FUNNY STUFF?
I've seen a good many pratfalls in my time; taken a few myself, and I can't seem to get myself into a mood which automatically thinks of all of them as being funny. Dumb? Yes. Embarrassing? Yes. Painful? Sometimes, and they can also be dangerous. I fail to see any of them as being “funny”and yet producers of TV family-type fun shows see to think everyone sees a bad tumbles as the main in ingredient of funny bone stuff.
So many of these potential side-splitter gags are supposed to be videotapes which the sender – en en entirely by chance - “happened to catch on film”. The featured falls are made to appear to have been accidental but you don't have to be a film critic or an award winning cinematographer to realize they are produced, premeditated and some faked.
I suppose some viewer think anything that seems to happening to someone else might think of it as being funny. These sudden falls are crude and violate the usual purist rules about mistreating men,women, children and animals. I am supposed to think it is funny when a little girl falls a throne, six-foot bush. A kitten falling all over itself in an automatic driver is not high on my fun card. You can see why pratfalls by old people -long, slithering slides before they hit the icy pavement, would not inspire laughter in me and other older viewers.
The viewer contributed video shows are, perhaps, the main offenders. I hate to see some really decent emcee talent being cheapened and killed by such mundane burlesque humor. On such host called his routine a “crotch and cleavage ” series. Every time you see him usher his kids into the back yard with baseball bats in hand you know what is going to be featured for the next five minutes. It will all fade away when either a well-aimed ball or a flying bat hits pop – and we take impromptu and painful leave of the sports milieu as Dad bends over in agony and a commercial begins to brings us temporary relief.
There is a positive side at times, when something really funny creeps into the shows format and those, as a rule, strike me as being more genuine. It is difficult to set up enough cameras to catch all possible angles, and then to sit there and try to think of something funny to film. Humor seldom works that way.
Fortunately, some genuine humor creeps into the format now and then, which, perhaps, saves the shows when renewal time comes due. They make profitable re-run and cable packages, and the payment for such material high which that the commercial success of the original series must have been substantial They can be useful, too, in the sense that if you can look at them and you find yourself laughing at situations which are not at all funny - then you might consider ...well, think about some changes.
You don't want your entire life to be one of “tune in next week for more of the same.”
A.L.M. December 2, 2004 [c527wds]
