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Sit-Coms & Comic Stars   Term Paper ID:27856 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Examines the role of stand-up comedians in the development of television situation comedies through the years.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Examines the role of stand-up comedians in the development of television situation comedies through the years. Paper Introduction: Comedy comes in many different forms, and in recent years standup comedy has come into its own. The growth in comedy clubs across the nation and the creation of new outlets on cable television give comedians more exposure than ever before. Styles of comedy change over time, and one of the reasons comedy changes as rapidly as it does today is television. Television uses up material and requires a constant influx of new comedians and new material to satisfy the audience. Comedy has been a vital element in network programming since the beginning of the medium. The massive ratings success of I Love Lucy in the 1950s produced a continuing search for the next long-running hit. A number of comedians have made their mark in recent years with innovative programs or programs that featured their strong points. Several have used their popularity on television as a springboard to Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. She is standing pat, week after week on her show--and a lot of the rest of the time in a lot of other places--speaking out for the dignity and the rights of those the media have set out to shame into invisibility or seduce into endless, self-hating efforts at personal transformation. Another big draw is Seinfeld himself, who, claim his friends, really is the affable, irritable, cereal- loving neatnik you see on TV ("Jerry Seinfeld," 1994, 85). "When Harry Met Barry." TV Guide (October 9, 1993), 1 -15.McCrohan, Donna. New York: Avon, 1978.Zoglin, Richard. He made several appearances in the character ofHarry on Cheers before becoming a judge on the show Night Court, which ranon NBC, mostly on Wednesday's at 9:3 pm, for nine years. With her bad hair and baggy pants and oversized shirts from the lower level of the mall, with her burned meat loaf and tuna casseroles and Malomars, with her rough language and politically incorrect child-rearing methods, with her dead-end minimum-wage jobs, Roseanne has gone further than Madonna or almost anyone else I can think of at turning the hegemonic norms of the corporate media on their heads (Rapping, 1994, 36-37). The show itself is deliberately not aboutsomething specific each week and instead is structured to have the freedomto be about nothing at all. Tim Allen plays a home improvement guru with his own televisionshow, and this character appeals especially to upper-income, highly-educated, professional households; more in the heartland than in urbanareas; and very little to ethnic audiences. Short is one of several comedians to have come from the Second Citytroupe, or rather one of the Second City troupes, since it started inChicago and then opened a branch in Toronto where Short was a member. One writer offers his idea of why the show has beensuccessful: To an audience CNNed around the clock and weary of negotiating the minefields of political correctness, Seinfeld's gently subversive humor is liberating. Both have also pushed television comedy toward everydayproblems and issues, whether they are major family issues such as confrontRoseanne or the foibles of life exploited by Seinfeld. A comedian who has just returned to television this season and whocomes from a different tradition than standup is Martin Short, and his TheMartin Short Show is seen this season on Thursday night at 9:3 pm on NBC,immediately after Seinfeld. Anderson sees his new show as a show for families, and he likes toemphasize the family element. The Second City. Jerry Seinfeld and his partner created the show that features hisname, and in essence he plays himself, a comedian living in New York.Seinfeld is on the NBC network, presently on Thursday nights at 9: pm,though it has had other time slots in its time on the air. And Seinfeld, the hip hit NBC sitcom that prides itself on being about "nothing"--the importance of a decent haircut, a good parking space, a great massage from your girlfriend--provides the delicious escape that comes from magnifying nothing into everything. This aspect of her appeal is noted byone writer, who states: I am a big fan of Roseanne--Barr, Arnold, Conner, whatever. He has borrowed aleaf from Tim Allen and has a show-within-a-show--he plays the star of atelevision show who performs on that show while also interacting withfamily and friends off-stage. He has a family of his own, but he has nevermade his family part of his routine as other standup comics do. By 1959, PaulSills was ready to start another group to revive the spirit of the CompassTheater, and he joined with Bernie Sahlins and Howard Alk. The humor on Dave tends to be more intellectual than on Night Court, andHarry as Dave is more the humorous but solid center of the family. It is thus not a situation comedy in theaccepted sense of that term--it depends on the interaction of charactersmuch more than on any given situation. This was the beginning of an explosion of creative energy aseach week the company would open a new scenario for improvisation,rehearsing through the day and performing nights to enthusiastic audiences. "Of course, I'd trade any one of them for a dishwasher" (Zoglin, 199 , 85).Anyone watching the show over time can see that it is pro-family, however,and that the real change that has taken place is that the family unit isnot the functioning social entity it was once believed to be but is moredysfunctional, or at least pulled this way and that by tensions within thefamily and from society at large such as may not have existed in earlierdecades. Seinfeld's approach is seen as different because his stylealone is the center of the show. Comedy comes in many different forms, and in recent years standupcomedy has come