It seems to me that the discussion has gone a little off-piste. So here I am to set everyone straight with the correct views.
The discussion started with the question "Why are American talk shows so much worse than British ones?" but then compared British panel shows with US late-night talk shows. So already we have conceptual confusion: we're not comparing like with like. British chat shows (Wogan, Parkinson, Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton) are the equivalent of the US talk shows. They're both fine if you like that kind of thing (delivering prepared anecdotes to an indulgent studio audience). Indeed, I suspect the US has the edge in this area (leaving aside Knowing Me Knowing You With Alan Partridge). But they are not panel shows.
The original post tells us that there don't appear to be many panel shows in the US. I'll come back to why that might be. But it seems to me that the lack of direct comparisons is a more interesting observation than saying that UK panel shows are funnier than US talk shows.
Let's start with some like-for-like comparisons: sitcoms and sketch shows.
The discussion on Cowen's blog has got into British sitcoms and come up with the idea that they are about betterment and self-improvement. I'm afraid that's not right. As ane fule kno, British sitcom comedy is about laughing at and with failures - and "at" and "with" at the same time.
Basil Fawlty, Reggie Perrin, Blackadder, Mr Bean, Dad's Army, Only Fools & Horses, Hyacinth Bucket ... Or we can take more modern examples: Spaced, Green Wing, The Office, Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show, Black Books, The IT Crowd, Fleabag, Mum. Sometimes we have social strivers, or people keen to get ahead in some other sense, but that is far from being universal: neither Fleabag nor anyone in Gavin & Stacey, to take rather different rungs on the social ladder, aspires to climb any higher in life. But all of these shows are full of people who can't quite cope with what life has to throw at them. Some of them rage (Basil Fawlty, Victor Meldrew), some go off the rails (Reggie Perrin, any character played by Mark Heap) and some just suck it up (Tim, Martin Freeman's character in the Office); some have insight and some don't; some are redeemed and some are not; but what they have in common, at the heart of the comedy that is their situation, is the fact that they are all, in some way, failures.
It's not that the comedy is always cruel. Dad's Army, for example, is warm and loves its characters. But what is the most famous line in Dad's Army? It's "Don't tell him your name, Pike!", which is the perfect combination of well-meaning intention combined with utter incompetence in execution. Capt Mainwaring is a failure; a pompous, well-meaning, lovable failure.
We laugh at these people when their plans go wrong, or because their self-image does not match up to reality, but at the same time we see ourselves in them - in Captain Mainwaring, David Brent or Alan Partridge - and we squirm.
One commentator on Cowen's blog said "An example of the difference between British and American comedy which I found quite a good summary (I can’t remember who said it), imagines a comedy sketch where a musician is playing a guitar badly and a man comes up and smashes it over the musician’s head. The contention is that an American comic would want to be the one smashing the guitar whereas a British comic would want to be the one getting hit with the guitar." That observation is correct (and also gives the lie to the betterment idea: what is bettering about being hit by a guitar after playing it badly?). But it is correct because the central truth is that failure is at the centre of British sitcom comedy. The "situation" in "situation comedy" is a bleak view of the human condition itself.
US sitcoms are different, but they are also very good. Frasier, for example, is a bit of an outlier in that it is quite British in format (social climber not quite living up to his acquired social status; humour from awkwardness; combination of both broad physical comedy and verbal wit - in fact, it's a bit like The Young Ones when you put it that way). But it's far from being the only good one. There's been strength in depth for US sitcoms for many years: see Police Squad, Cheers or The Cosby Show, for very different older examples, as well as famous and high-quality recent exports such as Friends, Seinfeld, Scrubs, Modern Family and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
US sitcoms also display a consistency which British ones can often lack. Compare, for example, the multiple high-quality series of Frasier with Roger & Val Have Just Got In, which started out being one of the best things on television and ended poorly, or Friday Night Dinner, which suffered a similar falling-off.
If UK sitcoms are about failure, what are US sitcoms about? Not success, exactly, but success is a part of it. The police in Brooklyn Nine Nine tend to catch the criminals; the doctors in Scrubs treat patients; the friends in Friends really are "there for" each other. There is a centre of warmth that the British sitcom lacks. The typical weakness of US sitcoms is sentimentality, while the typical weakness of Brit sitcoms (apart from inconsistency) is the opposite: having too many horrible people.
