When I attend to an e-mail concerning a post I wrote
entitled “The New ‘Funny’” (3/25/14), my desk will be entirely clear. It is not that big a desk.
A commenter by the name of gourdcranium took keyboard to computer screen to disagree with my
“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 an audience
old enough to vote which may be too old for the networks.”
Where do I start with that?
Okay.
First of all, Mr. of Ms. gourdcranium
answered, or at least blunted, their own assertion with the qualification that
that the theoretical “substantial audience” that would amass to watch a Frasierly-comparable comedy would
indisputably be an older one, “indisputably” because nobody assiduously
following these matters would disagree with that assertion, most particularly
the networks, who have proven consistently that they have no interest in such
an audience, with the possible exception of CBS,
about whom David Letterman, in the course of a “Branding Competition” bit concerning
that network’s upcoming season’s schedule once quipped, “CBS – Your grandparents like us.
Why don’t you?”
It is consequently no surprise or coincidence that the Chuck
Lorre stable of hit series are all broadcast on CBS. However – and I assert
this without specific evidence; it is merely an educated hunch – although ABC’s Modern Family has approximately half
the audience that The Big Bang Theory
has, I would bet a shiny new nickel that buying a thirty-second commercial
“spot” on Modern Family is considerably
more expensive than buying a similar “spot” on The Big Bang Theory, the disparity explained not by the size of the
audience (which actually trends strongly in the opposite direction), but by Modern Family’s audience’s superior
desirability to the advertisers.
So there’s that.
Joke-driven comedies, as reflected by the disparity in their commercial
value are considered – not by me but by the marketplace – to be retro and, dare
I say it, along with their audience, a dying breed.
Now.
Creatively.
Which was specifically what “The New ‘Funny’” was talking
about – and if that was not accurately delineated in the post, the fault lies
entirely with the writer and nobody else.
For thirty years on the network level, I was a successful writer
of television comedy. Then, due to the
confluencial changes in the audience’s tastes in comedy and to the burgeoning “Demographic Revolution” (in which audiences
were adjudged valuable not – or at least not exclusively – by their volume but by the presumed intensity of the
viewers’ attracted to the show’s buying interests – my services became in
increasingly diminished demand, until it was time to go home and write a blog.
This – or at least the “changes in the audience’s tastes in
comedy” component – is, as I alluded to in “The New ‘Funny’” hardly a
contemporary phenomenon. American comedy
has been continually evolving, from baggy-pants vaudeville through The Red Skelton Show (1951-1971) to The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which brings
things up to date, if by “up to date” you mean the late 1970’s.
Though I perhaps would have preferred that it had, comedy did
not freeze at the precise point where I was good at it. Instead, tastes in comedy continued to
evolve, ultimately “evolving” me right out of the business, as it had
inevitably booted out the departing cohorts of once “hot” comedy writers who
preceded me.
Unlike, England, where the theatrical offerings – and this
phenomenon is reflected in English television
as well – can simultaneously accommodate (as they did during the time that I
lived there) a variety of comedy genres from classical Feydeau farces (A Flea In Her Ear), to ingenious
Shakespearean re-imaginings (Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead), to broad sex comedies (Brian Rix’s Let Sleeping Wives Lie), American comedy,
like American everything-else in my view, adheres inflexibly to what I call the
“Gunfighter Mentality”, where one genre stands triumphantly alone, while their sadly slower
adversaries lie still and lifeless in the anachronistic dust, this (quintessentially American) Darwinian
fashion process (it's about restlessness, competition and selling) prompting the “What’s Hot and What’s Not?” columns in every
magazine in every doctor’s office I have ever waited in.
If America favors series filmed in front of a studio
audience, then you will see virtually nothing else on the airwaves. (When shows of that configuration ruled to
sitcom roost, the only sitcom not
filmed before a live studio audience was M*A*S*H.) If, however, the “Fashion Wheel” turns and “What’s
Hot?” moves on to shows that are filmed “single camera” without a studio audience, then the few remaining series filmed in
front of an audience devolve almost immediately into the Nehru Jackets of situation
comedy.
Why did “single camera” sitcoms become popular? One, digital technology made them cheaper to
produce than they had previous been, elevating that format to a fiscally viable
alternative. Two, the audience got tired
of the less naturalistic-feeling “joke-driven” format. And three – and who knows what order these
should really be in – TV writers,
whose heroes tended more towards Judd Apatow than Neil Simon, favored the
movie-inflected format over its stodgy and stagy theatrical counterpart.
(And I frankly, at least in spirit if not in physical
collaboration, am with them. It seemed
strange to me that my bosses insisted upon reality when it came to character
and motivation and then would go, to me, incongruously “the other way” with their
insistent formula joke-constructed dialogue.
It did not make consistential sense to do that. Or make me many friends for mentioning it.)
Although, “The New ‘Funny’” never suggested that the
joke-driven format could not at some time in the future generate a popular
success, my intention, clearly a failed one with gourdcranium, was to assert that no such series could ever again
represent the cutting edge of half-hour comedy.
My experience is that trends in comedy almost never proceed
backwards. (Laugh-In was a memorable exception, but the show augmented its
vaudevillian hi-jinx with colorful miniskirts and lightning-fast editing.)
If trends in comedy did, in fact, revert to their earlier
incarnations, the Red Skelton writers
would be happily rising from their graves and driving excitedly back to the
studios.
And I would be enthusiastically right behind them.
2 comments:
Thanks for answering the question, Earl. Sorry I didn't get the point of the post. I'll have to go back and read it again to see where I went wrong.
I do fondly recall, though, that you used some $6 words in the post, and I deemed it Big Word Day, hence my non de plume de plume that day: gourd(pumpkin)cranium (head).
oops, nom de plume, not non.
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