into its own. The growth in comedy clubs across the nationand the creation of new outlets on cable television give comedians moreexposure than ever before. A number of comedians have made their markin recent years with innovative programs or programs that featured theirstrong points. I'm a magician" (Marin, 1993, 14). Both Roseanne and Jerry Seinfeld have had a major impact ontelevision, leading to a number of imitators who have not done as well withthe same formulas. Theproducers seek stories that reflect concerns they believe their audiencemay have, whether males like Tim or females like his wife, Jill. His showis less like his routine than the shows of the comedians discussed above,but over the years he has introduced aspects of his act into his televisionroles. He has performed magic as the judge on Night Court and has alsomade the part his own with some of his personal obsessions, such as hisadmiration for singer Mel Torme, an obsession he shares with his character. There has been considerable note taken in the media recently aboutthe number of standup comedians who are becoming television stars, or whoare at least being given the opportunity in shows of their own. The Compass Theater lastedfor about two years before disbanding (McCrohan, 1987, 32). NBC moved its popular Frasier oppositeRoseanne, which was seen as a potentially foolish move on the part of NBCbecause it put the show up against Roseanne, but it is not clear whetherABC thought Frasier was so strong that it had to move Roseanne away toprotect it. An examination of severaltelevision comedians shows how their styles differ and how theirexperiences may differ as well. The show originallydebuted with four episodes as a sort of test. Styles of comedy change over time, and one ofthe reasons comedy changes as rapidly as it does today is television.Television uses up material and requires a constant influx of new comediansand new material to satisfy the audience. Short is thus making use of the same skillsin the way he has developed his new show, just as each of the othercomedians discussed has taken their earlier work and reshaped it for thetelevision medium. The comedian-as-hero is also not a new approach to television comedy, having been seenbefore with Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Danny Thomas,among others. "I'm not even an actor by trade. The scenarios usually lasted from 4 minutes to an hour, and beforeengaging in the scenario the troupe would perform one or two short piecesplus a "Living Newspaper," a form calling for the cast to read excerptsfrom the newspaper as if it were a play script. Thenewly-formed Compass Theater opened in 1955 with its first production,directed by Paul Sills from his scenario, The Game of Hurt, with ElaineMay, David Shepherd, Robert Coughlan, Loretta Chiljian, Sid Lazard, andRoger Bowen. Several have used their popularity on television as aspringboard to feature films, where they become even more widely known thanbefore, leading to a renewed interest in their television shows, which thengain a wider distribution in syndication. In its own way, Home Improvement combines thehomelife of Roseanne with the backstage show-business attitudes of Seinfeldand does so in a way that is unique to Tim Allen's personality. Comedy has been a vital elementin network programming since the beginning of the medium. The team seized the enemy's banner and planted it as their own--a polite way of telling the enemy where he himself might plant it (McCrohan, 1987, 37). They took theirname from a caustic piece in the New Yorker written in 1951 by A.J.Liebling called "Chicago, the Second City": Liebling had suggested that when it came to culture, Chicago ran a poor second to New York City. Night Court seemed quitedifferent in that it was very broad humor, more related to burlesque andvaudeville than to a polished standup routine or a sophisticated magic act. "Family Life ("Aargh!") in the Comfort Zone." New York Times (September 18, 1994), Section 2, 33.Sweet, Jeffrey. The show finished as the number one-watched show last season. This trendspoken of as if it were something new, when in fact it is not. "In Praise of Roseanne." The Progressive (July 1994), 36- 38.Sharkey, Betsy. In the195 s, television comedians came primarily from vaudeville, the "standup"of an earlier time. Seinfeld succeeded with some difficulty. "They're all mine," she says in a moment of reflection after a Thanksgiving get-together. Both shows were sketch shows, and improvisation was important in thedeveloping of those sketches. Something Wonderful Right Away. Theshow is loosely-based on Tim Allen's standup style and some of hisroutines: At its core, Home Improvement is a blend of Tim Allen's stand-up comedy routine on tool-obsessed machismo and its creators' underlying creed: men and women were not meant to live together, and therefore, married life is a series of consequences couples face for having defied fate (Sharkey, 1994, Section 2, 33).The show mixes the two alternate strands in each episode by addressing thehome life of its main character on the one hand and his television program,"Tool Life," on the other. The success of JerrySeinfeld and Roseanne Barr-Arnold (and now just Roseanne) is the reason forthe current attention given to standup comedians with television series;several can be seen on the air this year. When they did well, the showwas put on the schedule, though ratings were not high at first.Eventually, the show found an audience and became the important centerpiecefor the Thursday night comedy group, especially after the loss of Cheerslast season. Roseanne has been an important ratings winner for ABC for severalyears in its time slot on Tuesday nights at 9: pm. Anderson's act was built on illusion, and the humor he evoked was as muchbased on a certain level of disgust (he would run a needle through his armand drip blood on the stage, for instance) as it was from the way he fooledpeople with card tricks and other magic. Whether he is as successful as they have been or not,he is doing the same thing