All right, that's not quite true. I like comedy fine; I don't like the word. This comes from decades of television watching, especially TV ad watching. The word just never goes away. The ads hammer and hammer you with it, always tying in one-liners that are never, ever funny. Laugh tracks don't help either, though those are usually left out of the ads, mercifully.
I think it's all because comedy is based on surprise. If somebody tells you that this is the funniest movie you've ever saw, well, I think we've all had this experience. You sit stone-faced through the entire thing. Whereas if you had been told only that it's a fairly good movie, you might have laughed your ass off. The only sitcoms I've liked as an adult were ones that nobody told me about and that I happened to start watching without seeing ads first. As to movies, I think I was told that "The Princess Bride" was very good, but not that it was wildly funny (it was). I was surprised to like "Shrek" because its ads were so annoying, but at least those were more of a guerilla campaign; no claims of funniness or of anything at all, really. The campaign almost kept me away, but it didn't raise any extreme expectations.
I think when I get my sitcom and have to make my annoying promos for it, I'm going to tell people that they shouldn't worry, it won't be funny at all. We'll be doing Chekhov plays. In Russian!
You are right that high expectations often lead to disappointment when it comes to film or books. I have found that to be true. We could have a DL sitcom based on ( as Seinfeld's was base on "nothing') roaming endlessly in hope of the prefect meeting place and finding nothing- lots of opportunity for laughter there. Maybe.
ReplyDeleteI dunno; I think it'll flat be fun. Maybe we'll just keep running forever: Drifting Liberally.
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