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+--- Thread: Comedy of the Past (/Thread-Comedy-of-the-Past)
Comedy of the Past - FlyingClayDisk - 07-16-2024
This morning I was reading an article about a former SNL cast member, Adam Sandberg, who was talking about how “hard” life was on SNL. I didn’t feel particularly sorry for him, and this was the bulk of the article. However, after reading, I scrolled down to the comments section (something I often do, when available).
The comments section was replete with comments I expected to see…”SNL hasn’t been funny for decades!”…”People still watch that program????”…”Haven’t watched it for 30 years”…”SNL stopped being funny and became political propaganda long before Sandberg ever even joined the cast!”…I hadn’t really expected to see much different, and I’d pretty much felt the same way when I tuned out almost 30 years ago myself (even though it used to be my absolute favorite program).
Then I came upon a comment which caught my eye. The commenter opined that they had gone back to the comedy of the day (recently), back in the late 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, and it wasn’t funny anymore. In other words, they had gone back to the comedy ‘greats’ like George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, John Belushi and so many others, and it just didn’t seem funny today. This got me to thinking. Maybe they were right…in a way.
Oh sure, it was funny back in the day. Heck, I can remember rolling on the floor laughing at SNL, SCTV, In Living Color, and so many others. So, I decided to go back and see for myself. The commentor was kind of right…it wasn’t particularly funny now. I wondered why? I realized comedy is a very strange thing. Obviously dated news type comedy won’t be funny, I expected that much, but there was so much other comedy which wasn’t dated, and it wasn’t particularly funny either (now). What changed? I wondered.
After some contemplation, I realized several things changed. First, and most obvious, I’d gotten older and my comedic tastes have changed and matured. So, the target audience for comedy is very specific. Second, and probably more importantly, we were seeing things we’d never seen before. The comedy was new, some of it physical, some of it mental, but all of it new. It was a changing genre and we were seeing the emergence of it. Then, after even more thought, I realized comedy is always changing; true comedy exists in a constant state of change.
It wasn’t what we saw which was funny, it was often what we did NOT see which was funny. It was what WASN’T said which was funny, it wasn’t necessarily what was said which made us laugh. It was all about timing.
Remember back to John Belushi’s mid-70’s era “Samurai” routine on SNL. It was hilarious! It wasn’t what he said or did which was so funny, it was the way he would stop, frozen, and his eyes would dart back and forth; that was funny. To hear Dan Aykroyd today tell Jane Curtain…”Jane, you ignorant SLUHT!”…wouldn’t be nearly as funny. But these things sure were funny then. Why? Because no one had ever done that before.
Though, I have to admit; seeing Eddie Murphy play the skit “Mr Robinson's Neighborhood” on SNL in 1984 is still pretty damn funny! So is Jim Carrey's "Fire Marshall Bill" from ILC in the '90's.
RE: Comedy of the Past - Maxmars - 07-16-2024
I always thought comedy was as much about the audience as it was the comedian, and to some extent, even the material.
It seemed that making a comedy album often had two approaches, the live album, recording the presentation to an audience and the 'studio' album which was more of a production but without social laugh cues.
I went back to older material I have, and while I still found it funny, the humor was also prompting repeated winces about "how that would play today?" (Lot's of old Bill Cosby albums, Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor,...and many etc.) I see your point clearly.
SNL was often a blend of physicality and mental humor... gravitating towards political parody towards the end... when it got ultimately less funny and more activist-like in it's one-sided focus... as if only their "targets" were often laughable, but not their "heroes." That's where the story lost it's universal comedy, I think.
RE: Comedy of the Past - Oldcarpy2 - 10-07-2024
Comedy of the past, some is now offensive to the wokerati.
Still bloody funny tho.
I give you, Spike Milligan's Pakistani Daleks:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C0n88tZQc4Q
