They called it the “Isles of Wonder,” but it was really a parade of British whimsy: sheep and milkmaids, factory workers, the Internet, Mary Poppins, the queen and a snippet of the Sex Pistols’ rendition of “God Save the Queen,” and, oddest of all, doctors and nurses jitterbugging on hospital beds in a tribute to the National Health Service.


The opening ceremony of the London Olympics on Friday was a tableau of national pride that studiously avoided bathos and easy excesses of patriotism. The show opened with music from “Chariots of Fire,” a movie about two principled British runners in the 1924 Olympics, but it was not the famous theme by Vangelis; the creators instead chose the classic hymn “Jerusalem.” The Vangelis song came later, as a joke by Rowan Atkinson in his Mr. Bean persona, comically bored and distracted while playing the synthesizer with the London Symphony Orchestra.


In a video, even Queen Elizabeth II and her corgis did their bit, greeting Daniel Craig as James Bond in Buckingham Palace (“Good evening, Mr. Bond”). Then the queen, festive in a sparkling pink gown and pink-feathered headpiece, pretended, via a body double, to parachute into the Olympic arena at his side.


It’s hard to imagine any other nation willing to make so much fun of itself on a global stage, in front of as many as a billion viewers. It takes nerve to look silly; the cheesy, kaleidoscopic history lesson that took Britain through its past, from pasture through the workhouses and smoke stacks of the Industrial Revolution to World War I and, of course, “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” was like a Bollywood version of a sixth-grade play.


But bad taste is also a part of the British heritage. The imagery mixed the glory of a royal Jubilee with the grottiness of a Manchester pub-crawl. Britain offered a display of humor and humbleness that can only stem from a deep-rooted sense of superiority.


People said Beijing’s opening ceremony was the hardest act to follow, but for Britain, it was the easiest. The Chinese government had so much to prove. The 2008 extravaganza, with all those waves of drill teams, dancers and drummers, thousands of anonymous performers synchronized to represent the invention of movable type printing, was a paean to regimentation, discipline and collective self-effacement that was magnificent, awe-inspiring and unenviable. (It didn’t help that the adorable little girl in a red party dress who sang an ode to the motherland later turned out to be lip-syncing with the voice of a child who sang better but wasn’t quite as perfect-looking.)


Britain confidently opted for a celebration of individuality, idiosyncrasy and even lunacy. The showmanship was entrusted to the British filmmaker Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”), and he favored pop music, movies, make-believe and Britain’s top export commodity: celebrities. David Beckham drove a bearer of the Olympic torch to the arena in a speedboat. Kenneth Branagh, dressed as the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, recited lines from “The Tempest,” and J. K. Rowling, the creator of “Harry Potter,” read from “Peter Pan.” Paul McCartney closed the evening with “Hey Jude.”


NBC didn’t share the British art of playfulness. Even though the ceremony was shown with a time delay (no live streams allowed), the network prefaced the opening ceremony with its own opening, a solemn and pompous video celebration of the Olympics, narrated by the actors Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt. Ryan Seacrest came next, interviewing two members of the American gymnastics team. Later, Seacrest returned to ask the swimmer Michael Phelps whether he could emerge from these games as the greatest Olympian of all time. Phelps shook Seacrest off like a leg cramp.


The NBC anchors Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira did their best to get in the spirit of British nuttiness, but at times their energy flagged, and their bewilderment became obvious. After a hospital sketch that morphed into a children’s nightmare — and a giant fake baby floating on a bed — Lauer said, “I don’t know whether that’s cute or creepy.”


The whole show veered from cute to creepy and from familiar to baffling, including a pop music tribute to Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Most of all, it showed a love of movies that celebrate British eccentricity. “Isles of Wonder” seemed most inspired by a scene from the movie “Love Actually,” in which Hugh Grant, playing the prime minister, explains that Britain is still a great nation because it is “the country of Shakespeare, Churchill, the Beatles, Sean Connery, Harry Potter, David Beckham’s right foot.”