Procrastinet

Funny Rude Brit Alert: Jeremy Clarkson

filed under: The Weekly WANT IT

I discovered Jeremy Clarkson when Jalopnik linked to his horror story about the arrival and subsequent disastrous failure of his beloved but long-delayed Ford GT:

(photo: Peter Tarry)

Clarkson is a car writer for London's Sunday Times and he's one of the funniest muggerpuggers I've run into on these here Internets. He's a cranky git, and his political views are antediluvian - were he an American Southerner, he'd be called "unreconstructed."

But holy crow can this man write about cars. In the last two weeks I've read a couple of his pieces each day, including the ones about cars they don't even sell here: Citroens, Vauxhalls, Rovers, etc.

Each review spends at least half of its length ranting and carping about something, like a warmup standup routine.

Here's a sample of his review of the Lexus GS430, which he prefaces by talking about the 11-year old Japanese exchange student staying with them, who is totally flummoxed by British life (and made actually ill by mashed potatoes):

Like all cars, it has doors, seats, pedals, a steering wheel and lights at the front and the back. But how can this be, when it comes from a people who are baffled by a spoon? How do they make something so instantly recognisable as “a car” when they can’t eat mashed potato without vomiting? We have knives and forks. They have chopsticks. We lie down in the bath. They stand up. We cook food. They don’t. Their culture is completely different from ours, and yet the Lexus, on the face of it, is just the same as a Jaguar, a Mercedes or a BMW.

Except it isn’t. It is much, much quieter. At 70mph it’s so silent you can hear your hair growing. Sitting in your garden after a lovely lunch is more frantic. In the cabin you are so isolated from the real world that you get some idea of what it might be like to be dead.

The six-speed automatic box swaps cogs like an albatross changes direction, and even if you do put your foot down, the big V8 responds by humming, quietly, like it’s in a church arranging flowers. Driving this car is like being wrapped up in a duvet and carried from place to place by a small white cloud.

Oh, and did I mention he's unrepentantly offensive? Here's a sample about the results of a consumer satisfaction survey which, my senses dulled by a decade and a half of American political correctness, made me catch my breath:

Interestingly, the Mercedes M-class came last, chiefly because the dealer network is so appalling but also because it’s made in Alabama, where the locals are good at picking cotton, singing mournful songs and listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd but not so good at attaching complicated pieces of machinery to one another.

Even a brit has to know that making a cotton picking joke takes serious stones and a fine feel for the utterly inappropriate.

If you like cars, or acerbic British humor, or god help you both (like me), go here and just start clicking.

Posted by rjt at July 15, 2005 12:28 PM