Television Humor

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Television Humor

• by Don L. F. Nilsen and
• Alleen Pace Nilsen

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Its a jungle out there.--Adrian Monk
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THE ARRIVAL OF TV?

• When television first arrived, people had dire
  predictions
• NO ONE WOULD READ BOOKS.
• NEWSPAPERS WOULD DIE.
• RADIO WOULD DISAPPEAR.
• AND SO WOULD MOVIE THEATERS.
• BUT, WHAT HAPPENED?

• In fact, television contributed to making other
  media more popular.
• How can this be true?
• What cross-overs do we see?

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HUMOR WAS PART OF TV FROM THE VERY BEGINNING

• In the 1950s, many people purchased TV sets just
  so as not to be left out of the fun.
• Water pressure in New York City used to be
  influenced by when the advertising breaks came on
  I Love Lucy because thats when everyone got up
  and went to the bathroom.
• Several of todays sitcoms get more viewers than
  did the early classics, but they arent as
  influential because there are now so many more
  choices.

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I LOVE LUCY (1951-1957)

• The show was praised as a complete synthesis of
  TV comedy because it had
• The music and burlesque of Berle,
• The plot strength and slickness of Amos n Andy,
• The charm of Burns and Allen, and the naturalness
  of The Goldbergs.
• It was the first sitcom to be filmed in front of
  a live audience. But, most important was Lucille
  Balls comedic talent and her ambitions in this
  time when domesticity was being held up as the
  be-all and end-all.
• She was a forerunner to the feminist movement of
  the next decade when millions of women were too
  bright and too ambitious to want to stay in the
  kitchen.

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Sitcoms were developed first for radio and then
moved to television. They replaced the old jokes
that were part of vaudeville and travelling
shows because

• Old jokes could become funny when tied to
  individuals that viewers already knew and
  liked. New situations supplied the element of
  surprise that is necessary for jokes to succeed.
• Stories could move faster because script writers
  did not have to set the scene or introduce
  characters for each episode.
• Also, they served as zeitgeists, i.e. they
  reflected the spirit of the times by focusing
  attention on whatever issues viewers were most
  interested in.

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One of the most successful transfers from radio
to television was The Goldbergs.

• Molly Goldberg was a warm, Jewish mother living
  in an apartment in the Bronx.
• Her radio story was popular all through the 1930s
  and 40s, and on TV from 1949 until 1954.
• Characters with accents had been popular on radio
  because their accents helped audiences
  recognize who was who.

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In the 1950s, when Americans were giving serious
thoughts to integration, Amos n Andy was a less
successful transfer.

• It first aired on radio in 1928, and was adapted
  for TV in 1951. It had come out of the
  minstrelsy tradition, and was really blackface
  comedy, meaning whites were playing the black
  roles. This kind of artificial humor was
  unacceptable and the show (with new black actors)
  lasted only one year on television.
• Twenty years later in 1972, Sanford and Son
  brought a new kind of African American humor to
  television.
• ,

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The 1980s Cosby Show featured an upwardly mobile
African American family, but some critics
thought it was too white.
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Mr. Peepers (1952-1955)
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The Fresh Prince of Bel AirWas a New Kind of
Family Sitcom

• Between 1990 and 1996, Will Smith starred in a
  fictionalized version of his own story.
• He was a street smart Black teenager from
  Philadelphia sent to live with his aunt and uncle
  in the wealthy town of Bel Air.
• Of course, there were cultural conflicts that
  made for humor, but it also brought up serious
  issues.

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An Overgeneralized Plot Description of Sitcoms

• Each segment has its own plot so that the shows
  circle around to end much as they began with the
  setting and the music being the same.
• Shows begin with a humorous complication, which
  the characters try to solve, but usually make
  worse.
• Near the end, an unexpected force enters the
  scene and solves the problem, leaving the
  characters ready for the next weeks challenge.

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The First Really Popular TV Sitcoms Were Family
Stories

• In the 1950s, World War II was over and people
  felt a great nostalgia for the old days when
  fathers went off to work and mothers stayed home
  with the children.
• Of course, life had never been as idyllic as it
  seemed in retrospect, but nevertheless the idea
  of FAMILY was central.
• A more practical reason for family shows was that
  households owned only one TV set and so families
  all watched together.

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But very soon, audiences wanted more than just
the foibles of typical families.

• This meant that producers went looking for
  variety to go beyond Leave It to Beaver and
  Father Knows Best. We soon had
• Happy Days
• The Waltons
• And such blended or one-parent families as The
  Brady Bunch, My Three Sons, and Diffrent
  Strokes.

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All in the Family (1970s)

• The most controversialand also the most
  influential of the family sitcomsAll in the
  Familybrought attention to middle class
  prejudices as revealed through Archie Bunkers
  actions and statements. However, some
  thoughtful critics worried that the program was
  teaching old prejudices to a new generation
  instead of eradicating them.

