I know you’re making a point, but the play-within-a-play scene in the 1999 movie of A Midsummer Night’s Dream had the entire theater in stitches, and it remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
Do you remember which episode? Because I thought The Marine Biologist episode in particular did a nice job of tying everything together at the end.
So, IIRC, it was “The Package.” And now that I think more about it, I also think I didn’t like the humor overall until the last segment brought it all together and then I laughed for several minutes. I think it has a lot of “this is the one where there is a misunderstanding” type humor, which I don’t like. The ending really surprised me with how much I liked it.
If you like the bringing everything together aspect of the story, I recommend watching Curb Your Enthusiasm, an HBO sitcom created by and starring Larry David, who was a producer and writer on Seinfeld, and who George Costanza is based on.
I find that Curb Your Enthusiasm episodes often do the same thing, of bringing various storylines together at the end.
I hadn’t been to England when I first saw Fawlty Towers, and I found it hiLARious. Laughed 'til I cried. I bought a book from a seller in Torquay, and we chatted a bit. He said Basil was based on someone that everyone in Torquay knew. A real a**hole.
I think the term “comedy-drama” was first used by TV Guide to describe Lou Grant. Everyone expected it to be funny along the lines of Mary Tyler Moore, from which it was spun off, but it wasn’t. The series dealt mostly with serious, newsworthy topics. Any comedic overtones were of secondary importance and came from the characters played by the regular cast.
In that respect it was a lot like MASH, which was airing concurrently, but I never heard MASH referred to as anything other than a comedy.
I remember the word “dramedy” being coined a bit later to describe Lou Grant, simply because no one knew what else to call it.
I was in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream twenty years ago. The producer/director (a posh Englishwoman) kept saying “This play is hilarious!” but it was funny only if the characters were played to the hilt. The Mechanics did this very well, and the rest of us who were on the stage had to work hard to keep from laughing.
I hated Sheldon and loathed Raj. 
Everyone in Torquay probably did know him, but he also managed a hotel where the Pythons stayed while filming something in the area, which was how John Cleese met him and got the idea for the character.
His opening very brief monologue was often grin or chuckle worthy. But not the show itself, which relied upon cringe humor, and the stupid misunderstanding cliche all the time.
The total lack of even trying for some sort of historical accuracy was too annoying (many sailors were actually very good with sewing, they had to be), buit yeah, not funny.
Barney Miller is still good, and so are WKRP and most Night Courts. But there ain’t many. But Friends has not aged well.
Could be, but again, the lack of unlikable characters is an issue there. I love Cleese, but I despised his character.
I still like the final scene, but yeah some of the antics are horrifying today.
Yeah, there’s a whole ton of these films made from the 2000s - 2010s. Films like
Sideways (2004)
Garden State (2004)
In Her Shoes (2005)
Sunshine Cleaning (2008)
10 Years (2011)
Young Adult (2010)
I could go on.
They are usually classified as comedy/drama or romcom/drama. And for the most part they aren’t bad movies. Some are actually quite good.
But to your point, they don’t seem to be actually “funny” in a sense of being parody, absurd, or laugh out loud hysterical.
Maybe “ironic”? That’s a form of comedy.
I think these movies are considered “comedy” in the sense that (according to Aristotle) dramas deal with serious people dealing with serious problems while comedies deal with dipshits dealing with dipshit problems. While not hilariously funny, all these no-laugh comedies tend to deal with flawed people trying to deal with messes that are largely their own making.
Opposite for me: hated the monologue opening with the early seasons. I don’t find Seinfeld’s stand-up particularly good. The show was the laugh fodder for me.
Maybe you’re right- I didn’t find Sunshine Cleaning funny at all, and there were a VERY few moments of Sideways that were amusing. Mostly both movies were just kind of painful to watch people do some combination of doing stupid stuff and suffering.
The line between funny and unfunny is very thin. Archer used to be side-splittingly hilarious, but the last two seasons have been just awful. The characters still go through comedy ‘beats’ and say similar things they used to, but they took the edge off the show and now it’s just a shell of what it was. Witty, subversive writing has been turned into sitcom mush.
My family loved Archer. We watched the first episode of the last season last night, and none of us so much as cracked a smile. At the end my kid spoke for all of us when he said, “Well, that was painful.”
Nanette (2018), a live-recorded ‘stand-up comedy’ performance by comedian Hannah Gadsby.
Billed as stand-up comedy - and aesthetically structured as such - Nanette is actually an emotional monologue decrying the evils of misogyny, homophobia and heteronormativity (among other things). It’s searingly honest (she breaks down into tears while recounting a time when she was raped, for instance), and (clearly) powerfully-moving as an artistic work of social commentary. The Rotten Tomatoes critic score is 100%, with reviewers gushing over its bravery, innovation and transition to a ‘post-comedy paradigm’.
However, I thought it was bloody awful - as did lots of other people (the Rotten Tomatoes user review aggregation is 26%). This wasn’t because I didn’t agree with (or took offence over) Ms Gadsby’s various theses (I have no doubt that it must have been hard growing up as a queer woman in 1980s-1990s Tasmania, for instance); rather, it’s because the whole event was mis-sold. This isn’t a comedy, it is essentially a secular sermon about the difficulties that middle-aged lesbians have faced (and continue to face)… A timely and necessary narrative? Absolutely. Comedic? Not in the slightest.
(Dave Chapelle famously dug himself even deeper into a hole amongst the transphobia-business with his (accurate) injunction that “Hannah Gadsby is not funny”).
The best stand-up comedy finds a balance between serious social commentary and jokes, with a poetic interplay between the two.
Very much agree with this with the caveat that I wouldn’t trust RT audience scores to mean anything. They’ve increasingly been used to vice/virtue signal anything that can be considered political (which is nearly anything).
Benny Hill.
I thought it was hilarious. Or maybe I’m thinking of the one she named after her dog. The breakdown of Renaissance art was fantastic. It’s not unusual for stand up artists to mix comedy with social commentary or personal issues, Mike Birbiglia, Bo Burnham, Maria Bamford, and Jerrod Carmichael to name a few.
Do you feel that way about It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World?