Lame/Cool Month Continues: Things can be so lame that they're cool, as explained by The Coolness Continuum.
I want to compare two things for a moment. Allow me to hold up, side-by-side, two different sitcoms for you to stare at in the harsh light of day/harsh light of your computer monitor/harsh light of your own cold reasoning:
On one side is Three's Company:
On the other side is Arrested Development, which I would love to show you a clip of but I can't because the makers of Arrested Development don't want you to watch their show; they will only allow you to see it on their own website and won't even let me put a clip up here even though putting a clip up here would benefit them because you would see it and then want to go to their website to watch more and maybe buy the DVDs, and they'd make money. So the makers of Arrested Development are very funny people but they are also shortsighted.
Still, even though you can only watch part of one of them, think about those two shows a minute. And don't tell me you're not familiar with either one of them. They are both landmark events in human history, both life-altering, society-changing, demographic-busting TV shows. Also, they are in reruns and what else have you got to do? You're not going to be one of those people who claims they don't watch TV, are you? Because if you claim you don't watch TV, you're lying or a jerk or both. Everyone watches TV except people who want to somehow proclaim they are better than those around them and believe that not watching TV makes them better than those around them.
I'm not sure when ignoring/downing something that everyone in the world agrees is a great thing became equated with being a better person, but somehow, it did. So everyone in the world agrees that TV is a good thing, except the sort of people I always get stuck talking to at dinner parties (which is why I don't go to dinner parties), and those people think that they are better because they disagree with 99.9999999% of society. And then the rest of us are supposed to feel as though we are inferior because we happen to find a technologically advanced invention that streams hundreds of options for entertainment right into our room to be a good thing?
So, like I said: Saying I don't watch TV = saying I am lying or = saying I am a jerk. Which means that you watch TV and you've seen Arrested Development or Three's Company.
The comparison I want to make is this: On Three's Company, the humor is broad. It stems mostly from Jack Tripper (huh!) falling over couches. (See why I said huh!?). The plots are simple and unadorned: Janet is getting bothered by a bossy woman at the flower shop so Jack must go down there and flirt with her. Simple, happy, bouncy -- like Depeche Mode when they first came out:
On Arrested Development, some thirty years later, the humor comes mostly from the possibility that blood-related characters are in love and someone might have committed treason. Also, there is a prostitute. Dark, complicated, strange -- like Depeche Mode when they decided to talk about Jesus:
I'm not saying one is better than the other. Wait, yes, I am: Arrested Development is better than Three's Company. But that's not my point. I bring up the comparison to point out how much TV has changed in order to point out why today's nominee, My Name Is Earl, is The Best TV Show That's So Lame It's Cool.
My Name Is Earl is the latest in an ever-growing line of TV shows that have worked their way into my psyche, a line of TV shows that began, not coincidentally, with Arrested Development. (Three's Company didn't have to work its way in; I held the door open for it.) There are shows that I saw the ads for, and declared -- much like I once did about the Internet, and Lemon Poppyseed Muffins-- that will never be a big thing and I will never like it. Then, one day, I 'accidentally' watch the show...
...accidentally meaning it was on and I couldn't reach the remote so I just sat there and watched it, unwittingly becoming a living demonstration of the type of behavior that will eventually result in humans being replaced by squirrels...
and liked it. Mostly, these were shows that did not demonstrate immediate appeal because their humor is subtle. Until you've actually watched Scott Baio replace Henry Winkler as the family lawyer, and heard him say that he's going to work on his blog, which is called "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog", you don't really get the humor.
I want to compare two things for a moment. Allow me to hold up, side-by-side, two different sitcoms for you to stare at in the harsh light of day/harsh light of your computer monitor/harsh light of your own cold reasoning:
On one side is Three's Company:
On the other side is Arrested Development, which I would love to show you a clip of but I can't because the makers of Arrested Development don't want you to watch their show; they will only allow you to see it on their own website and won't even let me put a clip up here even though putting a clip up here would benefit them because you would see it and then want to go to their website to watch more and maybe buy the DVDs, and they'd make money. So the makers of Arrested Development are very funny people but they are also shortsighted.
