The perfect example of this was “The King of Queens.”
We used to watch it, and got some laughs out of it, but after awhile neither my wife nor I could take how out-and-out mean the characters were.
Yeah, on Married with Children, everyone in the family hated each other, and their disgust for each other was totally justified. They’d have been idiots not to hate each other, because they were all horrible people.
Well, the point was that they DIDN’T legitimately hate each other. As soon as an outside threat came along, they stuck together like a band of baboons. Al could say a thousand things about his daughter but let someone try and mess with her and he was heading for the door with a baseball bat.
It was funny in the single-income family era of The Bickersons because humor is an escape valve, among other things. If she divorced him, she’d have limited income until she found a new husband. If he divorced her his income would be drained by alimony. So men and women were stuck with each other. (I’d link to some Bickersons radio shows on YouTube, but it really was kind of lame)
Of course, there was the marriage of Marie Menken and Willard Maas, the inspiration for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. People hung out with them because they were brilliant, but also because it was amazing to watch them at each other’s throats.
Does anyone remember the comic strip The Lockhorns? It was a strip about a bickering couple. Tom the Dancing Bug used to have a parody of it, one time the punchline was “God, I hate you.”
Remember them? I still love them! (Although, it must be admitted, probably not in the way the writers intend. I love them more in a Comics Curmudgeon kind of way.)
Remember? It’s in my paper every day. One of my favorite comics. Each spouse gets his/her share of digs in on the other.
Holy shit! I had no idea that was still in print; I assumed it went away around the time my dad traded in his last Oldsmobile.
I was going to say it stopped being funny when The Bickersons got cancelled. And it barely even made it to TV.
It worked on Married… With Children because it was played so broad and over-the-top. In order to enjoy the show, I had to assume that insults affect Bundys the same way physical injuries affect cartoon characters: they’re not really hurt by them.
I find your thesis flawed. It was never funny in the first place.
Without insults and without pain there really isnt comedy. From Groucho Marx insulting Margaret Dumont to The 3 Stooges to Its a Mad Mad Mad World to MAS*H its the gold standard of comedy. Its the realization that real life is hard and painful. Its a mechanism that allows us to laugh at this pain without internalizing it.
I’ve heard that theory, best articulated by Mark Twain:
*
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.*
Far be it from me to call bullshit on one of the greatest humorists who ever lived, but I’ve never found that to be true. I just don’t laugh at that stuff, while I laugh my fool head off at absurd stuff.
But isnt absurdist stuff a derivative of pain and embarrassment?
Here is a general article on why we laugh
Some of the sarcastic banter seen in shows like Married with Children is merely four people trying to cope with the difficulties of life.
Not in my experience. The last thing that made me laugh uncontrollably was a musical joke in the movie “While We’re Young”. The lead characters are a childless middle aged couple visiting their friends who just had a baby. The music was a toy piano version of the David Bowie song “Golden Years”. For the life of me, I can’t see any pain or embarrassment there.
Thanks, I’ll bookmark that for future reference. Or a really bad case of insomnia.
Really? They just seem like hatemongers to me. I’ve seem people laughing at that show, and listening to the laugh track, presumably they are saying things that are intended to be funny, but I’ve never laughed at it myself. Or Don Rickles and other insult comics.
Modern Family is one of the more popular family sitcoms of recent years, and all of the couples on that show tease/complain about/insult each other.
Arrested Development was hysterical and the family members were mean to each other. In fact, the show’s less-funny moments were the more maudlin:
NARRATOR: At that moment, Michael realized how much he had overshadowed his son’s accomplishments.
Of course it then blows up anyway, to comic effect.
Well, from reading this thread, I think we can conclude that different people find different things funny. I know, groundbreaking, isn’t it? Look for my doctoral thesis on the subject.
Married With Children was so cartoonish it was funny, just like Stewie on Family Guy fantasizing about killing his mother is funny because it is cartoonish(no relation to actually being a cartoon).
I bet if you recorded some real families doing some real verbal insults and sniping not a person would laugh.
Oh, it’s quite funny. We are friends with a family who all insult and snipe at each other. That is the family dynamic and the way they communicate. We have often commented that they could be a sitcom, including the grandparents.