Tragedy is when I get a paper cut on my little finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
-Mel Brooks
There is some commercial on TV that has a clip from an episode of The Three Stooges in which Moe clocks Curly in the head with an enormous pipe wrench. For those of you too young to be familiar with that old show, it was not about sado-masochism, it was supposed to be a comedy. Eye-gouging was a big laugh-getter back in those days. Back in the good old days, comedy was directly proportional to the size of the object you broke over somebody’s head. It was much funnier to smash someone’s head with a sledge hammer than with a small vase. As a comedy writer I long for those simpler times, those halcyon days of comedy where a piano dropping on an innocent bystander’s head was enough to bring the house down.
Lots of comedy shows back in my youth were so appallingly violent that Spanish Inquisition torturers would probably flinch at their content. I wonder if I somehow damaged my psyche by sitting through countless hours of this horrific brutality. It’s not that I really liked watching trash like The Three Stooges or Tom & Jerry cartoons as a kid but it sure beat learning Mozart sonatas on the piano. Besides, we didn’t even have a piano. If we did have a piano my brothers and I probably shoved it out a third storey window on one of the neighbor kids. Sure, life was violent back then, but man, did we have some major laughs.
The Simpsons has taken the violence of yesteryear to outrageously absurd lengths in its cartoon parody, The Itchy and Scratchy Show. Unspeakable acts of torture are committed, all in the name of humor. I guess all this falls under the old adage, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets shot in the head repeatedly with a nail gun, and then it’s hysterical.”
But why does comedy have to stoop to such incredible lows of pain and suffering? Not all comedy writers take the low road to laughs. The New Yorker magazine has a cartoonist who contributes quite frequently and who never resorts to violence. I can’t ever read his/her signature but his/her drawings are almost always of a bunch of rich white people standing around at cocktail parties. In one cartoon the caption reads: It’s a ‘warts and all’ biography with some really great warts. I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that this cartoon desperately needs some sort of violence to bring out the humor. You are thinking that maybe the pilot light goes out in the $6,000 custom-made Wolf range in the kitchen and then one of the party goers lights up a Cuban cigar and KABOOM. Deadly shards of champagne glass and oyster forks create a carnage so horrific that only a careful examination of dental records allows loved ones to identify the victims. (Please allow me to regain my composure after my fit of giggles just thinking about all those rich people tragically struck down by a gas explosion).
In all seriousness I think it is high time America and I “grow up” when it comes to comedy. I'll admit that I'm not proud of work I've done in the past. The eye-gouging, the hammers to the head, the killings, all for a few cheap laughs, these all have got to stop. I mean, what kind of society are we living in if the comedic content of a New Yorker cartoon is vastly improved by an explosion that completely destroys a 5,000 square foot upper Westside apartment? Things need to change and I vow to change things here at Leftbanker right here and now. I refuse to use human or animal suffering to bolster a punch line. I vow to write humor as inoffensive as those New Yorker cartoons.
This is really, really hard for me so can you give me a few minutes?