Still, even though you can only watch part of one of them, think about those two shows a minute. And don't tell me you're not familiar with either one of them. They are both landmark events in human history, both life-altering, society-changing, demographic-busting TV shows. Also, they are in reruns and what else have you got to do? You're not going to be one of those people who claims they don't watch TV, are you? Because if you claim you don't watch TV, you're lying or a jerk or both. Everyone watches TV except people who want to somehow proclaim they are better than those around them and believe that not watching TV makes them better than those around them.
I'm not sure when ignoring/downing something that everyone in the world agrees is a great thing became equated with being a better person, but somehow, it did. So everyone in the world agrees that TV is a good thing, except the sort of people I always get stuck talking to at dinner parties (which is why I don't go to dinner parties), and those people think that they are better because they disagree with 99.9999999% of society. And then the rest of us are supposed to feel as though we are inferior because we happen to find a technologically advanced invention that streams hundreds of options for entertainment right into our room to be a good thing?
So, like I said: Saying I don't watch TV = saying I am lying or = saying I am a jerk. Which means that you watch TV and you've seen Arrested Development or Three's Company.
The comparison I want to make is this: On Three's Company, the humor is broad. It stems mostly from Jack Tripper (huh!) falling over couches. (See why I said huh!?). The plots are simple and unadorned: Janet is getting bothered by a bossy woman at the flower shop so Jack must go down there and flirt with her. Simple, happy, bouncy -- like Depeche Mode when they first came out:
On Arrested Development, some thirty years later, the humor comes mostly from the possibility that blood-related characters are in love and someone might have committed treason. Also, there is a prostitute. Dark, complicated, strange -- like Depeche Mode when they decided to talk about Jesus:
I'm not saying one is better than the other. Wait, yes, I am: Arrested Development is better than Three's Company. But that's not my point. I bring up the comparison to point out how much TV has changed in order to point out why today's nominee, My Name Is Earl, is The Best TV Show That's So Lame It's Cool.
My Name Is Earl is the latest in an ever-growing line of TV shows that have worked their way into my psyche, a line of TV shows that began, not coincidentally, with Arrested Development. (Three's Company didn't have to work its way in; I held the door open for it.) There are shows that I saw the ads for, and declared -- much like I once did about the Internet, and Lemon Poppyseed Muffins-- that will never be a big thing and I will never like it. Then, one day, I 'accidentally' watch the show...
...accidentally meaning it was on and I couldn't reach the remote so I just sat there and watched it, unwittingly becoming a living demonstration of the type of behavior that will eventually result in humans being replaced by squirrels...
and liked it. Mostly, these were shows that did not demonstrate immediate appeal because their humor is subtle. Until you've actually watched Scott Baio replace Henry Winkler as the family lawyer, and heard him say that he's going to work on his blog, which is called "Bob Loblaw's Law Blog", you don't really get the humor.
In the case of My Name Is Earl, it was the opposite. I got the humor right away, or I thought I did, and I wanted no part of it-- or I thought I didn't. Because My Name Is Earl is a throwback, of sorts. It relies on physical humor and simple plotlines and making fun of the stars of the show in a way that makes you laugh at them and yet still think maybe they're not so bad after all.
Take the recent episode that led off after the writers' strike. 90% of the humor in that show revolved around [COMATOSE CHARACTER SPOILER ALERT] Earl being in a coma after having been hit by a car; while in a coma, Earl gets rolled around the city on a stretcher and people try to shock him back to life and he maybe has sex.
Now, that is not only a throwback, it's a throwback to a movie that has become synonymous with lame: Weekend At Bernie's. (I didn't need to spell that out for you, did I? You knew.) My Name Is Earl reached way down and came up with humor based on a maybe-dead guy rolling around town on a stretcher.
That also is not so far off from the plotline of the Three's Company episode where Jack faked amnesia because he didn't want to get in trouble for wrecking Janet's car while on a date. So My Name Is Earl resurrects physical comedy from the 60s and 70s and brings it into the Aughts, and does so while coupling it with jokes about dumb stuff, too. My Name Is Earl would not look out of place leading off NBC's Friday nights, providing a little fluff before "The Love Boat" gets all gooey.
