Why is real comedy so hard to find on local TV? As part of our research on a long piece on Filipino humor, we had an illuminating and really funny talk with an iconic humorist, who agreed with us that TV comedy shows are generally not as genuinely risible as they used to be, for many “wrong” reasons:
First, comedy shows in the past used to be based on situational humor. In other words, even before individual jokes were thought up, the storyline had to be funny—and, believably so.
These days, our grinning guru observes, the focus of comedy writers “jumps over” that essential first step, as they concentrate on coming up with many jokes, puns, observations on the funny things people say and do, etc.—with emphasis on quantity, not quality.
The hope is that, if you “hit” viewers with 50 jokes, they will laugh at, hopefully, 10 of them—?
‘Scattershot’ approach
That unselectively “scattershot” approach is unproductive, especially because quite a number of the jokes aren’t new—they’re rehashes of really old gags that are no longer funny—due to sheer repetition!
Worse, individual jokes have to make it on their own, with no “framework” to hold them up. That’s what the situational structure of old did—keep the entire series of jokes focused and leading up to a more coordinated effect and outcome.
To illustrate: In the past, one of the favored situational comedy frameworks revolved around the “mistaken identity” format, with one person being mistaken for somebody else due to a number of misleading similarities.
For the “mistake” to be accepted by viewers, scriptwriters took great pains to make the error believable.
Patent improbability
These days, that isn’t deemed necessary—all a show has to do is state that the error in perception is being made, and viewers just “have” to go along with it, despite its patent improbability.
For instance, on a recent sitcom, two women were mistaken for each other just because they wore identical outfits. It didn’t matter that one of the women was young and svelte, while the other was much older, had an obviously larger physique, and was decidedly less easy on the eyes.
Obvious disconnect
And yet, despite this obvious disconnect, everyone in the episode kept mistaking one woman for the other—making viewers worry about those characters’ eyesight or mental state!
To remedy the deteriorating state of TV comedy, writers should go back to the situational comedy structure, stop borrowing or stealing jokes from long-dead comics, and put a stop to their unproductively scattershot penchant for mistaking quantity for quality!