Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 3

Tyler Perry

I really hate Tyler Perry. Not as a person mind you, as I don’t actually know him and it’s hard to develop strong feelings in any way for someone who smiles blandly as much as he does. No, my issues with Tyler Perry are based entirely on his work, particularly his dominance of original TBS programming. You see, TBS, despite supposedly “knowing funny” whatever that means, has not one, but two original shows painstaking shat out by Mr. Perry on his way to cashing a series of massive checks. This has not only made portions of TBS’ regular programming unwatchable, but it has also made the network itself a minefield of ads for sitcoms that are not only unoriginal, but also deeply offensive to my non-existent African heritage.

My African heritage.

Nothing better encapsulates my feelings towards Tyler Perry’s oeuvre quite like the South Park episode “The Biggest Douche in the Universe.” Except while in South Park Stan accused John Edward of slowing down the progress of humanity, I merely accuse Tyler Perry of slowing down the progress of comedy, and, occasionally, of having an unusual amount of space between his nose and upper lip.

“Hi, I’m Tyler Perry and you could practically ski down my nasal labial trough.”

Because of his lack of humor, cultural sensitivity, or really any sense of quality control whatsoever, Tyler Perry may well have already done more to kill the American sitcom than any other single person. Now, this is actually pretty impressive considering it wasn’t so long ago that Perry was just a weird theater kid in Georgia, except instead of writing wish-fulfillment coming of age rock operas, Perry wrote musicals about child abuse that made his audience really uncomfortable.

Pictured: Tyler Perry’s early work.

Over time Perry adjusted his plays bit by bit until they started getting good reviews. Presumably by the time he realized that what had once been a deeply personal expression of his adolescence had now become him doing a two hour drag performance of what it would be like if you put How Stella Got Her Groove Back in a blender with the comic strip Crankshaft, it was already far too late. And once the dump trucks full of money, cocaine and hookers showed up Perry decided he no longer needed to express himself in any medium but awful, awful comedy.

The world's worst game of Shoot, Screw, or Marry.

The problem with Tyler Perry’s comedy isn’t just that he does it rather than following his bliss and making terrible plays no one wants to see. It’s that in abandoning his dreams for commercial success, he also abandoned all semblance of creativity. Sure by all accounts his pre-success writings were awful, but at least they were somewhat original. Now Perry just uses the same stock characters and situations that have been around for 50 years, occasionally exaggerating already exaggerated aspects and re-contriving the most contrived of plot devices. Fat, goofy neighbors, annoying in-laws, and aggressive disdain for one’s own off-spring based simply on the fact that their sensibilities differ from that of their elders in some way, all built around a nougat core of Tyler Perry not giving a shit anymore. There’s nothing that is ostensibly “funny” about Perry’s shows that wasn’t already played out by shows like Good Times, All in the Family, and Family Matters.

If you put Jaleel White in that outfit you would swear this was the episode where Urkel travels to the future.

A further problem is that those who criticize Perry’s creations are commonly presumed to simply “not get it.” I realize that as an Irishman raised in the southwest by East Coast elitists I’m not exactly Tyler Perry’s target demographic. And I can understand defending Perry’s style of humor by claiming that it’s a “black thing” or a “southern thing” or, even more accurately, a “specific to distinct regions of the dirty south, as seen by African-Americans of specific economic, social, political, religious, and educational backgrounds living therein thing.”

Or a “cross-dressing and fat suits worked for Eddie Murphy thing."

I can actually sympathize with this, because, as you may or may not know, there is such a thing as Irish Catholic humor. It’s a particular brand of humor usually passed down through Irish families that emigrated during the potato famine and clustered in specific neighborhoods in New York, Chicago, and Boston. It’s a humor that is extremely juvenile, can be easily understood by a small child, and makes use of well-worn comedy conventions.

As opposed to Tyler Perry, who weaves a spider’s web of intricate satire regarding inter-generational conflict.

The hallmark of the Irish Catholic style of humor is the Pat and Mike joke which features an understood premise: There’s these two guys named Pat and Mike, and they do silly things, usually somehow involving alcohol. The punchlines usually involve piss, the clergy, general idiocy, or all three.

I thought I was going to have a hard time finding a picture that succinctly represented piss, the clergy, and idiocy all at once, but what can I say? God bless you, modern art.

So I get how Tyler Perry could be playing to a very specific demographic with his humor, but here’s the thing: I would never try and market Pat and Mike as a national television show. It would essentially be like building a TV franchise around a “you had to be there” joke. While to me and people from the same very specific shared background Pat and Mike jokes are observational satire, to everyone else they're lowest common denominator slapstick played out with offensive caricatures. And if there’s any better way to describe Tyler Perry’s comedy, I can’t think of it.

Unless I'm allowed to use made up words like “shitastical” or “offensipalooza.”

Simply put, Tyler Perry manages to create sitcoms that are paradoxically so familiar they’re tiresome AND so specific that they’re unrelatable. Still, I would happily forgive him for all of this if he would just do something about that upper lip thing.

Just a thought.

Check back next time when I'll be wrapping up this series by talking about: Censorship. Look forward to more swears!

Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 2

The British

As an alarmingly Irish-American, I’m no fan of the British. Their food is legendarily bad, and considering their neighbors are Ireland, known for taking a vegetable that smells like feet and boiling it into a national staple, and Scotland, who took a sheep stomach and filled it with everything else no one wants to eat, that’s saying something.

Haggis: Looking and tasting like Satan’s balls since 1430.

