Couldn’t part of it be that you’re simply getting older, eman77? Feeling a bit too BTDT and cynical? It’s not as if most sitcoms of the past were necessarily better, or talk shows either. Carson might have been king, but he was still sanitized for the masses, y’know?
That’s definitely true. 99% of televison in any era is total crap. Sometimes we just remember shows we watched as kids as being better than they actually were. When I was a kid I loved that Hulk show with Bill Bixby. When see reruns as an adult, I can’t believe how cheesy it was. I used to think Happy Days was funny too. It wasn’t.
There is one thing I’ve notice while watching TV with my wife and stepson. I watch Will & Grace with them but would never watch it myself. One reason is that I can always predict the joke before it is made and that just bores me. The funny thing is, they can also predict the joke and often say the joke before the actor does.
The difference is, they like doing that. They get pleasure in being able to outthink the writers.
Thats the reason I still watch Frasier and The Simpsons, those two shows can usually catch me off guard.
You got a point Diogenes the Cynic I find “Curb your Enthusiasm” decently funny as well and even 99% of the jokes on “The Sopranos” are ten times funnier than say “Frasier”. When I was a kid I loved reruns of “I Love Lucy”. I found them very entertaining but now I can’t believe I watched that. Remember how big a problem people had with the pregnancy episode and if they god forbid were shown sleeping in the same bed. But it’s good to know that there are other people in this country who don’t enjoy this crap.
Yeah, most t.v. humor is really sad.
And when something really funny gets out it doesn’t last long. Did anyone watch “Andy Richter Controls the Universe” on FOX? The SO and I thought it was really funny and subtle, and it was yanked and now it’s that Beene crap.
Thank god for South Park, Simpsons (which lost it’s edge for a while but seems to be back on solid ground) and Malcolm-Sunday night is really the only time we get our hopes up…
Praise “The Simpsons.”
I get more laughs out of an old Simpson’s episode that i’ve seen five times before than i do out of most of the new “comedy” on television.
They couldn’t even say the word “pregnant,” IIRC, and it was kind of mysterious how she got that way when they were sleeping in separate beds. 
Why does “clean” seem to mean “not funny” while crude is what is the “missing ingredient” (damn those tv censors anyway), and is supposedly why TV isn’t funny?
I find this really weird. When I go to a comedy at a theatre, the parts that are the grossest and most base are the ones that get the fewest laughs. The parts that took some real brainstorming on the part of the writers are the ones that get the biggest.
Yet everyone (not meant against you QT, just in general) is always whining about how “santized” and “censored” things are. Do we think shows would really be “funnier” if we just dropped all censorship and just let it ALL hang out? Anything goes? Nothing is too gross or base? Nothing “off-limits”?
Some of the really old shows (those where you couldn’t say “pregnant” or the couple had to sleep in twin beds) were the funniest and still are. They were funny because of really good writers and characters (and actors) that were people you’d actually want to meet in real life, that were good-hearted, fun, down to earth people.
Another reason they were funny was that the comedy was “real”. As in you could see yourself doing, or at least thinking the way they do in some of the situations they were in.
For instance Bill Cosby (his albums, not the show), his stuff was funny because it was from real life. You could see a kid actually playing submarine in the toilet, or walking around like the “glazed donut monster”. And how many husband HAVEN’T been required to “kill things”??
Writers these days are lazy, they go for the easy “gross-out” or bathroom humor, no muss no fuss and they still get their union wages.
PS the reason SNL is so stale?? (stale hell, they outright SUCK these days). They are union too. No outside scripts are accepted. I know this from a coworker who writes and sent them a script that was their answer. “Sorry, we’re union, no outside scripts”. And I heard just the premise of his script, just the idea was funny.
For all you Simpsons fans out there, I can write only two words about this above link:
“Admiral Baby”
I’m going to have to disagree with you CanvasShoes , Real life isn’t like the Cosby show whatsoever. In my reality all I hear all day is profanity non-stop, even I happen to use it once in a while. The only jokes I hear from co-workers are sex jokes or other crude forms of humor and the funniest are the “dirty” jokes. To me all the old shows were so unbelievably humorless that they are unbarable for me to watch nowadays. I was watching Comedy Central standup a couple nights ago and for the first time in a long time I saw a funny comedian, his name was Greg Giraldo and popped some great jokes. And alot of jokes he could’ve made funnier didn’t work because the show had to draw a line. This Greg Giraldo is likely not to have a future ahead of him, because instead of all the decent comedians out there, there comes out a Wanda Sykes and an Ellen Degeneres that end up in their own crap sitcom. I think there’s going to be some show on ABC or something called the funniest person in America and I bet some King of Queens type comedian is going to come out of there, crack the same jokes we heard over and over again about how horrible marriage is and that’s the end of it.
The reason this “gross” humor doesn’t work these days because networks draw a line so some Christian family foundation won’t come out of the woodwork and start complaining. That’s why the writers probably seem lazy. On the tonight show I bet the producers give the writers a set of guidelines to follow.