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Roseanne (1988-1995) was a kind of protest
against the goody-good mothers in most family
sitcoms.

• She was described as rude, crass, and
  blue-collar.
• Married with Children had a similar
  description.

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Fantasy Was Another Way of Satirizing Perfect
Families

• In the mid-1960s both The Munsters and the Addams
  Family proved that not all families are the same.
  
• I Dream of Jeannie, also in the 1960s, was a
  fantasy about a 2,000 year-old genie in love with
  an American astronaut.

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The Addams Family vs. The Munsters Totally
Different Fan Bases
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Get Smart (1965-1970) was a Parody of James
Bond (007)
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The Best Known One-Parent Family Sitcoms were
Andy of Mayberry, and The Andy Griffith Show,
1950s

• When Andy Griffith died in the summer of 2012,
  every obituary writer nostalgically mentioned
  Mayberry RFD.
• Reruns had made the show known to 2nd, and even
  3rd, generations despite critics complaints that
  Mayberry was the only U.S. southern town with no
  African Americans.

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Mayberry RFD added a new twist in that Andy was
the Sheriff. Other Career sitcoms soon
followed

• There is no end to the careers that could make
  way for old jokes in new situations as with Mary
  Tyler Moores spinoff from the Dick Van Dyke Show
  (1970-1977), Tim Allens Home Improvement
  (1991-1999), and Tina Feys current 30 Rock.

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Dukes of Hazard (1979-1985)
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Disfunctional Families Threes Company
(1977-1984) Married with Children (1987-1997)
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Everybody Loves Raymond (2000s) was not as much
about a couple and their children as about a
couple and their parents.

• Did Raymond come off looking like Father Knows
  Best or like Dagwood?
• How important were the children?
• Where were the kindly grandparents?
• Was it a show for kids or adults?

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Everybody Loves Raymond

• http//www.everybodylovesray.com/

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The Dick Van Dyke Show let the public in on
script-writing while Scrubs opened the door to
the medical profession. Other popular career
shows include

• Cheers
• Frasier
• MASH
• The Office
• Parks and Recreation
• Spin City
• Taxi
• Two and a Half Men
• The Vicar of Dibley (a BBC show)

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• SLAPSTICK ON CHEERS
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vr1kbn-LOpes

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Parody of M.A.S.H.
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Viewers like characters who resemble people they
might know, but they feel uncomfortable if they
think a script writer is making fun of them or of
their ethnicity.

• This is one of the reasons for sitcom characters
  to be distanced from the viewers.
• One way of creating this distance is to make the
  subjects of the sitcom so extreme that viewers
  will not feel that the script is about them.
• For example, none of us would worry that we were
  as incompetent as were the characters played by
  Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor in Green Acres
  (1965-1971).

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The 1960s Beverly Hillbillies were equally
extreme, but from the opposite end of the social
system.

• When oil was discovered on the Clampetts Ozark
  farm, their new wealth allowed them to move to
  Beverly Hills.
• Some viewers were offended, but most just
  chuckled and felt superior.

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Welcome Back, Kotter (1975-1979)Inner-City
Schools
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Another Way to Distance Characters Is to Bring
Them from Outer Space

• Alf (1986-1990) was brought from another planet.
• So was Mork for the popular Mork and Mindy.
  Robin Williams became famous playing Mork between
  1978 and 1982.

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Settings Naturally Influence the Kind of Story
Being Told

• One of the first animated sitcoms was The
  Flintstones (1960-1966), a prehistoric family
  show set in Bedrock. It starred Fred and Wilma
  Flintstone and their daughter Pebbles. Hanna
  Barbera created this pioneering show with the
  catch phrase of Yabba, dabba, doo!
• Between 1962-63, and later between 1985 and 1987,
  a space-age counterpart, The Jetsons, was a
  science fiction family sitcom, that was popular
  with children, who loved the transportation
  system and the robots for doing housework.

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Animated Sit-Coms Automatically Create Distance

• This is why Family Guy (1999-2012) is allowed to
  be so vulgar as the stories are told about the
  dysfunctional Griffins.
• Creator Seth MacFarlane voices several of the
  characters.

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The edginess and vulgarity of Southpark is all
the more shocking because the lines are spoken by
children.
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The long life of The Simpsons (since 1989)
relates to the smart allusions, the up-to-date
plots, the appeal to all ages, and the fact that
the actors can go on forever.
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The Popularity of Non-Family Members Living
Together

• One of the biggest cultural changes of the last
  couple of decades has been the increasing number
  of people living outside of typical families.
• This is especially true of young adults, and
  because they are the audience that advertisers
  want to woo in hopes of influencing lifetime
  buying patterns, producers can afford to put big
  money into shows about independent young people.
• Threes Company was a ground-breaker because it
  challenged gender expectations.
• It would be fun to compare the humor of that show
  with the humor in todays popular Big Bang Theory
  or with the humor in Golden Girls.

