I don’t mean that the joke just isn’t funny, I want to know a joke that almost makes you want to fast-forward through the scene.
I feel like the cursed inverse of this is The Orville, where they’re divorced and then drama and jokes about being divorced is half the show. It was in what I saw of season 1 anyway, it was so relentless I couldn’t stand another minute of it.
If you can stand a bit more, the show does become a lot more than what those first few episodes imply.
I think Married With Children has managed to come through unscathed because of Ed O’Neil and who he is as a person. He’s so much the opposite of Al Bundy and has always been very open about that. The show as a result falls into that same category as South Park or All in the Family; We understand that the jokes are meant to be satire via absurdity; It’s so over the top and the actor is so different in real life that we just get it.
Compare that to something like Home Improvement, where we know that the humour isn’t meant to be absurdist, and we know that Tim Allen really is a douche.
This is why I avoid watching all commercials in America which inevitably take this trope to the extreme every chance they get. Usually referring to the man who is a doddering incompetent who must be ordered out of his “man cave” to perform some sort of yard or mechanical chore to prove his worth.
Pretty much every segment of Jerry’s stand up routine in Seinfeld. I have no idea how that man became a famous comedian.
Because that shit was actually funny 35 to 40 years ago. It just didn’t age well.
Tastes change.
I don’t find Jerry funny, like at all. I like Costanza but I adore Kramer
Jerry was a straight guy in the show, is funny because he is not funny. He’s just a normal guy with a few good observations
He’s there to anchor the show
All tv shows named after the main character are better without that character (spin-offs excluded obvs).
Seinfeld
Dawsons creek
Rosanne
Ellen
Exception that proves the rule
Columbo
How rude they are to Jerry in Parks & Rec. Doing a rewatch of it now and wow it is way worse than I remembered, and starts way earlier. It’s not a flanderisation thing, there was a season 2 joke that made me have to pause and go online just to see how many other people felt the same way as me.
I find it funny because of the sheer absurdity of it. There’s absolutely no reason to dislike Jerry. He affable and unassuming, a good family man and just generally a good guy. Yet everyone inexplicably hates him, even Chris. It’s makes absolutely no sense and that disconnect is what makes it funny to me.
If they hated him for a reason it would be mean spirited. Instead, it’s just over the top silly and fits in with the humor of the show.
The bit where Leslie throws his painting in the lake is one of my favorite moments. It’s just so exorbitantly stupid that it makes me laugh.
Personally I don’t have as much of an issue with when they’re poking fun at him per se, but when they denegrate or damage things he has clearly worked hard on and put a lot of passion into, that’s crossing a line for me. It becomes incredibly mean-spirited.
There are two examples in this compilation video. One at the linked time, and another at 6:33. Especially with how happy he is to see Leslie in the second clip until she destroys his art. It’s honestly heart-breaking. The pie to the face that came a little bit before that was also hard to watch and really felt mean. Dunno if that’s because of how cold and calculated it was (vs the more usual off-the-cuff comments), or because it was a physical act rather than verbal, or something else. But I didn’t like it.
It’s the opposite of the Lil’ Sebastian thing, where there’s that horse that everyone idolizes for no discernible reason. Although with that, there’s the one character who doesn’t understand why they do that, so maybe that’s what the Jerry thing needed? Or perhaps that would have made it even sadder lol.
“no discernible reason”!? I would murder everyone in this room to bring Lil Sebastian back for 5 minutes.
I think it works there because it’s just Michael Scott that despises him, everyone else sees him as fairly normal from what I recall.
Watching Parks & Rec for the first time, and I also noticed this. IMO it’s missing something, maybe if only one of the characters acted that way towards him or something it would be better. He’s pretty much Meg from Family Guy, and I never really cared for that dynamic either.
It will be legen… wait for it… dary!
I couldn’t agree more. The idea seemed to have been “Hey, lets take a joke that was just luke warm at best to begin with, and then over use it in an attempt to wring every single spec of amusement out of it until our audience gets physically sick when they hear it”
Still a fun show though!
It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.
If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.
Sometimes that can happen with a joke - like it’s kind of mid when you first tell it, then you keep pushing it and everyone hates it, then at a certain point something breaks and it becomes the funniest thing ever for some inexplicable reason. Not saying that’s what happened with with this joke necessarily, but it is possible! Old Family Guy used to do it quite well sometimes I think.
I hate how in Disney family sitcoms as well as some cartoons, there’s always the stock dumb kid that gives the majority of the humor, and it’s humor that gets old.
The example I think that got me to dislike the trope was in Austin and Ally. The character Desmond was eating a muffin with the muffin wrapper on, and one of the characters mentioned you “have to remove the wrapper before eating it”, so he removes the wrapper and throws the muffin away and starts eating the wrapper because that’s how he interpreted their advice. And I’m thinking has there ever been a teenager who didn’t have some instinct on how to eat a muffin.
I grow tired of how all the Pixar style movies use the same facial visual gags. They’re all kinda samey.