Why I hate Seinfeld et al? Because great stand-up does not make for great sitcoms. Stand-up comics only know how to write for one, and then try to backfill with the minor characters. Good comedy bounced lines off a sidekick et al. The main character doesn’t get all the funny lines. I think Seinfeld, Ray Ramano, et al. need lessons in what makes for good comedy.
No, not everyone loves Ramond…or Jerry. Personally, I find them rather annoying.
Um…OK?
I don’t really like Seinfeld either, but I think one of the reasons it succeeded was because Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David insisted that all the characters should be funny, not just Jerry. In fact, he is the closest thing to a straight man in his own show.
Isn’t Seinfeld the exact opposite of your example?
Especially as Seinfeld was much more plot-driven than most sitcoms.
I think Home Improvement was funny, an excellent adaptation of Tim Allen’s stand-up shtick.
I see what you did there.
That having been said, I really enjoyed Brett Butler’s “Grace Under Fire”. To be fair though I’d never seen any of her standup.
I liked “Roseanne” as well. (And had heard some of her stand up.)
The few episodes I caught of…oh crap. Who’s the “Here’s your sign” guy? His sitcom was pretty good. Actually VERY good if I remember right, but it was buried on some 3rd tier channel I never thought to watch.
I think that the fact that stand-ups listed have had enourmously popular sitcoms kinda invalidates the premise.
But that’s just me.
What’s true is that Seinfeld, Romano, Roseanne, etc. are not particularly good actors. That tends to make subtler humor harder to pull off.
That doesn’t make it impossible to be funny. You can make the comedian the straight man (Seinfeld, Bill Cosby, Andy Griffith), load the show up with good actors who can carry the star (Roseanne) or just go with the basic premise in more and more outrageous ways and hope the writers can keep it funny (Burns and Allen, Home Improvement).
Bill Engvall’s the sign guy. And he knows exactly what makes most men tick. Especially long-suffering, long-married men.
There are plenty of counterexamples:
Bob Newhart, who was a standup great and also a great comic actor in two long-running shows (and another that was just as good, but was killed by the network).
Bill Cosby – successful in both drama (I Spy) and comedy.
Richard Belzer – people forget how good a comedian he was before he started playing Munch.
“When you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you’re a stand-up comedian – can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’… It’s as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, 'All right, you’re a cook – can you farm?” - Mitch Hedberg