Yesterday, while I my girlfriend and I were hanging out with a friend of ours, the TV was tuned to an old staple of Network Television, "Full House."
I remember watching this show when I was a kid and thinking how stupid it was. But a show's lack of believable plot, less than cheesy voiceover and shooting locations doesn't keep a cable television network from rolling out reruns in one hour blocks.
I was reminded of one of my many rules of life, cultivated over many years of television mind captivity. TV shows that have to add a laugh track to tell you when a moment is funny really aren't that funny (every rule has exceptions, this one's is M*A*S*H*).
If you don't believe me then I'll pull out some anecdotal evidence andl use it as if it were scientific fact.
Just think back to a time when you had a few friends. Let's say for sake of our story that you and these "friends" of yours went out to a movie. Now the movie is kind of cheesy, but has a full audience. Jokes that normally you would smile at become laugh out loud funny when a group of people around you is laughing. All it takes is one person to start the laugh avalanche. I call this the Principle of Laugh Crescendo.
Now, what a standard network sitcom does is artificially inducing the PLC by means of laughter planted in the show's soundtrack. They've been using that same laughtrack since "I Love Lucy" in the 1950s the people you heard laughing on Friends, and still hear laughing on Dharma&Greg, are at least 77 years old. Either that or they're dead, and with the age expectancy at about 72 in this country I'm betting on dead.
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3 comments:
You know, even though I watched Full House and Family Matters and all that bullshit when I was a kid, I always remember thinking something along the lines of "I like this, but the story and dialogue is really poor and the jokes aren't very funny."
On the other hand, I'm proud to say I never watched Saved by the Bell, a complete piece of shit that sends shivers down my spine when people talk about how great it was. Give me a fucking break. Speaking of crappy old shows, I really don't want to see Transformers.
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