Based on what I know of English history (namely, the first season of The Tudors), Britain has a multi-century rivalry with the French, which as far as rivalries go, is about as sad and pointless as Sisqo starting a beef with the rappin’ granny from The Wedding Singer.

Given the inevitable lead paint poisoning, I’m giving odds to the granny.

But by far the most egregious crime in Briton history is its long, humorless history with the Irish. This is particularly troubling because of all nations and peoples, the British usually do the most with their humor, and do their part to kill the American sitcom in the process.

Normally one-upmanship of American entertainment is solely the realm of bizarre Indian adaptations of copyrighted properties, depressing French existential cinema, and everything Japan does.

According to Google Image Search, this is a TV show in Japan. I can think of no reason to doubt this.

It’s hard to say what it is that makes the British so much better when it comes to situation comedies. British humor is widely acclaimed for its rapier wit and dry wordplay, but American sitcoms have done just fine without those for years!

HAHA, he’s vehemently intolerant of homosexuality! Hilarious!

In spite of their complete lack of appreciation for the humorous consequences of severe lifestyle intolerance and avoiding sex with your wife, British sitcoms routinely trump their American counterparts. In fact when American television producers want to create a hip new show, a good bet is always just to buy the rights to a show the BBC cancelled two years ago.

Coming soon to NBC!

In fact, with The Office an American adaptation of Ricky Gervais’ British show of the same name, and both Community and Parks and Recreation being American adaptations of the American adaptation of The Office, NBC’s only original content on Thursday nights is a show about what happens behind the scenes on Saturday Night Live and a show where Jerry Seinfeld belittles your marriage.

"Hi, I’m Jerry Seinfeld and I used to be culturally relevant.”

Unfortunately for anyone opposed to sitcom outsourcing, it’s likely the best American ideas will continue to be "pre-owned" British ideas for some time. As the best American comedy writers get lured away from TV by poor pay, reality programming, and Jay Leno wanting their time slot, it’s more than likely that we’ll continue to get our patriotic chuckles from the best and brightest the Queen can spare.

God Bless America.

Be sure to come back next week for, I don't know, more pictures and words and stuff, probably.

Things That Are Killing The American Sitcom Pt. 1

The American sitcom is a time honored tradition. And it is dying. I’ve found multiple reasons for this, and the next several posts will detail these reasons with thoughtful commentary and humorously captioned photos. Enjoy.

Everybody Loves Raymond

I used to watch Everybody Loves Raymond every week with my dad and younger brother. We’d get a Grande Combo from Taco Bell and watch the entire CBS primetime lineup from start to finish every Monday night, all centered around Raymond. And every Monday night, I would get terrible diarrhea. You might say this is because of the vast quantities of poor quality “Mexican” food, but I think Everybody Loves Raymond deserves at least part of the blame. There’s only so much bad comedy one can ingest before it has to find its way out, often in the form of rectal bleeding and anal fissures.

The leading cause of American dysentery since 1996.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Raymond is a bad show, in some kind of Supreme Scale of Comedy™ sort of way. It’s just that it’s exactly what a sitcom was 10, 20, hell, as far back as 60 years ago. Not only does Everybody Loves Raymond exemplify the schlubby husband+hot wife+annoying in-laws formula that’s been around since The Honeymooners, but most of the jokes would work just as well on the radio, for God’s sake. And before you get confused, that’s not versatile writing, that’s writing that’s so lazy it’s the equivalent of a comedy time capsule.

“Dammit, you forgot our anniversary again, Ralph! I mean--err--Ray.”

These are all relatively minor crimes against the American sitcom, but what really hurts this show is its legacy. Unlike the many, many lazy iterations of the Honeymooners formula, Everybody Loves Raymond ran for 9 and a half years, is syndicated on TBS 3 times per day, was just acquired by TV Land, and is regularly run on local stations (here the show is almost certainly on somewhere, no matter what time it is, often on more than one channel). To make matters worse, Everybody Loves Raymond lead directly to The King of Queens, a show which also ran for 9 years and took all of the slob husband/sexy wife/mildly unpleasant in-laws jokes Raymond had driven into the ground and proceeded to dig them up and rape them in front of their own mothers.

Joke rapist.

The weird part about all of this is that Raymond could have been a really good show. By the end of the series it was pretty irrelevant what Ray’s job was, he was mostly there to justify the title and blink occasionally, but he was actually a sports writer. There’s a lot of un-mined comedy gold to be had from a profession like sports writing, but the show only ever used it as a set-up to the same traditional family squabbles seen on every other show ever. Equally unused was the basic set-up that Debra was from a polite, upper-class, gentrified family, and Ray’s family was crass, low-brow, and so ethnic the cast of Goodfellas would ask them to tone it down. But despite all the possibilities this presented, nothing was ever done with it. The two families never really had any more conflict with each other than they did amongst themselves, and Ray and Debra’s differences in upbringing were always turned into jokes about Ray being lazy or Debra being a bitch. Even Ray’s father, who was supposed to be the epitome of unpleasant paternity, never went any farther than the kind of PG-offensive that would make Norman Lear spin in his grave.

Norman Lear is dead, right?

Ultimately this, more than anything, is what Everybody Loves Raymond has done to kill the American sitcom. It has taught an entire industry that original characters, creative dynamics, and thoughtful interplay are all worthless, because you can have broad caricatures tell the same stale jokes for a decade and still be commercially successful. Which is actually kind of an American lesson, now that I think about it.

America. Sigh.

While researching this topic I came across a lot of Patricia Heaton pornography. A LOT. It’s gonna take me awhile to recover. But when I do I’ll be back to talk about the next thing killing the American sitcom: the goddamn British.