This shit is about to get real.
Okay, I can't fucking take this anymore. Americans are just dumb, and don't know what is funny. Conan O'Brien is off of the Tonight Show, Arrested Development only had 2.5 seasons, I still wait patiently for a television offer of my own, and NOTHING. What is wrong with people? Why is "funny" just not funny anymore?
I realize I sounded a bit like Carrie Bradshaw there. But I am losing my mind. This is becoming ever clearer as I attempt to write a script for the Southern Rep Theater Alterna-Ending Play Slam. What is that obnoxiously titled competition, you ask? Well, it happens to be a competition to re-write the ending of a play and compete with other alternate endings and then someone wins and we all resent that person because they are 100 dollars richer and get to feel superior. I mainly am going after the feeling superior part, because that is really my number one jam.
The point is, I worry, as I write, that what I find funny will be universally un-lauded by the public and the only possibility for types of laughter will be nervous. I think, sometime in my lifetime, what became funny to me and funny to the general public shifted, and the sarcastic cynicism, sardonic quips and public shouting of the sexually awkward that I so love and practice was not what others found funny. I was raised on Seinfeld and the Simpsons, love the darkly comic and feel that there is simply nothing funnier than sex. Yet I can't bring myself to watch what people currently find funny because it is so lacking all of those things. My generation loves Scrubs. I love scrubs fifteen minutes in, until it becomes dripping with sentimentality and Zach Braff has an unlikely but inevitable realization that will help him not be quite so doofy in the future.
SNOOOOOREGASM.
Can't things just be crass anymore? Can't things just be random and weird and goofy and tragically comic? CAN'T THE HORNY MANATEE REIGN SUPREME!!???!
Oh yeah. That's it right there.
Sentimentality in comedy just isn't funny. I am sorry. I like a good rom-com as much as the next person, but during the canned climax I always zone out and play the chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld in my head, or perhaps the marble rye...I feel like I am most like Elaine but the things that happen to George is the kind of shit that would happen to me...hmm...have they kissed or gotten married yet so I can leave?
To add a touch of class and intellectualism to this blog post, I must quote the late, great Samuel Beckett. "There is simply nothing funnier than unhappiness, or in some cases, Jersey-guido-trash."
This man loved him some Snookie.
So the last part of that quote maybe a little disputed, but it brings me to the fact that the only thing I really find funny on television anymore, save re-runs, is trashy people acting completely fucking ridiculous. Well-off women fighting like middle-schoolers, men acting like juiced-up gorillas. It is hilarious because it isn't me, and no matter the ridiculous times I have partook in they aren't on television, which leaves me free to judge. It is titillating because it is voyeuristic. We watch it like we are watching Nascar, waiting for the crash to happen, waiting for the fight, waiting for someone to cry over something irrelevant...waiting for the unhappiness. Waiting for women to act like we know they can (but hope in real life they won't) and waiting for men to act stupider than seems possible. Smart people don't really exist in popular culture anymore, and when they do they are usually making fun of the aforementioned "hos" and meat-heads (a la Chelsea Handler and Joe McHale). Smart, witty people get cancelled and/or moved to cable (Conan and Bill Maher, respectively) and more episodes of the Bachelor are shat out and eaten up. It's upsetting, but I can't stop watching. It's upsetting because it does nothing to progress society, or stir dialog, or even make people just stop and think for a second. And it certainly does nothing for art, does not give us any inspiration to create something wonderful or be someone new. I remember watching Lucille Ball on Nick at Night when I was little and knowing that that was the person I wanted to be, the art I wanted to create. Who do kids have now? Miley Cyrus?
As a friend puts it, the cast of the Jersey Shore is "slowing the process of evolution." But I cannot say that when those fucking guidettes start whining, there is anywhere else I want to be but in front of the television.
