Male Regression as Comedic Impulse
Here is one thing that has snapped into focus while watching season three of The Office (American version) on DVD: either out of laziness or out of looking for lowest-common-denominator laughs, writers predicate very much comedy on grown men acting like 13- or 15-year-old boys. I do like The Office, but as the series goes on Steve Carell spends more and more time acting like a petulent child; meanwhile, Dwight (it seems that I call Michael "Steve Carell" but Dwight "Dwight") gradually resolves into this nerdy middle-teenage-years type similar to Napoleon Dynamite, nunchuck skills and all.
Throw into this basically every Will Ferrell movie (notably "Anchorman," which, to be perfectly clear, I found hilarious), of course Napoleon Dynamite, and some slightly more trivial examples (the cops in "Superbad," possibly Owen Wilson in "Bottle Rocket," though that's a more refined character) and you've got more than enough to constitute a pattern.
Is this writer-driven, or audience-driven? Are all our current writers former teenage nerds and tend to fall back on this as a default, or do audiences demand it? Is this regression a specifically male phenomenon? (It's hard to tell when most of your comedy is produced by males.) Will we ever return to a time when your male comedy role models are portraying mature, grown-up types, such as, I don't know, Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters"?
I don't really care; I'm just killing time by writing this.
Throw into this basically every Will Ferrell movie (notably "Anchorman," which, to be perfectly clear, I found hilarious), of course Napoleon Dynamite, and some slightly more trivial examples (the cops in "Superbad," possibly Owen Wilson in "Bottle Rocket," though that's a more refined character) and you've got more than enough to constitute a pattern.
Is this writer-driven, or audience-driven? Are all our current writers former teenage nerds and tend to fall back on this as a default, or do audiences demand it? Is this regression a specifically male phenomenon? (It's hard to tell when most of your comedy is produced by males.) Will we ever return to a time when your male comedy role models are portraying mature, grown-up types, such as, I don't know, Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters"?
I don't really care; I'm just killing time by writing this.
3 Comments:
Funny, I usually refer to Dwight as "Rainn Wilson". I can't say I have any consistent actor vs. character nomenclature.
I'd respond in kind but I'd probably just disgorge several huge paragraphs about the show but I should return to the vital business of putting things I still own into cardboard boxes.
My own quick rule-of-thumb in regards to the steady broadening of The [American] Office's humor is: For the most part, when the action of the show stays entirely within the office itself the humor doesn't get too cartoonish.
Also, they keep glamming up Pam (especially in the present strike-curtailed fourth season) but that's a complaint for another day.
I don't know about your rule of thumb; my favorite episode is the Booze Cruise one, and that's mostly outside the office.
They do keep glamming up Pam. I feel manipulated, like some focus group determined the show would be more popular if it was impossible for you, the viewer, not to develop a crush on Pam.
This post is interesting to me, even though I've barely watched either the original British or the current American "Office," suddenly, today, because I was at a social gathering (a "hang," if you will) last night, where several people were discussing how the American Office was really just hitting it's stride after wasting it's first season trying to emulate the British version and developing it's own comic sensibility in the second. I was tempted to offer a paraphrase of Jack's argument, but opted not to since I don't actually know anything about the show. Also, earlier in the evening, I had already committed the party foul of mentioning to a group of people that were talking about the movie "American Beauty" how much I hate that movie when they, in fact, were talking about how much they loved it and considered it to be one of their favorite movies. I had misheard what they were saying, and thought that I was joining a conversation about how terrible it was, so it was quite a shock to find myself, in fact, antagonizing the entire conversation. Oops! (I mumbled something about all the female characters being accesories and tried to slink away. (Though slinking was impossible, as this particular interaction happened in a car on the way to the hang - a classic front seat-to-back seat miscommunication/confrontation.)
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