The Dodgy Bits

Here's a question I have for our UK readers: so my wife and I go to see Love Actually, the latest romantic comedy from Four Wedding and Funeral's Richard Curtis. And there's a scene where Hugh Grant (playing the Prime Minister) is asking his Monica-Lewinsky-lookalike assistant about where she lives. I can't remember the name of the area she mentions, but let's say it's Peckham. The dialog goes something like this:

Assistant: I live Peckham, the dodgy side.
Grant: What is the dodgy side of Peckham.
Assistant: All the way at the end of the Harwith Road.
Grant: That is dodgy.

Now, in the screening we saw here in New York, pretty much every mention of the word "dodgy" got a laugh, particularly the last two. And it's clearly supposed to be a funny exchange, and the word "dodgy" is crucial to the humor. In a way, this is representative of a lot of jokes that Curtis writes; they have a tendency to revolve around the comic potential of slightly, um, dodgy British expressions, like "bugger," and "shag," and -- several times in Love Actually -- "cockup."

I understand perfectly well why Anglophile American audiences eat this stuff up: the humor comes from proper Englishfolk talking trash. But how does it play on its home turf? I thought about how this scene from Love Actually would play if it were Americans talking:

I live in Newark, the seedy part.
What is the seedy part of Newark?
Over by the airport.
Oh, that is seedy.

To my American ears, that's not funny at all. So why should the British version be funny to Brits? Or perhaps it's not?

Comments

[Ben Hammersley]

Gosh, that *is* British. It's a very complicated bit of self-deprecation call-and-response to my reading, and it is funny, but I'm not sure how I can explain why.

Dodgy doesn't mean seedy in this context, however. It's softer than that, implying, perhaps, a level of jolly enjoyment of the dodginess. I think. Erm.

[Kevin Marks]

I'm not sure Newark is a good mapping for Peckham, but i don't know New York (or Washington, if he's supposed to be president in this mapping) well enough to find the right nuance.
Peckham is south of the river in London, so in the no-tube-line void in most Londoners mental map of the city. It is a not known as an specifically ethnic area, like Brixton, and the mental image for the Grant class is working-class slums. The subtext (I'm guessing, not having seen the film) is that Grant has no idea that Peckham has graduations of dodginess as it is all dodgy to him, but he is playing along.

[James]

Could it be a reference to the "Dodgy Dossier"?

[Susan]

well I asked some of my UK buds and this is their report:

"Let's get this right. Dodgy is a phrase meaning "not to be trusted" and comes from the feeling people have when they find themselves the owners of a Dodge vehicle.
Shag is a large sea bird very much like a Cormorant.
Cockup is a common expression meaning messed up or failure but is normally associated with the workplace. Hence, should a failure of one party result in the discipline of another, or "my arse is on the line" it could be said that your mistake causes me to be disciplined or to put another way, it's "your cockup; my arse"
Now the last of the three phrases appears to be connected with bugger or buggery. This practice has been speculated upon recently in the press with regard to the ROYAL HOUSEHOLD and in particular, Prince Charles, who has issued a statement denying any involvement in anything that might be said in his absence whilst he is away in another country (where buggery is quite legal) O Man.
The truth will out soon ....... promise!"

I am "just" the messenger :-| and I personally don't know if this is correct or not. Not sure if this helps or muddies the waters even more.. but.. there ya go!

[Paul]

I think it's partly the sound of the word, "dodgy". Some words are funny, and some words aren't'. Dodgy is funny.

There is a mini-discussion of this in the new Monty Python "autobiography" book, wherein Michael Palin offers the view that fish are generally funny, but some fish are more funny than others. Snippet follows:

"...we used fish quite a lot through Python, fish slapping or the 'Piranha Brothers'. Piscatorial images were quite strong. We had an instinct that word 'haddock' was quite funny or 'halibut'..."

[Jason Malloy]

"I live in Newark, the seedy part.
What is the seedy part of Newark?
Over by the airport.
Oh, that is seedy."

A lot of words or phrases can be funny simply because they are being focused on, or otherwise comically repeated or emphasized. I could easily see your version successfully incorporated into an episode of Seinfeld, which often used similar formulas.

Many examples here. For instance:

"What was that look?""What look?""The look you just gave me.""I gave a look?""Yes.""What kind of look?" "I know that look." "Then what was it?" "Why should I tell you?" "Well, you're the big look expert. I wanna see how smart you are." "Trust me, I know the look." - Elaine and Jerry, in "The Deal"

Browse through. Similar examples in virtually every episode.

[Lloyd Shepherd]

I actually live near Peckham, and the joke is, as Kevin Marks says, that it's all pretty "dodgy". So we in Sarf London (phonetic spelling) would be chuckling to ourselves that the prime minister would even be talking about Peckham, and that he was being polite (in a Hugh Grant kind of way) by suggesting that somewhere in Peckham there was a place that isn't in any way "dodgy".

