[For this year’s
April
Fool’s series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of recent comic TV
shows. Share your thoughts on these or other televised
foolishness, present or past, in comments!]
On two
characters who walk that fine line between humor and offensiveness.
When I wrote this
post a couple years back, critiquing the very popular (and very funny)
sitcom Friends for a few of its less
admirable elements, I didn’t quite acknowledge the inescapable fact of
situation comedy that would certainly provide an important context for any such
critiques: that sitcoms, with few if any notable exceptions, rely on
exaggeration and (to at least a degree) stereotypes for many of their laughs. I
don’t know exactly what proportion of audience laughs to televised minutes is
necessary to make a sitcom successful and keep it on the air, but I think the
number is decently high; there’s a reason why so many sitcoms have used
the laugh track to try to emphasize those many moments for desired audience
response, after all. And to get those laughs quickly and consistently, more subtle
or sophisticated humor (which many
sitcoms have certainly featured) has to be balanced with exaggeration,
slapstick, punchlines, and other kinds of humor that aren’t necessarily realistic
(could anyone really stand to be friends with someone making as many sarcastic
jokes a minute as Chandler
Bing?) but that can get and keep an audience laughing.
One problem with
humor based on exaggeration and stereotypes, though, is that it’s always
perilously close to offensive (as, I argued there, were the
anti-intellectualism and homophobia in Friends).
Perhaps no current sitcom has demonstrated that challenge more fully than Tina Fey and Robert
Carlock’s Netflix series Unbreakable
Kimmy Schmidt, which chronicles the life of a 29 year old woman who
escapes from 15 years in a doomsday cult and tries to navigate 21st
century life and New York City with the mindset and experiences of a 14 year
old. Kimmy herself, played pitch-perfectly by Ellie Kemper, is too innocent and
naïve to be offensive; but the show’s two most prominent supporting characters
are a different story. There’s Titus Andromedon (Tituss Burgess),
a struggling actor who is so flamboyantly gay that he makes Jack from Will & Grace look like a wallflower
by comparison. And there’s Jacqueline
Voorhees (Jane Krakowski), an elite Manhattan socialite who, we gradually learn,
is actually of Native American heritage but passing for white. The identities
of both characters are frequently played for laughs (at least in the first
season; I haven’t had a chance to watch the second yet and welcome any
responses in comments as always!), with Krakowski’s identity and struggles being
the most potentially troubling as the actress herself is not Native American.
I can’t say for
sure whether these characters and performances are or would be offensive to
you, fellow AmericanStudier, and that’s of course part of what makes this
question so tricky: humor is very much in the funny bone of the beholder, and
what’s on the funny side of the line to me might well be on the offensive side
to you (and vice versa). Similarly, I can’t speak for either a gay or a Native
American audience member, and certainly believe that the perspectives of
different communities need to be heard and engaged with when it comes to
cultural representations of them. But at the same time, sitcoms can and should represent
characters with different sexualities, racial and ethnic heritages, and all
other aspects of identity; and as long as they also need to utilize
exaggeration and stereotypes for at least some of their laughs, then their work
with those and all characters is going to continue to occupy an uneasy space on
that fine line. I suppose all we can really ask is that those most exaggerated
qualities are balanced by some humanity, by a sense that these are extreme
versions of real people (rather than pure stereotypes, as the worst kinds of
sitcom characters have often been). And thanks to the talents of their
respective actors, both Titus and Jacqueline do achieve those vital moments of
humanity in the course of Kimmy’s
first season.
Next TV fooling
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other TV comedies you’d highlight?
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