One other point worth noticing about UK sitcoms compared with their transatlantic cousins is the much stronger influence of sketch comedy in the UK. Compare Scrubs and Green Wing, contemporaneous sitcoms set in hospitals. Scrubs was, according to Wikipedia, "noted for its ... surreal vignettes". Noted, I would say, only by those who had never seen Green Wing. The plot of Scrubs included romantic entanglements and a difficult janitor; Green Wing, by contrast, included the bit when "Alan becomes unusually happy after winning an internet caption competition, Joanna plans to take him down a peg. Using her dwarf cousin (Big Mick), dressed up in green body paint, she plans to scare him. The plan backfires when Alan is so scared, he beats Joanna's cousin to death with a stuffed heron. Alan and Joanna throw the body into the incinerator, but become paranoid that they will be discovered. Alan, however, learns from Boyce that the death is being viewed as a suicide, so Alan and Joanna go on a rampage, thinking themselves above the law." Wikipedia is pretty accurate here.
So that's sitcoms: both countries have their strengths. Now to sketch comedy.
Whenever a well-loved American comedian dies there is a spate of 'watch this immortal sketch!' pieces written by the bereft audience. I normally hunt out the sketches in question and they're normally quite good (e.g. the dentist sketch from the Carol Burnett show). I also think Key & Peele sketches are quite good. Portlandia had one joke, but told it well.
But let's be frank: these are the peak of the US sketch show experience. Fry & Laurie were turning out stuff at that level week after week. It's not terribly impressive for a nation of hundreds of millions, particularly as they have the Canadians to help them out. (I won't be the first to notice that so many of the funniest Americans are Canadians. But here's a question: who is the funniest white gentile American who is not Canadian? Steve Martin?)
British sketch shows simply have more variety. Probably more complete duds, but also more things that tickle some people while leaving others cold. Smack the Pony, Armando Ianucci, the best bits of Goodness Gracious Me; the Fast Show; Enfield & Whitehouse - that's a lot of different things going on. US sketch comedy seems to be all 'here's a normal situation made funny' or 'here's a parody of something on TV'; there is rarely something entirely fresh or surreal, nothing (I think) of the kind of Hale & Pace's "Poppadom Pom Pom", or Armando Ianucci's Hugh explaining that cheeseburgers were a penny then, or Ralph saying "Tomato - Ted - aubergine - your - potato - wife's - turnip - dead."
So, by contrast with sitcoms, British sketch shows are clearly better. If we want an explanation, I would point to Monty Python, which seems to have given British sketch comedy a high tolerance for experimentation while at the same time somehow telling the Americans that "zaniness" of that kind is only for the Brits: the higher variance that that experiment produced has led to better experience at the top end.
British panel shows are different again. They are funny because they are quick and merciless, and feature performers on the top of their game. Semi-spontaneous, someone said, and I think that's right, but the delivery of the scripted lines, and the reactions to them, are top-notch. While the best joke-writers in America go into sitcoms, the best ones in the UK go into panel shows.
So why doesn't America have equivalent programmes? You will recall that this whole saga started when someone said that they don't and they just have late-night shows. I have two suggestions.
(1) First, a cultural explanation. Panel shows are potentially nasty: being on the receiving end of, say, Frankie Boyle or Jimmy Carr at their best is surely not comfortable. Ask anyone about the tub of lard on Have I Got News for You, or consider the kudos Boris Johnson got from laughing off outright abuse. It all has an uncomfortable edge, familiar to British sitcoms, that I think rubs Americans up the wrong way. They don't want so much grit in their humour-oyster. That's why they prefer the cosy comforts of the talk show.
(2) There's a structural explanation too. The UK has long tradition of radio panel shows (I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, Just a Minute, The News Quiz) that have trained the writers, the performers and the audience. Again, this may be different from the US.
But I don't want to leave this on a jingoistic note. The final like for like comparison is the comedy film and here there can be no doubt: it has been many years since the Brits served up (not just starred in) a top-tier really funny and good film. America might not have 8 out of 10 Cats, but it does have Hollywood.
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