Three tha Hard Way: April Fool's Day Blogathon: Richard Ayoade

Richard Ayoade is a man of many talents. He's a British comedian, actor, writer, and director, who seems to pop up in some of the oddest places. Well, sort of, but someone at Community or NBC must know his work because he directed the episode of Community, "Critical Film Studies", that I was talking about in the previous entry.

He first came to my attention as a small part of the ensemble in the epically weird and thoroughly funny, The Mighty Boosh where he played the shaman, Saboo. Here's an out-of-context taste where you can pretty much see the level of weirdness at play. But its also very funny, its one of the great discoveries for me of the past few years thanks to a British friend of mine

There's just a small taste of the sensibility from there.

Around the same time, the same friend introduced me to another odd and funny series, in a similar vein, and showcasing a bunch of the same actors, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. It was a horror-spoof-comedy . He not only directed episodes but also appeared ass Dean Learner, Garth's publisher, and Thornton Reed, a camp hospital administrator who carries a shotgun and answers to hospital boss, "Won Ton".

Less successful for me, although I seem to be in the minority here has been his stint on The IT Crowd (I might not have mentioned it but these are all British shows) People, particularly anglophiles, seem to love this show, but I mostly thought it was pretty lame. That being said, they did have one amazing episode that was so good I wrote about it on my old blog. This episode was so good, that the rest of the show just seemed that much more disappointing in comparison.

So, Ayoade is a director (I believe I mentioned that a couple times) in 2010 he had his first feature length movi, Submarine, which starred Paddy Considine. Be he also became famous for directing music videos . Here are a few of them: