Put some English on it?

[blimix]

I've had an idea for a short, dark comedy skit (spoken word). (Given that it's one of my ideas, it has maybe a 3% chance of coming to fruition.) The characters in it are unavoidably British.

I just read this post (thanks to a link by akiko) regarding the outrageous state of American depictions of Russia in fiction (due to a combination of cultural misconceptions and complete ignorance). And it inspired me to wonder whether my pathetic attempts to adopt an English accent* and incorporate some cliche'd expressions ("Jolly good!") would in fact be offensive to Brits. (Note that I don't care whether the intentionally dark aspects of the skit offend over-sensitive folks, who probably wouldn't ever hear it anyway. I just don't want to be one of those totally culturally insensitive jackasses, otherwise known as Americans.)

* My "British accent" is good enough to be taken as such by Americans, but not good enough to even be identifiable as anything at all by an actual Brit.

So, I suppose I have several options, were I to produce the skit:

1. Do it with my "British accent" anyway. Would this be offensive?

2. Do it in my normal American accent. It won't be as funny to Americans this way. And I have no idea what the effect on either humor or offense would be, for Brits.

3. Try to get some people over in England to record lines for me. That's a fair amount of extra effort, especially since this wouldn't be earning money with which to pay them.

4. Spend a lot of effort to improve my fake British accent (and local vocabulary).

So, people who are clueful, would you care to clue me in a bit? (Or refer a clueful friend to this post?)

(Hmm. It just occurs to me that I never made such an inquiry regarding my supposedly country song, "Get Your Hand Out Of My Armpit". But then, I doubt that something that silly could give offense.)

Oh, and while I'm posting, cluegirl has asked folks to pimp out this post asking readers what they want from writers.

Comments

[feuervogel]

Your first link is broken.

[blimix.livejournal.com]

Fixed. Thanks!

[tla]

I seriously doubt any real Brits would be offended by a bad attempt at a British accent, or clichéd phrases; if it is sufficiently over-the-top bad they would just find it funny. (Brits are in general predisposed to finding things funny.)

Only if you make the British characters look like humorless jackasses might British people get offended.

[alanj]

I think it would be exactly as offensive as Brits doing a skit with similarly clumsy caricatures of Americans. Not very.

[ratatosk.livejournal.com]

I think, sometimes, art has to come first. Two hundred years from now it might be confusing to decipher who was offending who and why, and it seems a waste to compromise humor in the meantime. Of course, if making something better aesthetically incidentally makes it less offensive to someone, and you actually want to not offend people, I guess that would be a win for you.