[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 four comic
shows from which we can learn a great deal about our society and culture.
1)
Key & Peele
(2012-2015): During its five seasons and fifty-three episodes, Keegan-Michael
Key and Jordan Peele’s Comedy Central sketch comedy series was more than just
consistently hilarious; it offered some of the most biting and insightful
reflections on race in
America that I’ve ever seen (in any genre or medium). (By all reports, Peele’s
new horror film Get Out manages the
same impressive balance of entertainment and social commentary within that
genre.) If I were to suggest any one cultural work to represent race in America
in the age of Trayvon and Obama, it would have to be Key & Peele; a viewer could dive into almost any episode and
come away with a better understanding of the lightest and darkest of both this crucial
issue and our national community.
2)
Inside Amy Schumer
(2013- ). I would say many of the same things about Amy Schumer’s Comedy
Central sketch comedy show, which has aired four seasons and has a fifth coming
at some point in the future; only her show focuses its social satirical lens most
consistently on issues of gender and sex. Schumer is particularly adept at
utilizing parody in the best ways about which I wrote in yesterday’s post: see
this Friday Night Lights sketch on football and rape culture;
or this clip from her
transcendent, episode-long parody of Twelve
Angry Men. But her entirely original sketches are just as biting, as illustrated
by this one on female
celebrities experiencing their “last fuckable day.” Between the two of them, Key & Peele and Inside Amy Schumer could comprise the entire syllabus for a course
on 21st century America and you wouldn’t run out of things to talk
about.
3)
Last Week Tonight
(2014- ): The Daily Show veteran John
Oliver’s weekly news satire show on HBO is an entirely different animal, not
only from sketch comedy shows like those but even from The Daily Show and its ilk. What Oliver does best—and, perhaps,
what only Oliver does—is produce in-depth segments, usually running in the ballpark
of twenty minutes, that examine a complex issue at great length, featuring a
mixture of humor, investigative reporting, and impassioned arguments and
activism. If you haven’t seen any, I don’t think you can go wrong, but I would
recommend in particular this
one on the death penalty, this one on
prisons, this
one on refugees, and this one on
online harassment of women. Like many folks, I used to say that The Daily Show offered more accurate
news than most of the news media; that might well still be true, but I don’t
think any current show offers better reporting on vital American issues than Last Week Tonight.
4)
Full
Frontal (2016- ): Another Daily
Show vet, Samantha Bee’s weekly news satire show is the newest of this
batch (it debuted just over a year ago), but has already impressed me (and
everybody else I’ve ever talked to about it) with its blend of reporting and
humor (a la Oliver’s show) mixed with Bee’s unique, fiery, and never less than
compelling voice and perspective. Once again, I don’t think you can go wrong
with any clip, but this
one—Bee’s response to Donald Trump’s Access
Hollywood tape scandal from last October—is a particular favorite and
exemplifies all those qualities that have made this show much-watch television so
quickly. As I wrote in this
post on the media and the 2016 election (written in the halcyon days before
that election actually transpired), to my mind the majority of the best
coverage of that campaign came from the Olivers and Bees of the media world. That’s
partly a disturbing reflection of the state of other parts of the news media,
to be sure; but it’s also partly an illustration of just how vital these kinds
of social satirical voices have become in our society and culture.
March Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other TV comedies you’d highlight?
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