This.
Yes! That’s exactly how I feel about.
My friends have also made fun of me and think I’m retarded because I can’t find the humor in all that.
I completely agree about David Cross.
I watched his latest stand up dvd (Bigger and Blackerer) and he made me very uncomfortable because he seemed extremely arrogant, bitter, and angry. He seems to have absolutely no humility.
This is my opinion of BBT, right on the nose. Well, that, and the laugh tracks are out of this world irritating. Hate them so much.
Never seen AD. Never saw an ad for it or a skit for it, and until this thread had no idea Cross or Cera was in it. I know absolutely nothing about the show, just that suddenly, over the last year or two, it’s popped up again as being popular somehow; I have no idea how or why.
One of AD’s true gems. One character called another character “Opie” and Ron Howard piped in with “She’d best watch her mouth.”
But I am in mild agreement with the OP. Arrested Development was OK, but by the end I was extremely tired of seeing them make the same joke over and over and over again.
Granted that it took me a long time to AD more interesting than funny. The show didn’t stike me as funny until its last few episodes. Scott Baio plays a lawyer name Bob Loblaw that everyone pronounces as, “Bah blah blah.” An area of Orance County California is introduced as “Little Britain” where suddenly everyone drives on the left side of the road and there is a daily nanny flight. Comedy platinum!
Seriously? That’s the payoff for that Andy Griffith Show reference?
Aah yes, and I remember he had a law blog. Bah blah blah’s lah blahg. Hee hee, sometimes words sound funny!
The smartest comedy on television indeed.:dubious:
Well, I find the wordplay fun–especially the “Analyst+Therapist business cards” (Analrapist.) That’s just one of the many different types of humor AD excels at. I don’t get that kind of humor from other TV shows.
Something is wrong with your brain, you should really get that checked out.
In my opinion, from the perspective of the TV viewer, it’s basically irrelevant whether the laugh track is provided by a studio audience or by a recording. The end result in my living room is just as annoying either way.
I agree. I enjoy Big Bang Theory in spite of the laugh track/studio audience. I’m not sure why, but it’s particularly irksome on that show. I don’t remember it bugging me so much on, say, Cheers. I wish I could select an SAP (secondary audio programming) channel that had a laughless version of the audio.
This post seems to miss a critical point about Arrested Development, to wit, that it is not a sitcom, but rather a satirical metatextual commentary about the conventions of the sitcom. From the replacement of the youngest character who is too old to be cute (Buster), to marginalizing characters who can’t be of use in the theme of the show (Lindsay), to the obnoxious but ultimately wise older brother or mother (Gob, Lucille) to the gag-inducing “very special episode”, Arrested Development is an angry stab out to the playbook of sitcom standards that have kept sitcoms as being bland pablum for the masses. It is being cute when it has Henry Winkler jumping over a shark, but brilliant when when Michael’s response to “Is Pop-Pop guilty?” is “Yes, son, yes he is.”
If you like and only like shows in which bland characters spout of one mildly amusing self-deprecating one-liner after another in rapid fire succession punctuated by a “laff trak” to let you know when the funny is happening, Arrested Development is not your cup of tea. You should watch that show that everyone is talking about, the one that is the spiritual successor to Friends and Everyone Loves Raymond. But if you want something that rewards you for paying attention to a running storyline and lampoons the standard conventions of the situation comedy as a genre, the Arrested Development is about the only game in town.
I have to agree on the particular criticism of David Cross and Michael Cera, however. His character is generally an unfunny one note chariacture despite the potential therein, and never really develops or does anything particularly interesting. Michael Cera seems to be capable of playing only one character, and one whose prime characteristic is not being very interesting. I always felt that more time should have been giving to Alia Shawkat, whose “Maebe” had far better delivery and ultimately more potential.
Stranger
Would it help to look at George Michael as the straight man in AD? That’s what I always saw him as. And while he did play virtually the same character in all his movies (and AD) and it was a particularly bland character, I personally think he did it well. I always thought his timing was spot on. Well, not his timing, per se, but he helped give everyone else their comedic timing.
