Which is the best comedy?
It was Sunday afternoon at the pub. Sunday sips. The smell of the roast, the background hubbub of those really owning the last hours of their weekend - with the backgrounded tension that it must end all too soon. The GF and I were in search of a topic of conversation that would divert our attention from this inevitable conclusion. We were trying to nail down the right methodology to determine the best comedy series. It seemed simple - you reach down and consult your guts - “which comedy made you hurt the most often and the longest?”
Poor horsie: Flogged to death no doubt
The GF is a classic diehard fan. Once a comedy has won her heart that was it - she was loyal to the end. It was The Simpsons that had won that prize. Her email address was a reference to an episode (say_chowder@***.com), the had a tonne of memorabilia packed carefully away. Yet even she admitted the party had gone on a little too long. Back in its heyday The Simpsons was an institution - they defined animated comedy. Yet for the past decade The Simpsons really had nowhere else to go - they had established the characters, then made fun of these types, gotten surreal, played with form, mocked the network that made it, included a world full of side characters, had celebrity cameos, shifted the target audience and all that within the first 15 years. They had tried to reinvigorate the series with a movie - which was just not funny (Spiderpig? what??). It was at that point I checked out. Goodbye old friend.
Yet if I was to total up all the laughs I had The Simpsons had given me - the total time I had spent buckled over or open mouthed and genuinely blown away by how funny a joke was - The Simpsons would win. But I could not get past the bad taste left in my mouth - by a franchise so whipped past exhaustion. It was so American, so beyond a joke.
“So perhaps,” I ventured to GF when she returned holding a white wine and a beer “you go for highest standard.” If you looked at a show like BBCs Peep Show. “The Brits know when to quit. They leave the moment the party begins to slide, rather that doubling down and waking up next morning in someone else’s house, covered in vomit. And starting to drink again.” I took a look around the pub.
Peep Show was genius - things began to feel a bit tired in the last season and they ended it. The wordplay was always brilliant - side characters well established and you never had the feeling they were there to fill time. It probably had the highest average of any show - meaning you could pop one on and be guaranteed a good time. Yet it didn’t seem fair to compare 54 episodes of Peep Show with a show like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia which has 134 episodes.
They say British shows get worse over time, while American shows get better. I don’t fully agree - British have a shelf-life while American shows have an actual life - meaning American shows grow into themselves - they have an adolescence - a slump when they run out of ideas - characters change and they abandon their initial concept. For Always Sunny - it happened in about season 8, about the 80th episode. They even made fun of it calling an episode - the Gang Recycles their Trash - where they repeated jokes from earlier episodes (while incorporating it all into a narrative about Philadelphia going through a strike of waste disposal workers). For me It’s Always Sunny had the highest heights. That is, their jokes were quite simply the funniest but their average was brought down by a crap season and quite a few crap episodes.
For the most controlled conditions for an experiment: you must compare the British Office with the American Office. The British version is brilliant and makes your skin scrawl for 12 very tightly scripted episodes (and 2 specials). It knows what it is - it executes it and moves on. It’s bleak in a way that would frighten an average American audience that always needs a spoonful of sugar. The American version soars - it gets a bit shit in it’s adolescence (Season 7 when Steve Carell leaves) but then it grows back into itself when Andy becomes boss. Behind each of these approaches is a deep financial and cultural difference - the Brits want to execute an idea, Americans need content, the Brits want pointed social commentary, the Americans want fun. That why a British version will always have the highest average - while the Americans will have the space and time to soar.
The GF and I were almost done - by done I mean admitting that the weekend was a movie on the couch and a slow cooked curry away from being over. We were no closer to a sure fire methodology - we had the highest average, the biggest hits and the most faultless record. I had one idea left - “What about the comedy that has aged the best?”
This opened up a whole can or worms. It’s amazing how much comedic fashion has changed. Hit up a show like Blackadder - brilliant at its time - now a word strangely pronounced by Rowan Atkinson (“wibble”) sends the canned laughter in paroxysms, as it did me when I saw it. Today I barely flinch. Yet if you watch works by the Marx Brothers - you see comedy travel over 80 years and retain its hilarity. Well played Groucho.
I put down my empty pint glass. “In the end I’m going for the one that gave me the most best laughs”. It made sense to me. I was of course thinking about It’s Always Sunny.