If someone has mentioned this I haven’t seen it, so here goes.
The PBS documentary on American humor starts Wednesday evening. Billy Crystal will introduce each episode. So far every critic I’ve seen has praised the series.
I can’t wait for this thing to get rolling.
PBS’s official “Make 'Em Laugh” website has an extra web-only episode entitled “Teh Internets,” documenting the rise of Internet humor. One wonders if a Web comedian will one day become one of the great names of American comedy.
And if you haven’t seen it already, here’s PBS’s clever spot promoting the series. (The man in the spot is a web comedian himself- the very entertaining Doug Walker of ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, alias “That Guy,” “Chester A. Bum,” and “The Nostalgia Critic.” He remembers it so you don’t have to!)
How many episodes will there be? I noticed tonight’s is 2 hours from 8-10pm locally.
Oh, god…I want to watch this series but 2 freaking hours? I have to drag myself to the TV to watch even 1-hour things I want to see. Why do they have to have 2-hour episodes? That’s a movie, not a TV show.
I find it frstrating but Neither PBS nor IMDB is providing any useful info.
There [del]might be 4 or[/del] are 6 episodes scheduled according to the IMDB.
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It appears my local PBS (WNET) will be showing the two episodes per night for 3 upcoming Wednesdays. Your might be different. Check your listings.
Ah…the light dawns over Old Scatterpate…
I had thought that each episode was 2 hours, not that there were two episodes. Two separate episodes I can handle, because I can DVR and watch them on my schedule. I have some sort of weird aversion to splitting a two-hour show up into one-hour segments watched on different nights that I don’t have with two one-hour shows.
No, really…it’s okay to think it’s weird. It IS weird.
I’m gonna look at all of the first two episodes later, but the opening of the first episode, in which Billy Crystal pokes fun at the stereotypical PBS Ken Burns-style documentary, is brilliant.
I hate when they do that. I’m not going to commit an entire evening to any TV show.
I watched the first episode. It was good, but I have better things to do.
I watched the first hour. It was exactly the same as every other history of sitcoms that has ever appeared on tv. Not an original thought or insight. And the same old tired clips.
Thumb and four fingers down.
Yeah? I’d forgotten how much early Steve Martin slayed me.
OTOH, I taped but may FF through the sitcom ep. Except the part where (at the beginning, so I saw it) Matt Groening said what we ALL know, that, on Leave it to Beaver, the funniest character was Eddie Haskell. Knew it when I was six; know it now. The show would be mothballed with Pete and Gladys and December Bride if it weren’t for him.
Eric Nakagawa will certainly be in the top ten. Though probably more as an enabler than as a comedian.
Well I enjoyed the first episode with the stand-ups but my power went off right at 9:05pm and I not only did not see the show but off course did not get to record it. I’ll have to look for the rebroadcast.
I’m with you. We were bored silly and did not learn a thing.
I thought the first hour was mildly interesting but the second hour fell down. FWIW comedians talking about other comedians is a lot better than comedians talking about themselves.
The standup episode was a decent overview for those who didn’t realize where current comedy came from. People might know Robin Williams, and those who understand Williams may not realize his debt to Jonathan Winters, and those who understand Winters probably never have heard of Lord Buckley (a brilliant clip, BTW).
The sitcom was less so, but the clips of Gracie Allen were great, as usual. She was by far the best at one-liners. But the idolation of Seinfeld left a bad taste in my mouth; the clip was still unwatchable.
What is worse is apparently an organization directly connected to Seinfeld help fund the program. That really does leave a foul taste in my mouth.
The Seinfeld Family Foundation = Jerry from my Google search.
I knew of Winters of course, I knew him well and well before I knew about Williams but I don’t remember Lord Buckley at all.
I have to admit that I’d never heard of Lord Buckley before last night. I will be looking for some of his monologues after work today. An interesting thing looking at his Wikipedia entry:
Norman Podhoretz is not a name I ever expected to see cited as a friend and/or supporter of a pot-smoking, hipster comedian…Podhoretz is currently the eminence grise of the neoconservative movement, and has spent most of the last eight years cheerleading for the bombing of Iran, the war in Iraq, and GWBush in general. Life is weird, man.
Jim Lehrer cracks me up.
I seemed as though the program’s producers were torn between making a conventional documentary, with some sustaining themes and arguments about the nature of American humor, or a “best hits” clip job.
Also, the whole shebang appears to be mistitled; it seems to be about American humor *on TV *(with a most perfunctory nod to humor on pre-TV radio). Even the stand-ups they profiled were portrayed in the context of their appearances on TV, their transition to TV, etc.
A truly comprehensive ten-hour program on the subject of American humor would have to cover the following: two centuries’ worth of political cartooning; early American drinking songs, jokes, limericks, etc. (many of them English imports, to be sure); minstrel shows; Mark Twain; Ambrose Bierce; Jewish immigrants, vaudeville and the borscht belt; comic strips; often-comedic college dramatic troups and singing clubs; comic college student papers; comic stars from the golden ages of radio and Hollywood; the classic Jazz Age/Depression-era, invented-in-America novelty gags (snakes in a peanuts tin; joy buzzers; whoopie cushions, etc.); The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and similar publications; “Tijuana Bibles”; film animation cartoons; and MAD magazine – all of which (except for MAD, which was est. in 1952) predated the advent of TV.
I watched the Buckley clip and wondered how the fuck I could possibly have never heard of this guy. I didn’t know much about Winters either - I knew the name, but now I get how he fits into the progression and what he actually did.
I hadn’t heard of the comediennes they mentioned either, other than Phyllis iller. That was a cool piece of history.
When they talked about the personality of individual comedians, it was good. Talking about movies and shows is less interesting, and I’m not feeling good about this sitcom episode. Even this Simpsons part - I don’t need people on TV to talk endlessly about the Simpsons and the meaning of the show. I have friends for that. 