The other day I was flipping through the channels on TV and came across an old Marx Brothers movie, A Night at the Opera. It’s a 4-star classic comedy. I watched for a bit and was astonished at how unfunny it is by today’s standards. What qualifies as humor has changed a lot.
If you were to watch an old vaudeville routine now, and you are under 60, it wouldn’t amuse you in the least. Those comedy bits relied mostly on cleverness and surprise. Cleverness and surprise are no longer enough to qualify as funny. They were sufficient through the Mel Brooks era of Young Frankenstein, but worked best when mixed with some sexual innuendo or slap stick to take it up a notch.
When I was a kid, the groundbreaking humor was a TV show called Laugh In. It featured adults being silly, and not much else. Cleverness wasn’t even a goal. I recall it being hilarious at the time, apparently because being silly on TV seemed like getting away with something. It violated the viewer’s sense of normal. If you watched it today, it would just hurt. Being silly, and mildly violating some norms, no longer qualifies as humor.
When Saturday Night Live first hit the air, it redefined humor for a generation. It was a little bit silly, but it was more naughty and dangerous. It didn’t violate norms so much as shit on them. (See what I did there?) Humor became, and remained for decades, a test of how much you could get away with.
George Carlin mixed the cleverness of vaudeville with the danger of the new generation and he was huge. I saw him live recently and I still laugh at the first lines he spoke when he walked on stage. I’m paraphrasing, but this is close: “Fuck Lance Armstrong. Fuck his yellow shirt. Fuck his cancer. Fuck his balls.” It gets harder each generation to violate norms, but George Carlin still nails it.
Seinfeld defined the observational school of humor that was huge in the nineties. Topics were funny if you could relate to them. You didn’t need to be silly or dangerous or naughty. Coincidentally, that’s the same time Dilbert started hitting it big on the comic pages. Dilbert started out being clever and not much else. It got very little attention. A few years into it, when I changed the focus to the office, it joined the ranks of observational humor, and it took off. People enjoy Dilbert to the degree that they recognize the situations. I season it with cleverness and cruelty and mild violations of norms, but mostly it’s about the recognition factor.
When reality TV shows hit it big, humor began another huge shift. Sitcoms started to decline as the main source of TV humor. Now the public wants to watch real people doing real (or allegedly real) things, so they can laugh at them at home. If you think about most reality shows, you wouldn’t classify them as humor, but what you are doing at home is often laughing. And when you discuss the shows with friends, you often laugh again. It is comedy in disguise.
Now it seems that humor is moving from center stage of our entertainment world to become more of a seasoning. Only one of the top 10 TV shows in the United States is an outright comedy, and it ranks tenth. But several of the top shows, such as House, Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars, and Grey’s Anatomy, all include humor as an essential ingredient. Humor is a seasoning, not an entrée.
Take a look at the top 100 books on Amazon. The only humor books in this category revolve around a particular topic, with humor as more of the seasoning. Nothing in the top 100 books could be characterized as pure humor, in the sense that the topic is secondary. It is all humor in the service of making a point, about politics, the world, the bible, something. And I only found four humorous books in the top 100.
#5 I Am American (And So Can You Be)
#32 Our Dumb World
#60 The Year of Living Biblically
#88 If Democrats Had Any Brains They’d Be Republicans
The most popular book I authored was The Dilbert Principle. It was humor, but it was about the workplace, and management in particular. Humor was seasoning for a message. My later books had themes, but they were really just excuses for collections of humorous essays. They weren’t so much “about” anything. And they were far less popular.
I had a conversation yesterday with a brilliant business associate about why The Dilbert Blog is so popular, while my book that has the best of its material is curiously not a huge best seller. If my writing is enjoyed by people who read blogs (a tiny percentage of the planet), I thought, the writing should be just as popular with people who prefer their humor in books. My brilliant business associate pointed out that the blog is about interaction. And while only a fraction of my blog readers bother to look at the comments, or make comments, the fact that they can if they want, changes their experience. The blog is seen as a conversation between lots of people, with me as the moderator and shit stirrer. That conversation – or the reality if you prefer – is the show, and my humor is just the seasoning.
I confess to looking at the blog-to-book conversion in the same way an engineer would. If 95% of the people reading the blog don’t care about the comments, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to leave them behind and put my writing by itself in a book for the majority of the world that doesn’t read blogs, who enjoy humor, and prefer books. It seemed like a no-brainer.
In my first proposal to a publisher, for turning the blog into a book, I picked the theme of my wedding. The blog posts in the book track the time from my engagement to just after I got married. Only a small portion of the chapters are directly about the wedding, but it all tracks my state of mind, as the tension ratcheted up. In fact, my original proposed title for the book was The Year I Got Married.
Do you think that title and approach would have worked better?