British humour conventionally punishes ambition rather than carrying the unsettling grotesque

Evidence

It is no accident that the words “grotesque” and “weird” are often associated with one another, since both connote something which is out of place, which either should not exist at all, or which should not exist here. The response to the apparition of a grotesque object will involve laughter as much as revulsion. “What will be generally agreed upon”, Philip Thompson wrote in his 1972 study The Grotesque “is that ‘grotesque’ will cover, perhaps among other things, the co-presence of the laughable and something that is incompatible with the laughable.” The role of laughter in the Fall has confused and misled interpreters. What has been suppressed is precisely the co-presence of the laughable with what is not compatible with the laughable. That co-presence is difficult to think, particularly in Britain, where humour has often functioned to ratify commonsense, to punish overreaching ambition with the dampening weight of bathos. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1133

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the critique of bathos and understatement as English cultural reflexes found elsewhere in k-punk and in cultural criticism of British comedy. — connects to: Pretentious ambition can be more satisfying than solid professional storytelling — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 647
• DEEPTHINKING: Dense claim that an aesthetic response (laughter) is culturally captured to police ambition, worth sitting with as a lens on British reception culture.

Broader Connections

• Pretentious ambition can be more satisfying than solid professional storytelling #contradicts (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 647