Leave it to PBS to make a 6-hour documentary series on comedy, and step all over the punchlines with their accustomed axe-grinding. Make 'Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America is the suitably-lame title for a politicized Baby Boomer's Canon of Comedy.
There can be few things more insufferable than unfunny comics putting on their serious faces and haranguing America about how important they are, how "courageous" and "dangerous" they are, and how they're leading all us lesser mortals to a more enlightened plane by "making us uncomfortable with institutions we've become comfortable with."
How "courageous" or "dangerous" is it for Chris Rock to make fun of white folks in the 21st Century? Making fun of Muslims could get a fellow killed; making fun of American WASPs fetches tens of millions of dollars, uniformly-fawning press, and international celebrity status.
And what does it say about the sort of comedy venerated by the PBS documentary-makers, that the only time anyone watches the stuff is on tedious documentaries, where some Boomer producers and directors patch together old clips and contemporary interviews with a lot of self-righteous comedy-retirees, preening about how outrageous and important they were?
No-one today is watching Your Show of Shows. No-one watches Laugh In. No-one will watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report once they're retired, any more than anyone watched Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher as of the day after it was cancelled.
Even Saturday Night Live -- by far America's oldest running TV comedy institution -- has a best-before date: Reruns go back only about half a decade. Try watching an episode from the '70s or '80s or early-'90s: Nothing in American society is any more dated than an episode of SNL. A fellow might laugh at a 30-second clip of "Wookin' Pa Nub" from 1981, but would he care to sit through the entire 90-minute episode it appeared in?
And yet Monty Python's Flying Circus -- 40 years old this year -- is still being broadcast, in primetime. So the problem is not that comedy just gets stale: only trendy, weak comedy goes bad. And the species of comedy venerated most by PBS is that trendy, weak stuff -- fleeting pop culture mediocrity.
"Whoever's in power, you go after them," one comedy authority explains. Ha. Democrats had controlled both houses of Congress for two years, and the comics went after Sarah Palin. Barack Obama is President of the United States, and still they're going after the last president: SNL's Weekend Update of February 7 made exactly one, skirting reference to Obama's flailing, and the punchline was, "That's your mistake? The last guy broke the world." No doubt the good folks at Weekend Update were hungover on the previous Sunday, and couldn't reasonably be expected to have noticed the provincial elections in Iraq: Over 14,000 candidates ran for over 400 seats, Iraqi forces managed the security, and the day passed without a single attack anywhere in the country. (The good thing about Seth Myers anchoring Weekend Update, incidentally, is no Seth Myers in the sketches. The bad thing is that he is clearly aping Jon Stewart and has reduced Weekend Update to an unfunny Saturday installment of the Daily Show. That Lorne Michaels allows Seth Myers to anchor Weekend Update is an injustice to tens of thousands of funnier Americans.)
Comics take on the institutions, sure enough: Institutions that they helped tear down decades ago. What these comfortable revolutionaries can never seem to get through their heads is that they are the establishment now. Who are the TV executives and movie producers in 2009? Who are the newspaper and magazine editors and publishers? The college professors? Senior bureaucrats? Baby Boomers, Democrats, and 1968-vintage Hippie Lefties to a man. But still these fearless self-professing iconoclasts shake their fists at The Man, who either passed on sometime in the 20th Century or is attached to an oxygen tank in an assisted living facility. For the Baby Boomers and their younger disciples, it will forever be 1968, they will forever be raging insurgents, and the enemy will forever be Eisenhower's America with its Levittown and Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Even when it's 2009 and the epitome of establishment is Hugh Hefner.
None of these comics are ever made to be "uncomfortable". None of the "institutions" they're "comfortable" with are ever assaulted. If they truly meant what they said about the importance of making one uncomfortable with institutions, then the first bubble they'd prick would be their own. No-one could be any more pompous, more pretentious, more sanctimonious, more dogmatic, more monolithic, more in thrall to celebrity and power -- provided it's sufficiently leftist -- than the kind of pop culture establishment honored by PBS in this waste of National Endowment for the Arts taxpayer dollars.
NB: I make an honorable exemption from this diatribe for Carol Burnett and her like. They were only out to be funny, they were, and they hold up.
1 comment:
Finally, someone with some sense.
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