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!