they have done as he approaches television andthus is demonstrating the importance of marrying the performer and thematerial closely even in the scripted realm of television comedy. In the 197 s the trendcontinued with Gabe Kaplan and Freddie Prinze. Short's style is improvisational and gearedtoward impersonations, and he has a structure in his show that allows forthis as well as for a comic home life with his wife. When Roseannechanges time slots this year, it will trade with another ABC success, HomeImprovement, starring another standup comedian who switched to television.Understanding this show's formula and the nature of the style of the star,Tim Allen, is more difficult than with the other two shows because it isless clear either what the show is about or why it has such broad appeal.The program attracts twice as many men, women, and children as the averagesituation comedy, and yet it has the apparent structure of a situationcomedy, making it more like Roseanne than Seinfeld in that regard.Roseanne has an appeal for middle-class and blue-collar families, whileSeinfeld appeals more to the young-urban-professionals represented in theshow. What Seinfeld has done is turn his standup routine into a show. "Home Is Where the Venom Is." Time (April 16, 199 ), 85- 86.----------------------- 11 This format allows Short to play to hisstrengths as a sketch comedian and improvisational artist as well as tohave the home life that plays well with the viewer. Eventually, the Second City troupe in Toronto turned to televisionwith SCTV, a syndicated show still shown on the Comedy Network on cable,and Short performed on one of the later incarnations of that show for acouple of years before becoming a member of Saturday Night Live for a year. This year, the showis being shifted to Wednesday night, trading places with Home Improvement.The reason for this is not clear. Whether these forces existed before or not, Roseanne and herfamily have to cope with them now, as do her viewers, which is why theviewers identify so closely with her struggle. She isn't "movin' up" to anywhere. "Go figure," he shrugs. Theirrelationship is the spine of the show set against the work of "Tool Life." A television comedian who was also a standup and yet whose televisionexperience has tended to be different from his standup routine is HarryAnderson. New York: Perigee, 1987.Rapping, Elayne. The idea that the elite may not understand the appeal of Roseanne isevident in some articles on the show, such as one in Time magazine whichlumped Roseanne with programs deemed anti-family: The Conner household on Roseanne is hardly an abode of peace and contentment either. Mom has a constant chip on her shoulder -- about her job, her housework, her nagging kids. Roseanne Barr started as a standup comic and achieved a following.Her comedy was built around family life to a great extent, and the seriesdeveloped for her put some of this into the storylines for the show. As astandup, Seinfeld discusses the same sort of topics dramatized on his show,much as he does at the beginning and end of each episode as he appears asif in a nightclub before an audience. Heplays a humor columnist, so his work is largely off-camera--as a writer hedoes not simply sit and write but rather talks about writing when he bringsit up at all. After that showwent off the air, he returned in the last episode of Cheers, as did severalother performers from earlier seasons, as a tribute to the show.Presently, he is starting his second season as the title character of Dave,playing an imitation of humor columnist Dave Barry. Anderson was a street performer before he became a comicmagician and illusionist, and he used his skill with cards and theconfidence game in his early appearances on Cheers as a streetwise con-manwho frequented the bar. Seinfeld is a show that featuresthe people rather than the events in each episode; it attempts to play offthe difficulties of living in New York, the problems facing people of acertain age with friendships and relationships as well as professionalproblems, and so on. The massiveratings success of I Love Lucy in the 195 s produced a continuing searchfor the next long-running hit. After the scenario-playthe actors would solicit the audience for suggestions for scenes whichwould then be improvised (Sweet, 1978, xxiv). Anderson sees the chance in this show to present a differentside of himself, the family man that remains hidden for the most part inhis professional life: Anderson still seems genuinely surprised to have landed in another show that both mirrors his own personality and has "potential hit" written all over it. References"Jerry Seinfeld." People Weekly (December 27, 1993), 85-86.Marin, Rick. Theshow differs from many other family shows in that it is deliberately blue-collar middle-class in orientation, reflecting the experiences of a largesegment of the potential audience. Episodes about such once-touchy subjects as masturbation, constipation and circumcision have filled the morning-after conversational void left by standard sitcom fare. So are my female and working-class students, who invariably claim her as their own and hang on to her for dear life as they climb the ladder of class and professional achievement--an effort in which their parents have so hopefully invested everything they own (Rapping, 1994, 36).Roseanne both on and off screen projects certain qualities which theaudience finds appealing: Fat, sloppy, foul-mouthed, and bossy, she is just a bit too unrepentantly, combatively proud of her gender and class position and style to be easily molded into the "movin' on up" mode of American mass media. The shows center on comic ideasabout life, and the response from the public shows that this approachworks. In the 196 s, standup comedians such as Don Adams,Flip Wilson, the Smothers Brothers, and Bill Dana. Networks shift shows around for all sorts of strategic reasonsthat are not always apparent to outsiders and that sometimes seem to havelittle logical support. 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