The Lost Tree

A while after the culture of Britain stopped being just how the world worked for me and I began learning how other people saw it, someone (from Nepal rather than America) explained to me that British humour was characterized by presenting absolutely absurd things and acting as if they're normal - a tone of voice that he said had been mastered by the likes of Douglas Adams.

America doesn't seem to have a grasp of this, and so I constantly worry about whether people understand my sense of humour - I remember that at the wedding in Maine last year I was ranting to someone or other about a topic I've forgotten about (possibly the uniquely unhelpful road signs that we'd seen during our journey) and during a pause, one of the group turned around and said to her friend right in front of me, "The best part is how he's so indignant about it". That's the point! You don't need to explain it out loud to subtitle it. (For that, I am sentencing you to two hours in TV Tropes.)

Still. Yesterday I remembered a clip I'd seen years ago that showed an unintentional example of this wonderful straight-faced absurdity, and I was delighted that someone had uploaded it on Youtube. It was on one of Denis Norden's programmes - the story behind it, I think I recall, was about this man (identified here only as Mr. Goodman) who went to the same village once every few years to plant a new tree - and they were trying to make a documentary about it, but they ran into a problem that they hadn't anticipated...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28gfWHzV2qM