That makes it lame, because pratfalls and bird calls and bad imitations, are lame. They're the stuff of vaudeville and Jerry Lewis and 70s TV shows about guys who pretend to be gay so that they can live in an apartment run by a guy with an unnatural attachment to his parakeet.
But what saves My Name Is Earl, what makes it cool again, is that they manage to combine that throwback humor with hip, up-to-the-minute comedy, like [SPOILER ALERT INVOLVING POSSIBLY-TASTY MEXICAN TREATS] having Earl eat a girl's churro while on a mission to rescue that stripper girl from Mexico
only to have the little girl explain in subtitles that she was not offering him a bite, she was merely showing him the churro because she was proud of it and only gets one per year -- and combine them both seamlessly-- seamlessly and without the ironic/indie/wink-and-nudge/if-I-hear-once-more-how-freaking-great-Diablo-Cody-is-I'll-throw-up type of seamless humor-bonding.You know what I'm talking about when I mention that other kind of ironic humor, the bad kind.
There was a time when people could have throwback humor and it was ironic and funny, like The Brady Bunch Movie. But that shtick got instantaneously old and tired when Ben Stiller tried it.
Then there was throwback humor like Will Ferrell's movie Frank The Tank Plays Basketball. That humor was never funny.
Then there's the 'humor' that consists of making up as many possible catchphrases as you can while creating a character that could, conceivably, say those things but could not, conceivably, exist, and that's largely what passes for 'humor' these days because a whole generation of kids was raised on the not-funny "SNL" and believes that if it's on TV or the Big Screen, it's worth watching, and therefore spend no time actually trying to write good stories or funny jokes or at least interesting pratfalls but instead simply makes a lot of "parodies" that aren't so much "parodies" as they are "merely mentioning the show/movie/celebrity and hoping you think it's funny."
My Name Is Earl doesn't go in for any of that. Instead, it just takes two great kinds of humor -- physical comedy about tripping and car accidents, and mental comedy about the rigors of working one's way up from the backroom to the showroom of an appliance store -- and just mashes them together like a big Reese's peanut butter cup (hey, you got your pratfalls in my ironic commentary! Well, you got your ironic commentary in my pratfalls... wait a minute...) and it works.
That Mexican rescue episode is a perfect example. In that one episode, Earl and Randy try to rescue Catalina, who has been deported, and while Randy must spend a day as an elderly couple's son because he ate a sandwich and so now has the son's spirit in him, Earl accidentally gets engaged to Cassandra and must fail the wedding tests, which involves him falling onto a log and other physical comedy.
Through it all, My Name Is Earl manages to reference old stuff without the references being mere hipster shorthand (like "Mr Roboto"-- watch the video at the end and you'll see) and manages to pull out old plotlines like the competition between salesmen without seeming to rip them off, and manages to do inside jokes that you have to watch closely to catch (like the t-shirts on the girl and the only-slightly-older woman, standing side by side, the girl wearing a "World's Best Mom" t-shirt and the only-slightly-older woman wearing "World's Best Grandma" T-shirt) and they manage to parody stuff like a "COPS" episode without it seeming weak. I'm not sure how they do it, but I think that the answer is that the people that write, act in, and produce My Name Is Earl aren't consciously trying to be hip or pull out references or parody things; they're just trying to write something they think is funny.
That, it seems, makes all the difference: the line separating Lame and Cool is one created by not trying too hard to be cool. Which, the moment you say it, you realize is true: you can't be cool if you're trying to be cool.
My Name Is Earl could have been remarkably lame; it could have been one big smug insult to poor people and hicks. It could have been one big ironic wink that was just an Ellen Page away from being overwhelming. It could have been an attempt to revive physical comedy that failed miserably. But it was none of those things: Instead, it managed to become a hybrid of old and new and make the new seem familiar and cozy while making the old seem hip and trendy, and in doing so managed to transcend its lameness and become cool without even trying.
What else is so lame it's cool?
Longitude.
The Atom.
Swing Music.
Charleston Chews.
"Bring It On"
State Fairs.
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