The Absurdity of Laughter
by Kelly Tong
It just isn’t funny. Am I being too pretentious or are my expectations too high? The audience is laughing but why aren’t I? Perhaps I’ve lost my sense of humor or even worse, grown out of the youthful phase when immaturity and senselessness was hilarious. I’ll give this another five minutes and maybe the punch-line will kick in, a pay off so great, that I will die of a cardiac arrest induced by laughter. No, this isn’t possible to endure, and it is going to take far longer than five minutes. Why can’t Jimmy Fallon just get his act together, stop giggling in the middle of the sketch, and just finish?!
First off, I would like to apologize for introducing this controversial topic that without any doubt is completely subjective. It has been often argued that Saturday Night Live has entered a phase of decay since the retirement of Will Ferrell. Yet, even with the new cast, which many find not as humorous as the last, there are still a fair amount of people laughing at the mediocre half-hearted jokes and Jimmy Fallon’s awkward stage presence. Then again, that is probably just canned laughter.
While SNL’s cast has brought the show from its glory days to its comedic slump and back to another high point, the formula behind the scripts have generally remained the same over the years. Sketches often feature reoccurring characters with popular catch phrases, and usually appeal to a young demographic by mocking pop culture. On top of that, celebrity hosts add a sense of freshness to each show, even when storylines remain essentially static. It is SNL’s young audience that is slowly finding the show’s comedy unattractive.
Novelty most accurately describes what viewers yearn for in their humor today, specifically in the type of comedy rather than in seeing new jokes. Consider the success of the Daily Show and now, The Colbert Report, both mock news shows on the television network Comedy Central. Their anchors, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert respectively, ridicule prominent figures of the present not by directly slandering them, but by using their own comments featured in news reports against them. This even adds a level of truth to the jokes, for those being mocked are caught in the act of contradicting themselves in speeches or making absurd charges. The comedy of these shows is also more sarcastically biting and uninhibited, taking jabs at authority figures and scrutinizing their faulty leadership. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times contends, “Humor has moved away from long, one-joke skits and wacky impersonations to jujitsu satire: using the glib complacency of television news against itself.”
Comedy has the innate tendency to become more absurd over time as social restrictions are relaxed. Yet, by the 1970s, there were few taboos in comedy. Woody Allen, for example, was inspired to make his renowned film Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask in 1971, which, over a series of vignettes, poked fun at human behavior (one tale entitled “What is Sodomy?” starred Gene Wilder, better known as Willy Wonka, and a sheep). Over the next few decades, censors even relaxed their regulations on profanity and nudity.
Comedy Central’s South Park continuously plays the socially acceptable line in its episodes and ultimately crosses it innocently in every episode. Debuting in 1997, the show follows the lives of four fourth graders in the small town of South Park, Colorado. One aspect of the humor of this show arises from the animation of the show, which consists of characters made from construction paper shapes. But it is the show’s first episode that engraved its notoriety – a line of continuous profanity that needed to be censored for ten or more seconds. It is a cartoon for adults, though a huge portion of its fan base is under the age of eighteen. Nevertheless, after eight years, the show continues to attract a larger audience as it relentlessly ridicules pop culture figures today to a tasteless extent (tasteless in a good way of course!). “Formerly rebellious adults may be the biggest fans of ''South Park,'' which is predicated on the hope that it continues to offend someone, somewhere,” states New York Times writer Virginia Heffernan. “Really to savor the show, it still helps to imagine joyless souls -- repressive parents or balky advertisers, stupefied by political correctness or Christian moralism -- tsk-tsk-ing in a distant living room.”
One cannot discuss the nature of present-day absurd humor without mentioning Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, a line up of cartoons after eleven P.M. It often begins with an episode of Family Guy, an animated cartoon about a middle class white family residing in Quahog, Rhode Island that shares the same comedic principles as South Park. The show has gained such a large following that the FOX network, which originally banned the show from its network, opted to reintroduce the show to its Sunday night spot in early 2005.
Other shows on Adult Swim, such as Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, reuse failed cartoons from the 1960s as characters placed in a completely different genre. For instance, Space Ghost, once a galactic crime fighter, is now a talk show host. Traversing further down the absurdity scale, we find Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Each episode focuses on the three protagonists, a milkshake, a meatball, and French fries that reside in Union, New Jersey; they occasionally fight crime, but more often than not, they enjoy torturing each other. The comedy from these shows arises from the confusion that arises from the discontinuous plots – characters constantly die and are revived in the next episode or lines of each character in a dialogue seem to be haphazardly improvised.
I am not one to say what is funny and what isn’t, for
there are no rules, standards, or formulas for comedy. If you find coarse
jabs at politics and religion funny, then laugh. If you find Bob Saget’s
narrations on America’s Funniest Home Videos amusing, giggle away (the
man is a genius!). But should long-lived shows (Saturday Night Live,
Late Night with David Letterman, etc.) alter their style to meet the
ever-changing demands from comedy? This I leave to the writers, who
should write in the style that they know best. Granted that Jay Leno’s
and David Letterman’s painfully disappointing punch lines are analogous
to hearing that one has appendicitis, the show is still running with
a huge fan base; the comedians that produce those jokes should therefore
continue writing them. If someone out there is laughing, then they must
be doing something right.