[Jesper Juul]

In in my experience, US people often say "sketchy" where Brits would say "dodgy". This doesn't quite explain why it's funny, but perhaps part of it.

[Ben Hammersley]

erm, Susan...no, actually, not to worry...

[oliver morton]

Steven -- did he at least say dodgy? Or are we all completely out to lunch here?
Peckham, fwiw, has a lovely and playful library by Will Alsop which is one of teh nicer bits of recent architecture in non-central london. But that's not really relevant any more, is it...

[Steven Johnson]

Actually, the original bit of dialog was about a new FIFA football simulation for the Playstation II, but I changed it a little to suit my purposes.

I'm kidding!

I'm pretty 100% sure that the word was "dodgy." And I did say in the original post that I was using Peckham as a placeholder... But now I recognize that there may have been more subtle geographic references that made the joke funny to the UK audience, if not the American. And for that I am truly, truly sorry.

Can't someone go see the bloody movie and find out? What's the Lazy Web good for if you can't get someone to go see a movie for you..?

[Oliver Morton]

Paul and Lloyd Shepherd are both on to something. Dodgy is both a funny word in and of itself (like poetaster) and a word peculiarly well suited to Peckham. Peckham is/was, after all, home to Del Boy Trotter, am archetypically dodgy south londoner in the vastly popular sitcom "Only fools and horses" (the title is from the adage "only fols and horses work" -- a dodgy person's mantra). I'm not sure if Arthur Dailey, the protagonist of the 1980s hit "Minder" ("Arthur Daley, little dodgy maybe, but underneath, he's awright", as a novelty song put it) actually came from Peckham, but he might well have done.

The prime minister might know the less dodgy parts of peckhma -- ie Dulwich. My street atlas reveals no Harwith rd whatsoever, so he might just be bluffing.

None of this, however, explains why people who don't know anything about peckham should find the exchange funny. I think the answer there must be in part delivery, in part conditioning (in that we expect stuff Hugh G says in such situations to be funny because he'll be getting it wrong in some way), in part incomprehension (dodgy is probably a funnier word if you don't quite know what it means) and in part the sheer amusement of the word. Or words: Peckham and harwith are not that funny, but the repeated disyllables may do something. And peckham, like haddock, is not entirely unamusing.

If I actually see the film, in one country or the other, I may have more telling insights...

[Steven Johnson]

I love this thread, but I'm afraid I have to point out (as I did in the original post) that Peckham was not the town mentioned in the actual film. (I can't remember what it was, so please, somebody go see the film and report back.) Also, I totally made up Harwith Road as well. It sounds like the specifics would be relevant here, so maybe someone will fill in the blanks for us...

[Jeff]

Perhaps, in addition to the language nuances, it's the accent. If you repeat the Newark exchange with a thick New Jersey accent, accompanied by some good ole NJ body language, it could be very funny.

[Mark White]

Here in Australia, one can commonly hear the phrase "dodgy brothers" applied as an adjective to all manner of somewhat shady business operations. To wit:

"Don't bother buying trying to buy a persian carpet from there. They're dodgy brothers."

Yes, it is funny. But the "dodge" is usually from the law, or reputable trading practices.

[Phil Dwyer]

Actually, I believe it was Walthamstow that was being referred to, not Peckham.
As a Brit, living in North America (Toronto, Actually) I found the exchange mildly amusing, partly, as suggested above, because of the nature of the word itself, and partly because the Hugh Grant character is speaking 'below himself' in using the word at all.
I'm sorry to admit it, but Brits get subtle clues about each other from the language we use - and we use them to navigate social situations - to 'place' people above or below us on the social scale. A plummy accent says as much as how someone dresses, as does content: DODGY is not a word which you'd normally find an Oxbridge educated prime minister using - it's funny because it plays on our class prejudices (IMHO). It's unexpected behaviour - we'd be more surprised if the prime minister farted, or scratched his crotch in public - but dodgy is enough to raise a smile.
It turns out, in the movie, that the Grant character should have known which part of Walthamstow is dodgy since his sister clearly lives in the area - so the point about knowing which part of Walthamstow (or Peckham for that matter) is, in itself, a bit dodgy.

[oliver morton]

It's wandsworth, a friend who saw the film at the weekend tells me. I take this as slight confirmation of my theory that the place needs to be disyllabic for the exchange to work. In general, wandsworth is not very dodgy, certainly not compared to Peckham, but as we established, that really isn't the point...
(Of course, it is important for the film, i understand, that a lot of teh characters should be able to live in teh same place and send their kids to teh same school. And these people would not be living in Peckham. But that's by the by)

[diseño web]

hoh, i remember Four Wedding and Funeral's, excelent movie!! :D really funny

[Dominios]

I think that this latest romantic comedy is very laughly but it is all.

Alojamiento web