Dear Diary Moment 4/16/2020:
Watching the live comedy shows I always have (Real Time w/ Bill Maher, Last Week Tonight w/ John Oliver, Full Frontal w/ Samantha Bee, and Saturday Night Live or even stand-up comedy) as well as the filmed sitcoms (SuperStore, Brooklyn Nine Nine, and Modern Family) in the new reality, I’ve been thinking a lot about humor which is important to my process since I consider humor an essential tool (most notably as concerns how I get my point across (and something I’ve always been thinking about to some degree or other.
And this point mainly came to me after watching Saturday Night Live’s at home edition. While I would not call it lame (I did chuckle at Kate McKenna and Adie Bryant’s breakdown during a Zoom conference), it simply was not as effective (didn’t make me laugh as much (as it use to be live. And I’ve seen as much with the other previously live shows as hard as they have tried to fill in the gap. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe they should resort to the same canned laughter that old sitcoms did and Chuck Lorre does in that much of what made/makes them work (I like Lorre’s latest project: Mom (was/is a kind of threshold dynamic like that at work in mob situations: a feedback loop in which with the lowest threshold reacts through a violent act that provokes resistance that then sets off the next threshold and so on and so on. And this is what happens with a live audience or even canned laughter in that it gives you a necessary cue. And this has nothing to do with the talent of the actors involved.
What does still seem to work, however, are the prerecorded sitcoms: especially those without canned laughter such as SuperStore and Brooklyn Nine Nine. And this is because they tend to work from the Thurber Law of Humor: create a character that you fall in love with and keep coming up with reasons for others to fall in love with them. And as I have always found out, your best bet is to go for the chuckle and let the gut laugh create itself. This is what distinguishes humor (which leans towards character (from comedy which leans towards the joke. And it makes perfect sense given that the explanation many evolutionary scientists give for laughter is that laughter establishes trust.
To give you an example of what I’m talking about: imagine how much better off the crew of Saturday Night Live would be if, instead trying to reestablish their past glory, they tried to fill in the gap through a pre-recorded sitcom very much like 30 Rock, something like a comedy troupe trying to put on a weekly comedy show. Or imagine Maher, Oliver, or Bee, rather than trying to reproduce what they got from a live audience, simply presenting themselves as an alternative news program that focuses on given issues. By doing so, they lower the expectations from comedy to humor and stand a chance of becoming more effective. On top of that, they’re allowed to develop a character that people might come to love.