Television Humor
by Don L. F. Nilsen and
Alleen Pace Nilsen
1
“It’s a jungle out there.”
--Adrian Monk
2
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?
3
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 that’s when everyone got up
and went to the bathroom.
• Several of today’s sitcoms get more viewers than
did the early “classics,” but they aren’t as influential
because there are now so many more choices.
4
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 Ball’s 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.”
5
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.
7
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 Air
Was 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 week’s challenge.
12
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 oneparent families as The Brady
Bunch, My Three Sons, and
Diff’rent Strokes.
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All in the Family (1970s)
The most controversial—
and also the most influential
of the family sitcoms—All in
the Family—brought
attention to middle class
prejudices as revealed
through Archie Bunker’s
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.
16
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, 1950’s
• 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 critic’s
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 Moore’s spinoff from
the Dick Van Dyke Show
(1970-1977), Tim Allen’s
Home Improvement (19911999), and Tina Fey’s
current 30 Rock.
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Dukes of Hazard (1979-1985)
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Disfunctional Families: Three’s Company (1977-1984)
& Married with Children (1987-1997)
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Everybody Loves Raymond (2000’s) 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 scriptwriting while Scrubs opened the door to the medical
profession. Other popular career shows include:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cheers
Frasier
M*A*S*H
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?v=r1kbn-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 (19651971).
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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 Clampett’s 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.
32
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.
34
The edginess and vulgarity of
Southpark is all the more shocking
because the lines are spoken by
“children.”
35
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.
36
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.
•
Three’s 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 today’s 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.
38
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 Friends—
but 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.
42
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
people’s 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?v=3qoP99pVm4g
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
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JIMMY KIMMELL:
http://abc.go.com/latenight/jimmykimmel/index?pn=index
JAY LENO:
http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno/
DAVID LETTERMAN:
http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/
REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER:
https://www.youtube.com/user/RealTime
DEAN MARTIN:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBm-vmAifco
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LAST WEEK TONIGHT WITH JOHN OLIVER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
TREVOR NOAH:
http://www.trevornoah.com/
TREVOR NOAH: “AFRICAN-AMERICAN”:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/trevornoah?gclid=CN7ajdPP1cQCFYNsfgodbrkAvw
DAN ROWAN AND DICK MARTIN’S “LAUGH IN”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O2PDESI5yc
JON STEWART: “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 from
Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show”
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