Conventional wisdom, for many years, went that American audiences and British humour just didn’t mix. Apart from legions of cultish fans who could quote Python chapter and verse, and PBS viewers glued to re-runs of Upstairs, Downstairs and Fawlty Towers, most American audiences seemed either to not get it, or just not care. But the recent pond-crossing successes of Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky Gervais suggests that maybe tastes are changing on this side of the pond. Or that we were never really that different to begin with. Simon Pegg is of the latter opinion.

Pegg, writing partner and director Edgar Wright, and best friend and regular co-star Nick Frost have been mining the spot where British comedy and American culture meet ever since their groundbreaking sitcom Spaced in 1999, and continuing with their cult hit zombie romantic comedy Shaun of the Dead. The latter was actually popular enough that one is tempted to drop the “cult” modifier. Their latest is the action cop comedy Hot Fuzz, about London police officer Nicholas Angel, played by Pegg, who has such a stellar service record that he gets shipped out to the sticks for making the rest of the force look bad. In a tiny rustic village where an escaped swan seems the biggest trouble he’ll run into, he’s partnered with Frost’s oafish Danny Butterman, a sloppy small town cop with a taste for American police movies and a desire for big city action. As one expects, things are not as placid as they seem. The village’s idyllic calm is soon spoiled by a number of gruesome “accidents”, which only Angel can see for the murders they are. For the die hard fans of the trio’s earlier work gathered at the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse Friday for an advance screening and live q&a with the filmmakers, the movie more than lived up to three years of anticipation.

Pegg & co. are geeks. And we mean that in the best sense. Their work is stuffed full of TV, film, and general pop cultural references denser than the most frenetic imaginings of Family Guy’s Seth MacFarlane. And Hot Fuzz may be the densest yet. It plays out like a massive Where’s Waldo puzzle where one has to spot all the reference points, which often overlap and intertwine, improbably running a reference to The Shining right into one from Point Break. But to say that all Hot Fuzz consists of is a patchwork of recontextualized quotes grossly underestimates what Pegg and Wright have accomplished here. One questioner made the mistake of asking, bearing in mind how much of their material is pulled from other sources, how involved they were in the writing process. Wright immediately shot back, “You mean, apart from actually writing it?”