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"Rik Mayall, the British actor who died heartbreakingly young Monday at the age of 56, wasn't just the consummate comedian of his age. For a certain generation who followed his every appearance on the BBC and then regurgitated it faithfully on the playground the next day, Mayall was a revolutionary. \nWild-eyed, in-your-face and obstreperous, Mayall and his collaborators made their on-screen Oxbridge predecessors \u2014 the Monty Python generation \u2014 look as staid as bowler-hatted bankers. Even as kids, we knew there was something dangerous about Mayall, something our parents and teachers didn't approve of, something that somehow threatened to turn us all into screaming punks.\nSee also: 10 Indispensable Life Lessons From Louis C.K.\nYou can see this even in Mayall's first appearance on television, as the relatively buttoned-down Kevin Turvey, a character parents could get behind. Turvey represented a classic trope in British comedy: the anorak-wearing, rambling know-it-all with a funny working-class accent (in this case, one from Birmingham). He wouldn't have looked out of place in a 1940s music hall. \nStill, the subversion was there from the start. See how he inserts into this meandering rant a withering analysis of why you can't swear on the BBC: \"You have to pretend to talk the way that people who invented TV talked 50 years ago.\"\n\nShortly after Kevin Turvey came Mayall's turn in The Young Ones as a student named Rik, a Cliff Richard fan and would-be People's Poet. At a time when a wave of alternative comedians made it their business to puncture the hypocrisy of Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Mayall made it his business to puncture their pomposity in this portrayal. \nThe Young Ones was over-the-top anarchic, filled with cartoon violence, fart jokes and the language Kevin Turvey complained about not being able to use. There was always a division in school between the kids who were allowed to stay up late to watch it and those who weren't. But looking at it now, from the other end of university life, I see something else in Mayall's character \u2014 a perfect caricature of every student with a fragile ego and a short fuse:\n\nThe Young Ones drove itself off a cliff in 1984, and Mayall went on to play a number of roles in a daring late-night comedy TV-movie series called The Comic Strip, including a member of a Spinal Tap-style rock band called Bad News. Then it happened one night in 1986: Mayall's most scenery-chewing, set-destroying role ever, as Lord Flashheart in the historical sitcom Blackadder II.\nLooking at it now, it's hard to credit the fact that Flashheart was on screen for a mere three minutes. Every one of these lines, every thrust of this insane performance, was being copied across the country the next day. Were we pleased to see him, or did we put a canoe in our pockets?\n\nFlashheart's scene was so successful, Mayall came back two seasons later to repeat it World War I-style, in Blackadder Goes Fourth: \n\nAs the Rik Mayall generation grew up, so did he. His next over-the-top turn was as the quintessential evil Conservative politician, Alan B'stard in The New Statesman. Think House of Cards played for laughs. By the end of the show, B'stard has founded the New Patriotic Party, and become Lord Protector of England:\n\nBy the time New Statesman wrapped in 1992, the transformation of British comedy was complete. Mayall's antics were no longer edgy; every comedian was copying them. Suddenly, the only way to be subversive was to go back to traditional sketch comedy, as Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie did. \nRik Mayall's ultimate success, then, was to make subversion mainstream. A legion of fans will never forget how he did it, his best lines indelibly etched in their memories. RIP. \nHave something to add to this story? Share it in the comments."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2014/06/09/rik-mayall-rip/>