Is Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike’s new gender-swap comedy inspired by The Two Ronnies?

aLast weekend, a trailer for a new Netflix movie titled Ladies First was released. The film, starring Sacha Baron Cohen and Rosamund Pike, is billed as a “playful satire” about a man who butts heads and discovers that women are taking over the world.

And what a nightmare it would be. There is a female pope. King’s Cross is now called Queen’s Cross. Baron Cohen discovers, to his surprise, that he owns a cat. Judging by the trailer, he spends much of the movie getting waxed, wearing impractical underwear, and getting spied on by a female taxi driver. At one point, after Baron Cohen begins his sentence with, “If there was a ball on the board,” Pike speedily exclaimed, “Would that delicate sack hanging from your body just take a whack and make you cry to the ground?” In the form of a reply. If an Oscar was awarded for best attempt at illegible dialogue, she’d be a shoo-in.

With all of this in mind, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly subtle about Ladies First. What’s more, it’s not particularly original either. Mel Gibson’s 2000 comedy What Women Want seems to be a touchstone in this regard. Because both are movies about chauvinists who find women’s minds embarrassing. But for a more detailed comparison, we need to go back another 20 years.

Among other things, the eighth series of The Two Ronnies featured a series of sketches entitled ‘The Worm That Turned’. Taken together, these sketches form a full-length story about a dystopian 2012 society dominated by women. Believe it or not, I haven’t aged very well.

The Worm That Turned was a natural reaction to Margaret Thatcher’s position as prime minister, depicting a world in which “housewives across Britain rejoiced at her rise to power, voting out more and more women and voting out more and more men.” The women, fully in charge, closed down the Playboy Club and renamed Big Ben Big Brenda. State police began wearing sexy, Nazi-like leather uniforms. The men forced to wear the dress seemed to be forever at the disadvantage until they discovered the only real weakness of their oppressors.

You might think we’ve evolved as a society over the past 46 years, but the comments under The Worm That Turned, uploaded to YouTube, suggest otherwise, with many commenters apparently mistaking it for a hard-hitting documentary. “This story is coming true,” one person wrote. “I never thought something like this would actually happen,” wrote another. “I love the jazz-funk synth score on this song,” wrote a third, but it’s not really relevant.

Of course, Ladies First has a more direct inspiration in the form of the film it’s literally based on. I Am Not an Easy Man is a 2018 film directed by French director Eleonore Prior that has the exact same premise as Lady First. The chauvinist finds himself butting heads, being judged by his appearance, and living in a nightmare world where the sex is over long before it’s over.

I Am Not an Easy Man included many jokes that seemed to characterize Lady First in order to make the concept more relatable. But I Am Not an Easy Man was also a remake of Prior’s 2010 short story Majorité Opprimée.. And it’s better than any of its descendants.

Majorité Opprimée has no grandiose bias or comic concussion. It takes just 10 minutes to put the product in and the short goes straight for the cervical spine. The father, a stay-at-home dad, is undermined by various women and eventually sexually assaulted on the street. Police doubt the veracity of his story, and his wife appears to suggest he may have been asking for it by dressing provocatively. The man at the center is completely alone, scared, and angry.

And this anger at being systematically ignored by society is the whole point. In a different way than “I Am Not an Easy Man” (let’s say “Ladies First”), this one feels vividly personal. Unlike the others, it has the courage not to play the premise for laughs, which makes it even better. Set aside 10 minutes now and save yourself a few hours when Lady First goes into effect next month.