Stephen Fry is an ass.

He did a TV program that was supposed to be him touring the USA to present the country, land, and people to Britain. All he did was complain that people smiled too much, they were too nice, they wanted to have fun, that the weather was too nice (or intense), etc. He hid indoors writing in a notebook while others did things. While people danced, he hid in a corner. Then he spent an entire episode running around on a scavenger hunt with male strippers in Las Vegas.

Sure, one can find humor in his presentation of himself as what HE believes to be a stereotypical 'Brit'. He's self-deprecatory - he acknowledges that his dislike of happy, healthy people, activities, and environments is pathological. But so what? Aside from saying "Haha, he's such a 'typical Brit', I'm just like that" or whatever, what can you take away from it? He just did a crap job in presenting USA. And all the while he reinforced a stereotype about Britons and found a way to excuse poor personality traits…by making as if they make him more "British" and as if that was inherently a good thing. Additionally, his interpretation of "American" is ANGLO-American. If he meets anyone of another ethnicity/nationality, he poops his trousers and runs off - they are the wrong kind of American, evidently, for his scheme of "cultural differences."

I swear. Just as there is Orientalism there is this Across-the-Pond-ism that is just as irritating. Fuck Stephen Fry. I'm American and across *my* "pond" is Hong Kong. Across the "pond" on my nation's other side is Accra. Just because I speak a variety of English, it doesn't create any reason to create these comparisons between what I do / think / say and a British person.