Last week, in his indispensible blog bykenlevine.com, my friend Ken Levine bewailed the disappearance –
especially from the more critically approved “niche” comedies – of the
classically formulated joke, wondering, “Since when did jokes become
passé?” (Oh, look! My computer does accent egues!” Oops, not that time.)
Full Disclosure:
When I was working, especially earlier in my career, I often took the
opposing side, complaining, especially when a show’s writing staff replaced my
more intelligent contributions with “just jokes” that my submitted drafts was
being deleteriously “funnied down.”
While attending a runthrough of a revised Taxi episode I had written, I recall hearing
Judd Hirsch complain, “What happened to that ‘primordial ooze’ reference we had
yesterday?” I had in fact written that discarded-for-a-joke “primordial ooze" reference,
and Judd’s bemoanment was music to my ears.
To my credit, and the extension of my career, however, I did not chime
in an irately supporting “Yeah!”
Here’s what this blog post is not about. It is not about
“Times change, and comedy changes with it.”
Though it could be. In his post,
Kenny L. unhappily asserts, “I just want to laugh.”
Well, to paraphrase what ventriloquist Senor Wences used to
say – “For you, easy; for me, difficult” – “For you, funny; for me,
excruciatingly contrived.”
Over the decades, comedy has inexorably evolved. On the massively successful Milton Berle Show in the early fifties,
the country laughed until it hurt when, upon the shouted cue “Makeup!”, a pint-sized
Arnold Stang would come out and slam the show’s star in the face with an
enormous powder puff.
Today, that would be funny to three year-olds. But a medianly savvy six year-old would
likely sullenly respond, “That’s stupid.”
Without boring you and burdening myself with a survey of
“Comedy Throughout The Ages”, “what’s
funny” has inexorably evolved in the direction of greater and greater
identifiable reality. It is generally
known that both Seinfeld and – wait,
let me go back further than that.
In the late seventies, before I departed for a vacation to
Tahiti, I left my pet goldfish in the capable hands of (Cheers co-creator and friend) Les Charles and his wife Zora, and
when I returned home it was dead.
I got two episodes out of that reverberating trauma, one on Taxi and one on The Cosby Show. My point here
being, that, on the more respectable sitcoms of the day, unlike the stories
from earlier sitcoms, the best stories were believed to derive from personal
experience.
(By Stark Contrast:
INTERVIEWER: Where do you get the ideas for your “Mr. Ed”
episodes?
“MR. ED”
SCRIPTWRITER: Well, I have a
talking horse myself, so the ideas derive from my everyday life.”
That did not happen.)
Going back to the sentence I started, it is generally know
that both Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond were famous for
requiring the writing staff to provide story ideas based on experiences that
“actually happened to them.”
The evolution in that case was in the direction of making
the shows more real. The thing is, though the experiences from
which the episodes were developed may have been real – or at least realer – the writing style remained
decidedly and unashamedly joke structured.
(Which, to me, though unequivocally not to my bosses, seriously undercut
the show’s “illusion of reality.”)
The latest evolution in comedy reflects a disaffection for
stories based on everyday life, possibly because of the glut of them the
audience had been subjected to growing up, or because writers simply ran out of
interesting “reality based” ideas.
Leading to – in the temporal rather than in the qualitative sense – an advance
to…something which, having been stylistically left behind myself, I am not
entirely comfortable defining, because I am not certain what it is.
The best I can do is to suggest that – what their detractors
would call – “joke-free” comedy appears to be the product of a layered collective
consciousness, to which the more demographically desirable segment of the
audience appears to be wired. That’s
kinda muddy, I know. But I’m on shaky
ground here.
Unlike the “Uncle Miltie” show, today’s “cognoscenti” may not look at television’s
signature sitcoms of the past and go, “That’s stupid.” (Or they might.) More likely, rather, their response to what
the audience of that day laughed very hard at would be a hostilely pejorative
“That’s just a joke.”
But, and not for the first time, I have deviated from my
central concern.
Which is this.
From its inception comedy was intended to be entertainment,
and it was taken as such by its audience, who had no objection to that
whatsoever. Unless it was handled
incompetently, the response was never “That’s just a joke”; it was a delighted
and spontaneous “Ha-ha-ha!”
Today, at least for the ostensibly “in-crowd” segment of the
audience, any tip-off that “They are trying to be funny”, such as a traditional
(and structurally required) joke formulation – no matter how funny (or sophisticated)
that joke may be, their reflexive response is,
“That’s just a joke.
And we’re tired of jokes.”
In the latest comedy mutation, a joke, or ironic observation,
or whatever, cannot, to be accepted, feel
like a joke. Today’s audience still
wants to be entertained, but seemingly contradictorily, they do not want what
has traditionally been accepted as “entertainment.”
As they attest in their critical comments to Ken’s blog, that
audience laughs at this latest mutation in comedy, sometimes, as hard as we used to laugh at the old stuff. So it is not that a joke cannot elicit
laughter.
It just cannot, without being directly acknowledged as such,
Send off the musty aroma of a traditionally structured joke.
1 comment:
Thanks for reminding me! I almost forgot that today was Big Word Tuesday!
I have to disagree with the dubious assertion that audiences today wouldn't respond to joke-driven comedy. I think if the next Frasier arrived on the scene tomorrow, it would find a substantial audience, though admittedly maybe an audience old enough to vote, which may be too old for the networks. Really, all the Chuck Lorre juggernauts are joke driven, though, so I think that is evidence enough. Actually Modern Family is really joke driven as well. So...
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