The Unprofessional Boy #28
The Unprofessional Boy #28
Advanced Media Studies
Hello again,
In the last newsletter, I discussed the first part of a quick series I’ve been working on: how the medium of a given story affects everything about it. Most specifically, its characters and the decisions they can make, which in turn causes everything else about the narrative. Then, I focused on films and the constraints they face; today, we’ll discuss how the overarching idea applies to television, diving into some adjacent thoughts on comedy.
As opposed to the film or theatrical performance, there are essentially two types of television show: the comedy, and the drama. The Greeks would have made this distinction in any medium, and Shakespeare would have included the history; I am enforcing it within the medium of television alone because its production conditions do, and increasingly, they don’t anywhere else. Setting aside variations in emotional character and stylistic choice, in television, comedy and drama are unusually, fundamentally different.
There are two subgenres sheltered under the umbrella of the comedic television series: “smart” and “dumb” comedy. Smart comedy was Seinfeld, Community and The Office; dumb comedy is Friends and the Big Bang Theory. What’s fascinating about this classification is that it draws into prominence a truth otherwise neglected: “smart” and “dumb” isn’t dependent solely on the writing. “Smart” and “dumb” have an entirely different look; they employ a separate dialect of the language of film.
Dumb comedy —the sitcom version, anyway— generally has a dated look, filmed in front of a live audience on a low number of sets: this is multi-camera, where each angle is recorded at once In contrast, smart comedy looks more cinematic: it’s filmed in film’s standard single-camera format, meaning that each shot, angle or movement is recorded by one camera, moved repeatedly. It’s more expensive, but it allows vastly more freedom in postproduction.
Friends, famously, was a factory; the writers’ room was able to crank out unbelievable numbers of acceptable scripts, and the actors filmed them on a breakneck schedule. The issue with making your television show an apparatus is that it doesn’t make you good art. A unique facet of comedy is that jokes wear out quickly if they’re told repeatedly, faster if they’re told the same way each time. Seinfeld, to a modern audience, is often received as not particularly funny— there’s humor in it, but that laugh value has been replicated and ship-of-Theseus’d until the original blends in with its imitators.
Joke thievery is an issue for the same reason magic thievery is an issue, and comedians have a loosely defined code of conduct in the same manner magicians do to prevent it: if it’s performed over and over again, a trick (or joke) loses its impact. But a joke is legible: it’s a visual gag, an arrangement of words, or a musical sting, while a magic trick —ostensibly— can’t be copied. This concept, extended, results in the death of not only specific jokes but of areas of comedy. First riffs on specific subjects (“airplane food,”) then styles of conveyance (multi-camera sitcoms) become useless. I have no doubt that the first buddy cop movies in the eighties were groundbreaking vehicles: nowadays, they’re an easy premise and ready-made structure which plates up mediocre writing.
The TV comedy, in almost every situation, is not defined by its budget, length, or cast; instead, the constraint which shapes a comedic television show is its premise, because this defines its producers’ struggle: they strive for the goal of remaining “fresh.” In other words, they aim for the show not to consume itself.
Take a look at the above video, which discusses Conan O’Brien and his approach to constructing a television show. He has mitigated his fall into the ouroboros of late-night television (wrapped up in an ever outdated format) and situational comedy (self-cannibalizing premises) by maintaining a constant subversion of the rules of late-night T.V.
Other late-night hosts do not do this. The fact that they choose to work closer to the core of those rules doesn’t invalidate their work, however: what does is that it is unimaginative. Fallon or Kimmel don’t do anything that makes them stand out. The vast majority of stand-up comedy fails to entertain for the same reason: a lack of imagination.
However, the lack of imagination is itself a symptom of a deeper problem: a lack of respect for the audience, and a refusal to adapt to newly available methods of constructing joke density.
It’s my contention that a large portion of comedy is explained by joke density; artists get laughter by either packing in sub-jokes, effectively building up to a big enough punchline, or both. In each case, the goal is to maximize the humor via quantity. Quality is important, but I think it can be treated as a derivative of quantity, much as a heavy object has higher mass— its subjective “weight” is useless in determining the legitimate “amount of joke” in a particular routine.
Different people have different tastes, but I think this is as close to an objective measure as can be arrived at, even if it is very far from one: how much “joke” is packed into your allotted time. This isn’t to say that silence, or pauses, don’t contribute to the timing, or how a joke lands: I am considering them here too as well.
For example, here’s a great explanation of the inner workings behind a comic like John Mulaney’s conversational style: it consists of many component set-ups, punches, and tags. The anecdote is merely a vehicle for the parts which provide density and therefore audience interest.
Different styles of comedy will arrive at “joke” in different ways. All that is necessary to achieve a high joke density is to effectively and efficiently use the tools available. The below video, for instance, compares Edgar Wright’s style of comedic direction to more typical Hollywood approaches:
In each shot, Wright is careful to play to the strengths of the medium, maximally incorporating elements of humor. This results in a visual joke where there otherwise wouldn’t have been one (quantity,) contributes to a line of dialogue, or strengthens a bit of comedic action (both quality, increasing the total joke amount.) There’s more “funny” in the total time allotted because of small choices like this, and that results in a better movie. He does this repeatedly where others wouldn’t take the opportunity: crafting specific transitions and close-ups, for example.
