comedy ain't for just anyone

Far be it from me to pronounce myself as any sort of comic genius. I am reminded of Eugene Levy's Dr. Pearl from Guffman who professed not being the class clown, but sitting next to him. And studying him. So take my critique and analysis with a grain of salt.

Today I watched "Francesco Vezzoli's project Greed, a faux ad campaign for an imagined perfume." This is meant to be a satire, thumbing its nose at the idea of promotions in the luxury product world. But it's terrible. Just terrible. I tweeted as such and my friend's response was enough to get my engines running. He wondered how this could have been avoided. His snarkiness aside, there's something to this line of questioning. He wondered if a different director or fight ch

oreographer might have helped the end result.

The whole experience actually made me consider two things:

1) Broad, self-aware slapstick comedy will never lead to laughter.

2) Comedy is hard. It is an art form that aught to be respected on the level of intense drama.

First part first. Think about Will Ferrell. I know, the last thing he needs is promotion. But he's widely considered one of the funnier people in the universe. He excels at both nuanced, life-or-death stakes realism as well as ridiculously over the top, fully-committed humor.

When the men enters a room in an electric wheelchair and opens a 2-inch cell phone, he just enters the reality of that physicality. The women in the Greed spot look like they've been told not to worry about what it all means, just roll on the floor and try to grab the perfume bottle. What surprises me is that both Portman and Williams have proven themselves to be gifted nuanced actors. And I wish I'd had the chance to see something more carefully performed, which I hypothesize, would have ended up significantly more biting and halfway amusing.

Which leads me to the second point. There's a reason some "comedy" stars are bankable. It's that they're funny and they're aware that comedy takes work. They know timing, commitment, delivery, and subtlety can make or break a moment. Which is interesting. Because I'll bet if you asked Steve Carrell and Ralph Fiennes how to make a single moment work they'd have similar answers. I'm just saying, being put in a wacky situation and making some faces doesn't make something funny in the same way that asking Jack Black to play the priest in Doubt would have probably have been the undoing of that movie (please see: King Kong).

I guess the bottom line is I think much as we'd like to believe that making people laugh is as easy as having a clever idea. But it's hard work that requires a good amount of talent and understanding of process. And it does help to just be funny.

Where have you gone, Heathcliff Huxtable? Your country needs you now.

CBS continues to blow the network trumpet, heralding "Two and a Half Men" with the generous superlative: "top-rated". I've seen this program once or twice. Surely, the great comedy minds at the Writers Guild of America can come up with better jokes than Jon Cryer sees pretty woman and longingly groans. or Charlie Sheen winces eyes and deadpans something about women and booze. But, "top rated", c'mon.

So where have all the good sitcoms gone? I recently asked that and someone said, "The Office". Another was "Family Guy" and "The Simpsons". Nobody mentioned "30 Rock", but I know somebody would. However, when you look at that list, 2 programs are animated, 1 is based on a groundbreaking British series, and the other is, well the other has Alec Baldwin.

The bottom line is this: "No sitcom has finished in the top 10 since Everybody Loves Raymond in 2005" reads the stat from USA Today article** about "Back to You", Kelsey Grammer and Patricia Heaton's new go at the 30 minute format. Gone are the glory days of the sitcom. Is this because writers have run out of ideas? Is it because reality TV is now the world's place to go to laugh? Are viewers getting less sophisticated? Are viewers getting more sophisticated? Are network dollars to tied up in advertising dollars to take a gamble on a sitcom finding its audience? What is the cause of the sitcom slide?

I have to believe it resides somewhere in the combination of a handful of the above factors. Certainly, the influx of reality TV programming has given audiences some of the stranger experiences in TV history. Equal parts idiotic, scandalous, hopeful, talented, talentless, and romantic, perhaps the needs we get from our sitcom characters gets scooped up with this rotating band of reality-celebs. I think the network dollars are probably responsible as well, though that's entirely conjecture. BUT, it always seem that when a hit comes out, 5 other shows are instantly developed with (say) 6 thirtysomething buddies trying to make it in NYC. Where is the original thinking? And if it's there and the public isn't allowed to see it for one reason or another, where is the spirit of taking chances? Creativity can not come from a place of fear of failure. There must be a willingness to be wrong, a freedom to fail and a readiness to be the one who tried something new that folks didn't quite "get" at first.

And maybe therein lies the purpose of this entry. I am convinced that talented, creative, funny writers are pounding out the next Cheers as we speak. I'd bet my job on it. But where are those programs? Where is the innovation? And as someone immersed in the world of advertising, that's a question we strive to answer all the time. Where is the passion that leads to risk that leads to true creativity?


**NOTE: This is a total case of "you snooze, you lose" blogging. I had thought about this for a couple of days, starting writing it yesterday and over lunch saw the USA Today article. Bastards. So, I included the reference above in my entry and published anyway. Oh well.