I’m not a big fan of Cohen’s movies. I think his characters are funny, but the putting people in uncomfortable situations, not so much.
Jerry Lewis, I love his physical comedy, although it doesn’t make me laugh out loud. I’ve never seen a complete movie from him, so I didn’t know he did any uncomfortable situations.
I had to look up who John Waters was. I like his openness, but I really don’t find him funny. I clicked on every Youtube link that said it was really funny, and I didn’t get it.
Let me name a movie I have seen that has the type of comedy I don’t like: Meet the Parents. I hated that they made Ben Stiller’s character so uncomfortable. I like Stiller more as he was in Night at the Museum. I guess you could call some of his performance uncomfortable, but it’s really easy to focus on the physical comedy. The only bad scene is when the kid doesn’t believe him, but that’s so short it doesn’t really get uncomfortable.
Wow - I’ve only watched the first half of that link, and it’s pretty freaky. She reminds me of the black-haired hippie girl in “Cheech and Chong Up in Smoke.” This was on TV? Did people take this seriously?
I feel like unsettling but funny is pretty huge now, though, as others have mentioned. I don’t personally like all of it but it’s pretty common. John Waters is a good, mentioned, example. And South Park–think of all the evil that one eight year old boy has done, from forcing someone else into cannibalism to trying to annihilate an entire people. But it’s all meant to be hilarious.
In short, it was the Arrested Development or The Office (BBC version, not the diluted American sitcom) of its day, and arguably better than either given what it had come from.
Go back and watch a marathon of Three’s Company, Mork & Mindy, Good Times, and Sanford & Son, and then you’ll have a context for just how bad t.v. was in those days. Not just the writing, too, and certainly not the acting (some of which was quite good) but the staging, the camera work, set decoration; it all just looks painfully amateurish now, like a middle school stage production. When you watch something now like Mad Men or Dead Like Me, the production values alone are better than the high budget cinema of the era, and the writing is phenomenal in comparison…and these are both lower budget shows that are independently produced. Indeed, t.v. then was the dregs for screenwriters; it is now arguably the place to be if you want to exercise actual writing skills and character development without being edited to death by movie studio execs. Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (and the similar Soap) was a bright spot of unpredictable originality in what was otherwise a creative wasteland of television.
You’re saying that you like very vanilla comedy that doesn’t challenge your sense of propriety. Nothing wrong with that; everyone has their own personal taste, and comedy is especially personal in the way it does or does not resonate. But for some people, the unpredictability accentuates rather than detracts from the comedic effect. Personally, I don’t care for pure shock comedy (and could pretty much do without Ben Stiller in any film) but when it is done in a truly surprising manner (like the naked Asian guy jumping out of the trunk in The Hangover) it can be gut-busting.
Another vote for a certain weirdness that the time required. Thing was, FOX at that time was always doing something weird, even though it wasn’t a network at the time. I remember also from that era – "The Old Man and the Sea” that’s right, the Hemmingway novel, aired with limited commercial interruptions. Also Mobil theatre, what I remember most from that was a showing of the life of Edward VIII. Why was that interesting to US audiences in the early 1970’s? Like it was mentioned above, weirdness with high production values wins out over photocopied drek.
Yeah, I guess. You’ve got to realize I have an anxiety disorder, and I don’t really find being shocked to be amusing. I think the uncomfortableness
But there is comedy that’s more vanilla than the stuff I like. It was really popular in older sitcoms, for example. The ones that had no bite. I still want a bit of snark in there.
Oh, and I must point out that there’s a certain type of uncomfortableness I like least–the one where other people are making the people we’re supposed to be laughing at uncomfortable.
I loved the show, though a lot of the attraction was its willingness to wander into theater of the absurd at any moment, and without feeling the need to signal it in advance. The quaalude pacing could be weird, but as someone else pointed out, that was part of what was entrancing, because it was so unlike anything else on TV. The closest modern comparison I suppose would be Twin Peaks, but given what we had to watch on TV back then, the effect was more like Monty Python: it was so different in format and tone that you couldn’t stop watching.
And of course it also spawned Fernwood 2 Night and America 2 Night, which introduced me to Fred Willard and Martin Mull as Barth Gimble and his twin Garth (Mull interviewing a legalized prostitute: “oh, I love this picture ID card, I can hold it up with one hand!”).
How about Steambath, with a perplexed Bill Bixby and a briefly topless Valerie Perrine in the anteroom to the afterlife? That practically demands its own thread.
What I remember is that we were forbidden to watch it by my dad (we kids ranged in age from junior high to first grade or so during the MH, MH years.) Hell, I would switch it off when I was babysitting because it had been so vehemently verboten by dear old dad. I was terrified I’d be besmirched!
I also remember one of our local tv stations doing a segment on why it was so bad, so very very bad, for society.
Can anyone explain why it was so controversial?
(Note - we were also forbidden from watching any soaps, CHiPs, and Donnie and Marie.)
Was this Norman Lear’s vanity project? I don’t mean that in a snarky way. Just that I’m familiar with many of his other shows, first-run as well as syndication and DVD, and MH, MH is so markedly different from them, it comes off as something he was doing for himself, to see if it could be done. I’m also wondering if he was familiar with the Samuel Beckett play Happy Days.
I don’t think it held up well. Mary Kay Place, Debralee Scott and of course Louise Lasser are absolutely brilliant casting. Those three actresses should each have been big stars, but alas it never happened, though each one has(had) enourmous potential.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was never a huge hit. It was syndicated and as far as that goes it held it’s own quite nice. The spin off show, “Fernwood Forever,” and “Fernwood Tonight” (Later “America Tonight”) were also outrageously funny.
But parodies are hard to sustain over long periods of time. This is why I feel the Carol Burnett sketch, indeed all Burnett’s sketches, hold up better, because it’s hard to parody over the long haul.
I watched Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman regularly when it began and enjoyed it.
Since its entire run was less than a year and a half, I’m not sure of the timeline or when I stopped watching it. But my impression is that the show became increasingly bizarre as time went on.
To me, there’s a tipping point between being enjoyably quirky and crossing the line to being weird for the sake of being weird. My fading memory tells me that the show crossed that line for me at some point, and I lost interest.
In some ways, I suppose, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman may be an early poster child for what, IMHO, has become of “humor” over the last quarter of a century plus.
It seems to me that nowadays, it’s not a requirement that humor actually be funny. If it’s simply outrageous, offensive, weird or in some way off-center, that seems to be enough for it to qualify for many.
I was essentially forced to watch it by a couple of friends. I never understood how anyone could find it entertaining in any way. Dody Goodman was okay, as was Mary Kay Place initially, but they couldn’t really make up for the fact that I thought the show stank.