Also, as much as I love David Cross in AD, I hate his stand up routines.
But it shouldn’t be, unless you’re prepared to dismiss all forms of comedy performed in front of an audience. A laugh track is the producers telling you when to laugh. A studio audience is the exact opposite – it’s real people telling the actors and producers if it’s funny. (If a joke doesn’t get a laugh during taping, it’s cut or replaced with another joke.)
Actually, “Arrested Development” and shows like it tell the viewer at home when to laugh a lot more than shows with studio audiences do; they simply use music stings, over-emphatic reaction shots, and so on where an older-single camera show would have used a laugh track. Which is fine, but it makes no sense to be all right with that but condemn a show that doesn’t just tell us what’s funny, but actually tests the jokes in front of human beings.
Very doubtful. All the writers of Arrested Development were traditional sitcom trainees and many of them obviously wanted to parody sitcom conventions, but they also played them straight as often as they parodied them. One thing AD has in common with the shows that have followed it, like Community and 30 Rock, is that they wink at us so we know they’re using old sitcom plots, and then they go right ahead and use them for their own sake, because they still work. The winking allows the writers to get away with some of the stories, jokes, puns and misunderstandings that would otherwise be dismissed as too corny.
Arrested Development even made sure to have at least one little heartfelt moment in most episodes, something '90s sitcoms like Seinfeld had tried to get away from. It’s a much more traditional sitcom in a lot of ways than Seinfeld or Everybody Loves Raymond (which broke all kinds of rules including the rule that a sitcom should have multiple plots in every episode), which is fine.
This is ridiculous.
Firstly, i’m quite happy to watch some forms of comedy with an audience. I love good stand-up, for example. But it doesn’t mean i want a bunch of other doofuses laughing over the show when i’m watching something in my own loungeroom. If it’s funny, i’ll be amused all by myself.
And, if the studio audience’s reaction determines whether or not something gets left in or taken out (i’m rather dubious about this, FWIW), then even a studio audience laugh is still, in effect, the producers telling me when to laugh. Either way, i don’t need it and i don’t want it. You are free to prefer it, but your rationalizations won’t change the fact that i much prefer shows without it.
That’s fine, but you can’t be amused at the stand-up without the audience present, because the comedy isn’t the same without it. Why do you think whenever stand-ups tape a special for TV, they do it with an audience? It’s not to tell us when to laugh. It’s because that style of comedy requires the reaction of an audience and they can’t translate it to television without that audience reaction.
No, it’s true. Anyone who’s been in a studio audience for a sitcom - and the only one I’ve been in was a rather stony silent one with a warm-up comic begging us to laugh more than we did - can attest that there are substitute jokes placed into a scene when a joke doesn’t get a laugh.
Again, it’s not about whether we at home need it. It’s a style of performing, timing and even writing that requires an audience, just like stand-up. Some people don’t like that kind of performance, finding it too broad. (Others find single-camera, no-audience comedy too low-energy.) But that doesn’t change the fact that the studio audience isn’t to tell you when to laugh, it’s to shape the performance and keep the energy up, just like with stand-up comedy or talk shows or sketch shows or live music shows.
You’re talking about purpose; i’m talking about effect. And, as the person watching at home, it’s the latter that i’m concerned with. Even if the *purpose *of the studio audience is intimately tied up with the manner of the performance, the audience itself is still the thing that i find annoying as a viewer.
That’s fine, I just notice that many people who can’t stand recorded laughter in a sitcom have no problem with it in many other kinds of TV - it’s hard to find someone who simply can’t abide the sound of an audience in anything. So I think it’s useful to point out that the purpose of the audience in a sitcom is exactly the same as its purpose in all those other shows.
It doesn’t mean the effect is any different, but in my experience some people who dislike sitcoms with laughter do so because of what they think its purpose is - they often think it’s there to force them to laugh or otherwise insult their intelligence. But it’s not. If anything it’s the other way 'round.
But, as you say, effect is different from purpose and if the effect is annoying in and of itself, there’s no requirement to watch.