Stand-up comics —the good ones— will do the same thing: crowd work, for instance, or modulating timing to react to the ineffable chemistry of a live audience. (This is another reason for the inclusion of the laugh track.)
Bo Burnham’s work is perhaps the pinnacle of this idea (for now.) He realizes that he has at his disposal not only an audience but a theater, so he does what somebody thinking from first principles would do: he incorporates light and sound.
A good skit is punchy, but the ultimate tool that it uses is its metacontext: its affordance for a short runtime. A skit, in and of itself, isn’t in most cases a finished article of consumption. Saturday Night Live and Key & Peele recognized this; both create a television show by splicing together small comedic narratives with only production details relating them. The product which a skit composes is a block of accounted-for attention: in other words, a modular stream of skits, not one individually.
This lack of interrelation allows more time to be spent on humor, less on continuing established elements and introducing new threads to follow. High joke density follows. (SNL is sub-par for other reasons.) This is the reason for the success of Vine, TikTok, Joke Twitter, and r/youtubehaiku. (It’s also why Quibi is dying; the secret isn’t short-form video, but the quantity of such, and the selection process that jams disparate forms of humor up against each other.)
Those sites and apps can cater to individual tastes (volume, low marginal cost for the viewer, and algorithmic (or quasi-algorithmic) discovery processes help.) Their true strength, though, isn’t variety. Instead, the castle that they compose is propped up by the solidity of each brick. Were a substantial percentage individual items within these infrastructures wasteful of the space afforded to them —if they weren’t concise— that pool in the content ecosystem would collapse. Joke density is the most important metric, though it’s brought about in these cases via competition and brutal Gini coefficients.
Dramatic television doesn’t abide by joke density, nor does the medium contain any such core principle; it can’t be considered in the same realm as its comedic counterpart. Comedy can be drama, while drama cannot be comedic except for uncharacteristic moments.
There are many forms of dramatic television which follow slightly different rules: the soap opera is one of these; the police procedural is another; modern prestige television is a third. These formats are standard, formulaic, repeated across television; their success, consistency, and primacy makes them ideal references. Soap operas, cop shows, and the like are easily scrutinized; they’re episodic, and usually daytime television, which uses repetition not as a comedic crutch, but as a necessary nod to its viewership.
I’m more concerned with prestige television because it’s currently in the process of eating everything longform and interesting. By “prestige television” I mean the term as it’s colloquially used: high-budget, somewhat pretentious, with the trappings and aspirations of elevating itself. Usually, it’s on a subset of small networks that have the resources necessary to spec into the style that’s increasingly becoming a genre but not the automatic ability to garner viewership: FX, Home Box Office; toss in AMC and Netflix, maybe USA, since it turned out Mr. Robot.
None of this is bad; I refuse to whine about shows which are just as good but to which no attention is paid by popular consensus, because I think there’s very little merit or virtue in doing so: good shows, for nearly every useful value of ‘good,’ survive. They do so definitionally. I don’t identify this trend to disparage it; I do so with the intent that we may harness it to bring about items which more closely match my taste:
More than ever, dramatic television lacks the traditional constraints which have defined it. Much like comedic television, I only hope for it to turn a little more inventive.
Work
I wrote a new short story, loosely about disruptions to plans, more closely about interactions between the stilted and the properly refined. It’s been a post-it for a few weeks now; I’m happy to release it. (~7200 words)
Links
Reading Stories of Your Life and Others, a Ted Chiang collection, was one of the events that started my recent trend in writing more, shorter fiction— I recommend Exhalation, a science-fiction short of his; it’s short, punchy, and inventive.
wildbow, the primarily pseudonymous author behind web serials like Worm, is someone else whose thought process is worth exploring, particularly as I’ve been putting ‘works really hard’ examples in this section:
About Writing (tag, two posts)
And a few interviews which give some insight into the way he writes and things:
The Guardian’s long read How the Sandwich Consumed Britain is a revealing, light cross-section of a culinary tradition which squares a familiar product and its entirely alien scope. I find it comforting and inspiring to refocus on the idea that these breakthroughs are conceived by individuals.
I’ve recently read Patrick McKenzie’s post How Running a Business Changes the Way You Think; he’s “fascinated by money, in the same fashion that the engineer in me is fascinated by bits and electricity…” and sandwich-makers are their craft, which is a beautiful mindset to have.
I mentioned Worm a moment ago —it’s one of my favorite books— and I feel obligated also in that vein to recommend Mother of Learning, a web serial I’ve been reading recently (though haven’t finished.) It does an excellent job of posing problems and thinking through the consequences of their solutions, much as one analyzes sandwiches or currency.
Feel free to email or shoot me a message on Twitter; otherwise, until next time.
Orion