In this NY Times article, Neil Genzlinger expresses his frustration over the new sitcoms popping up on television these days: There’s nothing new about them! All of the ideas these shows are exploring are not funny. Why? We’ve heard the jokes already. Gerzlinger calls this phenomenon the “End of Comedy”, or at least novelty. He breaks up the humor explored in these shows into five categories:
1. GUESS WHAT? WE HAVE GENITALS- The subtleties previously needed to “mention” these subjects on television are no longer necessary; words previously considered obscene are mentioned numerously throughout modern sitcoms for shock value, yet they yield very little comedic value.
2. TECHNOLOGY EXISTS TO MAKE US LOOK STUPID- This comedic topic has been used and reused for the past sixty years. Trite? Yea, it is. If Giligan’s Island did it, it’s already been done.
3. PARENTS+KIDS=WAR – “What in 1958 occupied 25 minutes is now condensed into 15 seconds. Television’s parent-child war, once full of intricate battle plans and troop movements, has degenerated into a snarky guerrilla contest made of quick, largely mirthless strikes.”
4: EEK, A BABY- I can’t remember a sitcom over the past two decades that hasn’t had an episode or two (or more!) that focused on the difficulties of being a new parent. Yet this is still being used as ideas for shows, evident in the creation of the new sitcom “Up All Night”.
5: CLODS IN THE WORKPLACE- Useless bosses, selfish coworkers, unfair compensation, unhappiness with an occupation. Done, done, and done. Sexual inequality in the workplace has been so “thoroughly strip-mined” that today a sitcom only has to make a passing reference to it.
Do these themes look familiar? They should, because since the advent of T.V., these have been recurring topics of comedy. And to be quite frank, they’ve gotten old. Even the idea of reusing topics of comedy is an old one. Look at Don Giovanni- the sexuality and even the innuendoes used (pillars as phallic symbols) throughout the play certainly do not feel two hundred years old. The Bald Soprano is still funny for modern audiences as well, and as mentioned in class, the effect the theater of the absurd has had on comedies such as Seinfeld is quite apparent. “If sitcoms are merely rehashing the same five categories of jokes, they’re also just shuffling the same handful of situations. Family with precocious kids. Workplace full of kooks. The young and hip being young and hip. You might think that the been-there-done-that thing isn’t an issue for viewers in a younger demographic, but thanks to Nick at Nite and such, it is; they too have seen all those shows we cranky geezers grew up on.”
Genzlinger calls this phenomenon the “End of Comedy” but he isn’t the first one to utter the line “It’s all been done before” and comedic television is not the only medium in which this is the case. Everything has been done before… several times over. This is the basic truth (as paraphrased by me) behind tvtropes.org, one of my favorite websites that exists on the Internet today. Genzlinger can lament but there is no such thing as new themes, new characters, or new ideas and there never was. There is only presenting the same ideas in a slightly different way. This is true regardless of the medium, be it TV/film/literature, etc. Before J.K. Rowling explored the epic conflict between light and dark, there was J.R.R. Tolkien, and before either of them decided to populate their tales with mythical creatures, people in Ireland were sitting around campfires and telling each other stories about elves and goblins and witches. They all tell the SAME familiar story, and yet, I can’t help enjoying the story in whatever form it is told (and there are many others who would agree with me). Maybe Genzlinger’s problem is that he watches too much television.