TV's Languishing Laughometer
Interesting article in the Times this morning, but I was wondering if people agree with it or not. I can't really say, since the last comedy I even saw (and laughed out loud to) was AbFab.
TV's Languishing Laughometer
Quote:
JEEZ, would it kill us to laugh more? Have we, the audience for television comedy, become an inveterately tough crowd, perpetually annoyed grumps who take one skeptical look at focus-grouped new sitcoms that employ empirically adorable comedians and award-winning writers from "Letterman" and "The Simpsons," and still won't for the world crack one paltry half-smile?
Let's hope not. And even if the sitcom is dead (and when will we know?), comedy on television doesn't have to die with it. Or such is the strident hypothesis of not just comedy geeks who long for Lenny Bruce or "Your Show of Shows," but of troublemaking channels like MTV and Comedy Central: that audiences can still be induced to laugh, as they have been since the beginning of time, even if nowadays it takes more than afghan-strewn couches and precocious children and laugh tracks to do it.
Hmm. As can-do and reasonable as the hypothesis sounds (and as clearly as "Chappelle's Show"- how we miss you - proves it can be done), I'm not sure it's right. Alternative comedies - a manic, almost desperate medley of reality, stand-up and sketch - have had fast-and-furious premieres this summer. They're curious, they're inventive and they're not boring, but try as they might, they just don't yield simple, genuine laughs.
Hoping to have my mind opened or changed, I asked two friends what they thought of one of the new comedies - O.K., it was "Stella" on Comedy Central, which started on June 28 - and they both seemed surprised even to have been asked. One said, "I thought it was pretty much a given that that show wasn't funny."
The other said, "Literally I watched that thing as if my face was palsied, that's how not laughing I was."...
There's more to the article, I was just skimming. I don't ming if tv isn't laugh out loud funny, since comedic situations, rather than one liners that illicit gigles, tend to be funny, but not cause any one single point of laughter.
Or are shows really not funny anymore? : (
