Bauen

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Comedy or Lack Thereof

" 'On most shows nowadays,' he said, 'almost all the characters are stereotypes, or they embody one basic trait and very little else. And you have shows where all seven characters talk exactly like comedy writers. All the characters seem to be constantly cracking jokes--and, specifically, jokes meant to injure other people. My old girlfriend Maria once said that if anyone ever said to her even one of the things that people on sitcoms routinely say to each other she would probably burst into tears and go running out of the room.

" 'When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of 'Get Smart' in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like 'That's the second biggest arrow I've ever seen,' and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down.' "

David Owen, Taking Humor Seriously, The New Yorker, March 13, 2000, p. 75

I kind of like the put-down comedy that David Owen is putting down. Of course, one can only take so much. I get enough put down comedy from working at a bike shop, so I have no desire to want to watch it on television. But I can understand why watching people make snide jokes at each other is funny. It can also be depressing and sad to watch though. I agree with Owen's girlfriend's sentiments - sometimes in the bike shop I have been insulted so much that I have wanted to cry.

On the other hand, I don't really like nostalgia. I don't think the "good ole days" of comedy were that good. Although I certainly do not assume that history is progress, I also do not assume that history is regress. In general, I think the good ole days were crap and there's no need to relive them.

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