Earlier this week I was reflecting on some of my early influences. It had something to do with how I predicted Lane was going to kill himself. That, and there’s jubilee that I keep hearing about. I’m not sure how I started down such a twisted path to British behaviorism knowledge, but I suspect that the prime reason was Roald Dahl.
I think I’ve mentioned before, he wrote the original, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and then “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”. That was my starting point. After I started collecting more and more of his work, I think I picked up a lot of dark twisted humor that he managed to inject into all his writing. We took a trip to London in the early 80’s that really impacted how I understood the British. While I like to think I absorbed a lot of things, my dry sense of humor was muchly affected.
A lot of his work was Twilight Zone/Alfred Hitchcock worthy, and they even did a series for a while with shows based on his short stories, “Tales of the Unexpected”. Reading the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was actually pretty dark. It seems like Burton tried to get some of the darkness in there, but truly dry British humor (or humour) is an art in itself. Surely there are plenty of Monty Python fans out there who can attest to the irreverent and witty Brit-slap-stick.
After Dahl, I moved onward to Hitchcock and then onward further to horror. I don’t think, however, that the twisted makeup of my childhood DNA really could have been any more impacted by any one author more than Dahl. Ignore what you’ve seen (even he disowned the first Willy Wonka movie, and he wrote the screenplay!) Get the books. Ask me, I’ve still got a few I could loan you.
