If you thought Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes might have cutting-edge taste in comedy, think again. The world-renowned American rappers have been gushing about their love for that stalwart of postwar British television: The Benny Hill Show.
What is it about this silly, smutty, slapstick show that they love so much?
Busta Rhymes has just revealed himself as a Benny Hill megafan. “I don’t think anybody has ever been as funny or as charismatic as Benny Hill,” Busta Rhymes told the BBC while at the MTV Awards on Sunday.
New York-born Rhymes spent two summers in the north of England in the Eighties. He stayed with his Aunt Velma in Morecombe when he was 11, sneaking into nightclubs to breakdance and getting up to speed with British culture. "I remember Boy George was cool, Wham was cool. But our favourite was Benny Hill. Benny Hill is still our favourite to this day.”
As a child, Snoop Dogg dreamed of coming to London to meet his hero – Benny Hill. A version of the British comedian’s slapstick comedy sketch show was syndicated to US television in the late Seventies. Snoop, born in California in 1971, would have been just the right age to watch it in all its Yakety Sax glory. And yes, he has done a remix of the iconic theme song with Dr Dre.
“Benny Hill was a bad motherf***er in California. He was funny as f***, too!” Snoop told The Standard in July. “We loved him. Like, I don’t even think y’all know how much he meant to the African-American community. He meant the f***ing world to us. The shit he was doing on TV, they would never do in America.”
It’s not just America where Benny Hill made huge cultural inroads. He’s also still a hit with the Spanish. “Benny Hill is big in Spain,” Miquel Echarri wrote for a feature in Spanish men’s magazine Icon last year, where feminists and film directors defended their love for the raunchy mid-century comic.
Britain has a more complex relationship with this particular export.
While he was an indisputable comic genius with perfect slapstick timing, today his brand of humour has is too laced with sexism to still be enjoyable. His troupe of backup dancers, the Hill’s Angels, were often performing raunchy (for the time) routines in leotards, and a lot of jokes revolved around women getting groped.
There was outrage when freeview channel Now That’s TV gained the rights to air re-runs of The Benny Hill Show in 2021. “All the camera angles were gynaecological, to be honest with you. It was ridiculous,” actor Debbie Hill said on Good Morning Britain. “He was a very very lovely person. But I just couldn't bear the shows. They were just awful and they were so sexist. I mean, looking up girls' skirts, how can that be right for people to see that today?"
His penchant for blackface is also a bum note for the British, although that was still a mainstay of British comedy well into Little Britain in the Noughties. But if Snoop says Benny Hill was an icon for the African-American community, he has the authority to do so.
And mind you, Snoop has also had to contend with a legacy of sexism in his back catalogue. In the Nineties, Dianne Warwick called a group of rappers including Snoop over to her house and gave them a dressing down for their demeaning language.
The lesson seems to have stuck - eventually. “My attitude has changed towards women," he told Sky News in 2015. "I am more sensitive and more vulnerable, writing-wise, and accepting a woman for being a beautiful person, as opposed to me saying she is a bitch or a whore."
Hill was never so uncouth with his language, but he did love a bit of double entendre. “I'm not against half naked girls, not as often as I'd like to be,” and “Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand”. Some of those one-liners wouldn’t be amiss in an (admittedly very tame) rap song.
However complicated his legacy, Hill’s comic timing, innuendo and rapid-fire jokes influenced some of music’s biggest Nineties rappers. Fingers crossed we get that Yakety Sax remix on Snoop Dogg’s twelfth studio album next month. It is called Missionary, after all.
