Luke Giordano is a comedian and television writer who has written for Two and a Half Men (briefly) and Nickelodeon's Marvin Marvin. He's alright.There’s a reason that stuff like painting and poetry and dance are always referred to as art and stuff like stand-up comedy and television are seldom called art, even though they are. Simply, people actually want to see stand-up comedy and will pay to see it. For instance, the advent of recorded music was sort of the death knell of mass consumption of poetry. Apart from certain circles and academia, modern poetry is not very widely read, so referring to it as art is a way to justify its existence in the face of public apathy.
This is not to say that poetry’s value to society has decreased in any way. Or that because more people enjoy stand-up comedy, it has greater value. Greater relevance, maybe. But that’s another argument. My point is that poetry seems to be put into a higher category than stand-up or television or movies or what-have-you just because of who appreciates it. The old high art versus pop art argument. Well, of course this is silly. It’s just a way for elitists to exclude the masses so they are the ones who get to decide what has real value and what doesn’t. I think all forms of art are equal in value. People don’t refer to stand-up as art mainly because you would sound like a complete douche, but also because you don’t have to. Its relevance is clear. But douchey or not, it’s a form of human expression through a medium or a tool or an aparatus. It’s art.
The perfect fart joke in the world is going to be equal in value as the perfect play. Because each of them are an unobtainable perfection, why is one better than the other just because it’s a play? Just because it’s generally accepted that one is lofty and the other is vulgar? It’s unfair to compare the two in the first place because they have different aims and methods, but I don’t think there is a single logical argument for why one is intrinsically better than the other. Or why evoking one feeling is superior to another feeling.
The perfect fart joke would be so funny that you would die from laughing at it. Your head would explode. The perfect play would cause any number of things, but mostly make you feel at one with the human experience, if I had to reduce the experience to one thing. But sharing in the human experience with others is what I think laughter does anyway. Their aims are different, and maybe what the play aims to accomplish is greater, but why not just try to appreciate perfection in all of its forms instead of arbitrarily deciding what gets to be true art and what doesn’t? I would say the perfect play and the perfect fart joke are equally as difficult to write.
The problem is that the people who get to decide what is high art — the intelligentsia, intellectuals, and elite as somebody has stupidly decided to call them — probably aren’t that much more intelligent than the average person. Just people with access to money and education. The privileged. Those who have the time and the ability and the access. People who have learned about and consumed more art, for sure, but only the art that has been generally decided that is worth knowing about. If the measure of a truly great piece of art is the the way it enriches the culture and each person, it’s hard to think of a sculpture, a painting, a poem, a symphony, or a post modern thing beyond description that has had more impact on the culture in the past fifty years than All in the Family did. It’s a show that legitimately engaged the public at large in a conversation on race in a time of great tension. I’m not saying this gives it higher value. I’m saying this gives it equal value.
A lot of high art wouldn’t survive without public funding, while popular art make up giant industries. I think that’s where a lot of the divide comes from. It must create some sort us versus them mentality. Any form of art that needs public funding deserves it and is worth saving. But the same argument exists even within television comedy. The most popular shows are for stupid people who like their jokes spoon-fed to them while all the smart shows for smart people get low ratings and get cancelled. I think it’s time to stop thinking on these terms all together. Most of the greatest TV comedies of all time were also the highest rated — Seinfeld, Cheers, I Love Lucy, the aforementioned All in the Family — it’s hard to think of many shows today at all that are as good as these were. I think it’s time to stop basing value upon how many or what kind of people something appeals to and just take everything at its own value.
The problem is you can’t just take everything at its own value. Its human nature to like something or not. The more you like it the more value you assign to it and that value is not fixed. And how we like come to like something isn’t always rational or logical. Wrong or right, family, friends and social status greatly influence what people like and don’t like and how much value they would assign to something.
I think the better of us seek to find value in art and art forms that we might not otherwise appreciate, but to suggest we “take everything at its own value” asks me to assign value you to it, and I will do that based on my experience. Some of it I will think is valuable and some of it I will think is shit.
And while yes, there is a segment of the population that props up dying art forms and looks down on others, many of the art forms were relevant in their day and I suspect they only wish to keep them alive, as dry and boring as people might find them today.
I Love Lucy, Cheers, All in the Family and Seinfeld are all 3-camera set-based sitcoms with a live audience. A dying art form for sure. But they stay in the public conscience because people still watched the reruns, the spin-offs bought the DVDs and passed around YouTube clips. My kids will like them because I will make them watch it and they will appreciate them because they are awesome. I don’t know if they will ever be considered high art, but I feel that is more so because they are comedies.
I feel like your broader argument is that Comedy never seems to have the same value placed on it as other forms of art. I agree, but I think there is a reason. Comedy among all the art forms is the most fleeting. It demands constant relevance and context. Take 2 tweets that are in theory equally funny. The one from today will be funnier than the one from yesterday. Comedy has always been a popular art form, but what we find funny changes very quickly. Not nearly as fast with music, drama, novels etc. Shakespeare’s comedies were popular, but I don’t think they are funny. Abbot and Costello, kinda funny, but not laugh out loud. Eddie Murpy’s Raw, used to be really funny to me, not so much now. Dick and fart jokes have more staying power because 1/2 of us have dicks and all of us fart.
TL;DR Shit is relevant. Comedy + Time = not funny.
You call multi-cams a dying artform, but if we looked merely at public consumption, it would look like single cams were the ones that were dying. They don’t seem that way because the single cams of today seem fresher and funnier than the current multi-cams. The multi-cams aren’t as lauded or as talked about. Probably justifiably. But if a truly great multi-cam were to come on the air today, things might change. Watch Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel — kids are still being raised on these types of shows, so while they may be dying, it looks to be a slow death.
I don’t know if I completely agree that comedy is fleeting. There is a lot of comedy that is very much of its time. But the same is true for a lot of drama. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is torture to watch nowadays, but was super impactful because of the climate it came out in. I think you’re right, this is a more typical problem of comedies. But a lot of Buster Keaton’s greatest films will still make most people laugh out loud even today. Because the situations are bigger, more universal. The General will age better than Raw, very much a product of the attitude of the 1980′s.
The larger point is that you should be able to look at each respective genre of art on its own terms. A show like The Wire as a creative accomplishment is not lesser than simply because of the medium used to express it.
Don’t disagree on your last point. I see your point about drama. I guess I really believe all art is fleeting, its just on a scale. I think overall dramas deal with things that are more central to the human experience in most anytime: life, death, love, betrayal, war, power, greed, struggle.
Good comedies can and do some of these things well also. I think the best comedies can deal with most any theme, but I don’t think its the norm.
Episodic TV adds another layer to the discussion since the high volume of content increases its chance at failure. Many great shows jump the shark or people simply tire of them because they don’t stay relevant. (The Simpsons, The Office)
There are popular multi cams out there. (Big Bang, Mike and Molly) I just don’t like most of them and I feel like I’ve just gotten tired of the format. They use the same plot devices and and writing styles over and over. I just prefer stuff like Modern Family, Arrested Development, even The Mindy Project. Its just not so played for the screen. Don’t get me wrong, live audience multi-cams were and probably still are some of the best TV ever made, but its just an outdated format.