There are a lot of unexpected turns in Paul King’s Wonka. A giraffe menaces Rowan Atkinson. Keegan-Michael Key’s police chief is corrupted by illicit chocolate payments. Hugh Grant’s Oompa Loompa has been sentenced by his countrymen to claiming reparations for Willy Wonka’s colonial plundering of their cocoa beans.

But the one bit I was truly unprepared for was seeing Phil Wang tap-dancing on a cafe table alongside Timothee Chalamet. These are worlds which should never have collided: Chalamet, the first great Zillennial movie star, beloved of indie filmmakers while anchoring the Dune mega-franchise; and Wang, whose Kill Bill-inspired Taskmaster outfit is seared into my memory.

It’s not just Wang either. In his scene, he proposes to Charlotte Ritchie from Ghosts. Olivia Colman (Peep Show, Look Around You) gets the horn for Tom Davis (King Gary) in lederhosen. Ellie White (Stath Lets Flats, Natasia and Ellie) reignites a long lost love with Simon Farnaby (Ghosts, Detectorists). Paterson Joseph (Peep Show, Green Wing) conspires against Willy with Mat Baynton (Ghosts, Gavin & Stacey) and Matt Lucas (Little Britain, Shooting Stars).

Basically: everyone you’ve seen in British comedy over the last 20 years is here, in one of the year’s tentpole Christmas movies, doing their thing.

The other massive comedy hit of 2023, Barbie, was another showcase for our comedians: there were representatives from Gavin & Stacey (Rob Brydon), Sex Education (Emma Mackey, Ncuti Gatwa, Connor Swindells), Derry Girls (Nicola Coughlan), People Just Do Nothing (Asim Choudhry) and Stath Lets Flats (Tom Stourton and Demetriou). It feels like a very, very big year for Brits in Hollywood.

wonka
Jaap Buittendijk//Warner Bros.

Of course, British comedians have been trying to make it in America for the best part of a century. Charlie Chaplin, Peter Sellers and Sacha Baron Cohen made it; Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais tried big mainstream comedies with mixed success; Lenny Henry and Lee Evans gave it a crack, but returned home.

And in some ways, these are two extremely high profile outliers. Margot Robbie’s Barbie was her passion project, and it had her fingerprints all over it. Brydon, for instance, got his bit-part because Robbie loves Uncle Bryn. It makes sense that King would return to the well. Before doing Paddington, King came up through the more esoteric end of British comedy: he directed the early Mighty Boosh shows above pubs in North London and from there to TV, an arena tour and their own absolutely baffling music festival somewhere in Kent.

He also did Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, the spoof horror in which a gigantic eyeball freak named Skipper ran amok in a Romford hospital impregnating people. The Paddington movies have featured Matt King – Peep Show’s Super Hans – Richard Ayoade, Jamie Demetriou, Ben Miller, Jessica Hynes, Desmond’s veteran Robbie Gee and other Brit comic actors.

There’s a few other things happening here too though. We like to think of our comedy as being this bubble of pure Britishness which rises from the national psyche, which in spite its infinite variety can be boiled down to some flavour of You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Live Here… But It Helps!! That’s not really been true for a good couple of decades though, and even less so since social media and streaming services made it easier for shows like Feel Good – written by Canadian Mae Martin, but produced here by Channel 4 before Netflix snapped it up, and co-starring Wonka’s Charlotte Ritchie – to float across borders in their original forms without being remade. Ghosts US is the exception to the rule here, which at least makes sense; far more sense than the last big attempt to port over a British sitcom, The Inbetweeners, which was an epochal disaster.

The other thing is that the particular flavour of funny that big Hollywood films tend to go for has started to smell pretty thin. Big comedy films are extremely rare now, but Marvel has been making comedies by stealth for 15 years now. Their megahits were built on superheroes and all that carry on, but they felt fresh because they had such a particular comic vibe. The Will Ferrell-Judd Apatow-Seth Rogen axis of goofy snark from the noughties bled through into The Avengers getting shawarma after saving Earth and Tony Stark comparing Thor’s backstory to Shakespeare in the Park. Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much Brick from Anchorman.

That original axis has faded, but Marvel’s success persuaded DC to lighten up too, and soon a big chunk of the funny stuff in the biggest films of the year felt very, very samey. The Taika Waititi reboot lasted exactly one film before paling too. The reflexive, slightly meta gags are on their way out, and importing a load of funny people whose stuff you’re familiar with and who speak the same language you do, but who will feel fresh to your audience, makes a lot of sense to American filmmakers.

Take, for instance, Phil Wang. He proposes to Ritchie; she pies him off. When he sits down to mope, he delivers his lines with the kind of sincerity you’d expect in a musical, but it comes out of his mouth with a very, very nearly sarcastic kind of topspin. When he and Chalamet jump up on the tables and start tapping, it’s all the more joyful for it.

Will Wang become the new Dudley Moore? We’ll see. But there’s a door opening here for a load of brilliant actors to get their foot into.