I don’t know why I never watched this show when it was on. I love the genre.
But I decided to give this show a try today. I had no idea how funny it was. But I can’t tell if the humor is intended or is it just me?
Anyway are there any old fans out there that would like to chime in?
Absolutely it’s supposed to be funny.
It’s campy as hell and everyone knew it at the time.
I never watched this show when it was on. I don’t like the genre, and anyway I wasn’t spending any time with media: my life was full.
The humour is a New Zealand brand of humour, slightly different than American humour, but closer to American than English of the same era: I found some English humor to be outright recondite. I will say that NZ shows really like puns and similar ideoforms.
But it’s not SNL. It a fantasy show with a broad river of NZ comedy running through it.
Is it? It was filmed in New Zealand and Lucy Lawless is a New Zealander. The show was created by an American. Was the writing team from New Zealand?
Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows(movie) are New Zealand productions.
Don’t take the history seriously…or the mythology, for that matter. 
Concur with others. I’m not sure that it would be classified as a comedy, but the campiness is supposed to be fun and funny, and not to be taken too seriously. The same is true of the show it spins off: Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.
It wasn’t just the chemistry between the two leads that made it an iconic gay favorite.
There’s probably a better term for that, but it’s not coming to mind
I definitely thought of it as a campy adventure series definitely not intended to be taken too seriously.
I loved the show! Very funny and also fun.
It’s meant to be completely serious. All of the inconsistencies and oddies that you ascribe to campiness have a simple explanation: a wizard did it.
This. Not comedy, but not serious either. Camp.
Not live action comic book but leaning that way. Before comic universe blockbusters were invented and comics were larger than life but not crazily so.
Say it isn’t so!
If you are struggling with the idea of shows that are fun, rather than funny, perhaps consider the 60s TV Batman series. They seem to be enjoying themselves and inviting you as a viewer to be in on the fun, without doing overt slapstick or comedic acting.
If you enjoy Xena, you might enjoy the recent Time Bandits Tv series remake. Similarly toned, and the emphasis on practical effects rather than CGI makes for a more engaged atmosphere of people jumping into the action with gusto. Sadly only a single series and not renewed.
Wait a minute, Xena can’t fly!
…Rob Tapert, co-creator of the show, is married to Lucy Lawless. He’s pretty much an honorary kiwi as far as many of us are concerned. He’s even an “Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit”, one of the very few non-NZ born people to receive that honour, and is among a list of true kiwi legends.
He brings a lot of work down here. And kiwi’s make up most of the production crew, about half of the directors, most of the background actors, much of the sensibilities. So much of what happens on screen doesn’t just come from the writers room.
The “kiwiness” just drips off the show.
Dunno. Maybe I only saw Gareth Maxwell directed episodes? Or maybe the NZ sense of humor was deeply influenced by Xena? I think the stuff I saw had a deeply NZ sense: People from NZ have that same sense of being at a slight angle to reality that the Xena universe demonstrates.
Cool, thanks.
No, but Lucy Lawless can.
“Camp” is a good term for it, yes. There’s certainly parts that are supposed to be taken seriously, it’s not a pure comedy; but it has so much deliberately over-the-top action and deliberate silliness that just calling the show “drama” or “action” doesn’t work either. So, camp.
You’re supposed to be laughing much of the time, and not worry too much about the underlying plausibility of the setting.
I watched it during the original run, and it was my favorite show then.
Some episodes were serious, some parodied things-- there were two that parodied the movies Groundhog Day, and The Producers for example. There is also one that doesn’t parody any specific story or novel, but just the idea of the people trapped in a old, dark house, and there is a murder, and then there is another that is a direct parody of And Then There Were None.
In that last parody, Lucy Lawless is out of commission with a broken hip from a horse riding accident, and the solution to have an evil god body-switch her with another warrior woman (and one she doesn’t like, just to complicate things more). That way, another actress can play the role for an episode.
Following that are three episode fans refer to as “fight light”; episodes choreographed to be easy for Lawless, and have less fighting to begin with.
There were over-the-top devices that made fun of television in general, like the idea that Xena has not one, but three lookalikes. There are musical episodes. There are dead serious drama, that can either be watched that way, or as a sort of meta-parody of the show itself.
My favorite episode is Warrior…Priestess…Tramp which I think is the funniest one of all, but I’m also quite partial to Tsunami, a very serious one (and also one that references The Poseidon Adventure, without parodying it).
So, that aside, yes, the short answer is yes, it’s funny. It’s also very serious, sometimes, but serious in a way you can take or leave, you can choose.
“Camp” is a term Susan Sontag coined to describe things that were bad, but fun, because the people doing them looked like they were having fun, like a sketch show or talent show at camp. Xena is certainly a show where people seem to be having fun, but it’s not as bad a camp talent show. In fact, it’s very, very good.