- Crack a Liberal joke
- Make a joke about a Bush
- Make a joke about Hillary’s book
- Relate it to her husband’s sex life
- Make a couple jokes about the U.N., the French and some reality show.
But don’t say too much because we might god forbid lose a viewer.
Pretty much sums up Jay Leno’s entire career, doesn’t it?
The thing about censorship isn’t that people want more dirty words on TV. It’s that, by going after dirty words, the censors are setting the bar so low that very little truly funny stuff has a chance in hell of getting on TV. Look at South Park, which is one of the best shows out there these days. Sure, they do stuff like say “shit” two hundred times in one episode, with a running tally in the lower corner. And that was pretty funny. But not nearly as funny, or offensive, as the recent Indian Casino episode. (“Goddam thieving, heartless, money grubbing Indians! Sorry, I mean Native Americans.”) If the swearing can’t get on the air, the really offensive (read: interesting) stuff doesn’t have a prayer.
I feel the exact same way about Robin Williams.
So you’re just one of those people who just complains about stuff but then shirks responsibility to change it, hoping someone else will. Excuse me if i fail to care.
If you’re sick of formulaic output, and you’ve got the initiative to look for it, try and hunt out the DVDs of the BBC comedy show The Office. IMO, it’s created a new genre of humour: the humour of tedium and shame. It’s utterly brilliant.
I didn’t say it was like the Cosby show. I said it was like Bill Cosby’s albums on life. And I said that the comedy was from real life, NOT that it reflected everything that went on in real life.
What shows? And why? Also I guess that like a dog being shocked, after a while one becomes numb to what is crude and after desensitization, is no longer able to find anything funny that doesn’t sink to the depths of depravity. What I’ve always wondered about this, is that if the most base language is used liberally as every day conversation, what do you say if you drop a heavy object on your foot? Aw shucks? The others’ have pretty much become mere conversation.
Again, you didn’t read my the example from my post closely enough. I’m talking about R movies that haven’t been censored and a theatre full of people. The grossest and most base jokes don’t get very much of a laugh. You think there’s a whole congregation of church people, or hollywood censors attending an R movie? I somehow doubt it.
Here’s an example. The movie “Me, Myself and Irene”, the scene(s) where he’s talking about the dildo. A big ole theatre FULL of people and not very many people laughing at that scene. What they DID laugh at was the scene where the character is fighting with himself and dragging himself to the car.
It’s not so much the subject matter that I disagree with, it’s the lack of cleverness. I’ve heard some dirty jokes that were ROTG hilarious.
But most of them, even in the movies, could have (and probably were) been thought up by a second grader.
I can’t see that that’s a factor, look at Will and Grace, or “Just Shoot Me” they don’t hold back much at all. All that’s missing are the 4 letter words, everything else is pretty much All hanging out there. They don’t appear to be worried about offending anyone.
And as to SNL? I’m amazed that they’re still on the air, they aren’t even up to the lame list of “approved” jokes that you list above. Most of their stuff nowadays looks like something 10 years olds would put on in their backyards.
I see your point CanvasShoes but by sanitized I didn’t necessarily mean clean but simpler maybe?
It’s the lowest common denominator thing, smart humor doesn’t go over well with the Walmart shopping denizens.
Yes Tars Tarkas , When it comes to comedic writing I do “shirk responsibility to change it, hoping someone else will”. But if I was out on the football field in high school I would go and do something about the game. There’s only so much one person can do, comedic writing isn’t my thing. I’m just complaining about it.
CanvasShoes , The reason no one in the audience laughed during the dildo scene was because Me, Myself, and Irene wasn’t attended by people looking for raunchy humor, they were looking forward to seeing a scene such as Jim Carrey fight with himself, because the majority of the people came to see Jim Carrey.
Next “Will and Grace” is not greatly offensive. You’d be surprised how much they’re not allowed to say or do on that show. Another reason shows may have lost humor (or may never have had it in the first place) is because the taste of the American public is slightly lower than mine. So I don’t know maybe I’m wrong, maybe people get very entertained by watching this stuff. Maybe it’s just me.
All I know is that as racy as you say “Will and Grace” is, I still find the jokes very corny. Maybe that’s the problem.
Yes. I absolutely loathe crude humor, and generally try to avoid it. But I think one of the reasons people are drawn to it is the sense of taboo it tends to hold. Were we to say “anything goes”, we’d get some quite atroicious things for awhile, but there will be a point where it no longer functions as an easy way to get ratings, as it can always be done. Then maybe we’ll see things that are slightly more sophisticated.
Jay Leno might of done that but I saw a show where David Letterman cracked a few jokes in the same order, so I guess he’s not any better (ok he is but by a very thin margin)
I’ve got to agree with CanvasShoes about the Cosby albums. I can still listen to his bits about the chicken heart, horror movies, Noah, or childbirth and laugh my ass off, and there’s no profanity on those.
And I think that’s what made the only time I ever heard him “swear” so powerful, when he was talking about cocaine.
Rigel