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And because the shows are about young people, we
expect the characters to grow and change, i.e. to
be dynamic.

• Critic Leo Charney says that Friends, Sex and the
  City, and Mad About You are dynamic sitcoms
  because of their long arcs of character evolution
  and carefully worked-out resolutions.
• He classifies them as a hybrid between the sitcom
  and the soap opera because of the way the
  characters age, change, and grow as they would in
  real life.

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The actors in Friends were much older than their
audiences believed nevertheless college students
and even teens identified with the life style.
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People joked about the popular Seinfeld,
complaining that Nothing happens.

• Seinfeld attracted some of the same audience as
  did Friendsbut Seinfeld also had adults in the
  audience and they did not expect so much growth.
  In literary terms, the characters were
  static.
• The Seinfeld scripts fit into the traditional
  definition of a sit- com in that the characters
  are emotionally much the same at the beginning
  and the end of the shows.

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Intricate-Attentive Humor
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The success of Golden Girls (1985-1992) showed
that not just young people can imagine living in
a family of strangers.

• In all but one year, the show ranked in the top
  ten.
• It starred Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, Estelle
  Getty, and Betty White, who is still performing.
• It would be fun to compare it to The Big Bang.

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Current Slapstick Comedy

• Arrested Development
• Community
• Parks and Recreation
• Tosh.O, etc.
• Compare TV Slapstick to Movie Slapstick
• Jackass, The Three Stooges, Shrek, Scary Movie,
  etc.

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Physical Humor in Sit Coms

• Community

• Parks and Recreation

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Big Bang Theory A Parody of Science Nerds
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Futurama A Cartoon Parody of Science Concepts
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Futurama Icons
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Some people consider NCIS (the most popular show
of 2012) to be a career sitcom. But we think of
it as a drama whose writers have borrowed
techniques from sitcoms, as in these examples

• An eccentric character, who can be counted on for
  a laugh, is Abby Sciento, the smart Goth girl who
  works as the forensic specialist and is always
  sipping Caff cows so that she is hyper.
• Dr. Mallard, who lets only his approved
  co-workers call him Ducky, is laughable in the
  way he always wears bowties and talks to the
  corpses that he is examining.
• Ziva David, the investigator from Israel,
  constantly makes amusing errors with English
  idioms.

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NCIS (continued)

• Anthony DeNozzo (referred to as Tony) is always
  quoting lines from movies and mispronouncing
  other peoples names.
• A recurring joke is that Jethro Gibbs always
  shows up when he is being talked about, and a
  recognizable motif is the way he slaps people on
  the side of their heads.
• Another recurring joke is the way they all throw
  around the word proby. It is a half-insult in
  that it stands for probationary, but it probably
  also reminds viewers of all the probing that goes
  on.

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N.C.I.S. Smiles and Farewells
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In Summary

• Sitcoms have been popular since the very
  beginning, with family stories being the most
  popular, as the shows began reflecting changing
  family dynamics.
• They often feature young adults, who are at
  interesting points of change in their lives.
• A second reason for featuring young adults is
  that advertisers will pay for high production
  costs because they are especially eager to woo
  potential customers who are in the process of
  developing their life-long buying habits.

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TALK SHOW WEB SITES

• JOHNNY CARSON
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?v3qoP99pVm4g
• STEPHEN COLBERT THE COLBERT REPORT
• http//www.colbertnation.com/home
• JAMES CORDEN
• http//www.cbs.com/shows/late-late-show/
• JIMMY FALLON
• http//www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/
• CHELSEA HANDLER
• http//www.eonline.com/on/shows/chelsea/index.jsp
• REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER
• https//www.youtube.com/user/RealTime

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• DEAN MARTIN
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vyBm-vmAifco
• LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?vfpbOEoRrHyU
• TREVOR NOAH
• http//www.trevornoah.com/
• TREVOR NOAH AFRICAN-AMERICAN
• https//vimeo.com/ondemand/trevornoah?gclidCN7ajd
  PP1cQCFYNsfgodbrkAvw
• TREVOR NOAH THE DAILY SHOW
• http//www.thedailyshow.com/
• LARRY WILMER THE NIGHTLY SHOW
• http//www.cc.com/shows/the-nightly-show

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Spin-Offs fromJon Stewarts The Daily Show
https//www.youtube.com/watch?vFh6SRiBbt2E
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• TRUMP MEETS THE HONEYMOONERS
• https//www.youtube.com/watch?v3XriXDtfqCg