There are a few young men and women who think they've uncovered the key to comedy. These earnest little worker bees, most of whom reside in Los Angeles County, are absolutely certain that to make people laugh one need only have a character fall down or spit out a beverage spontaneously upon hearing some shocking news.
My evidence for this?
Try counting the prat falls and spit takes in the next trailer you see for an upcoming Hollywood comedy. You'll be astonished as you exceed the capacity of your two hands and continue counting on your toes.
I'm not sure why this is, but it seems that several of these tinkerers (can they really be called writers?) have never seen (or never really paid attention to) the work of Buster Keaton, to name just one. Keaton was a master of slapstick but anyone who thinks that his laughs were earned simply by falling on his ass, ought to take a closer look. Invariably, true slapstick comedy is borne out of a careful melding of character, plot and suspense, in which the audience is encouraged to predict (often incorrectly) the next physical disaster in a chain of seemingly unpredictable but hilariously unified events.
What we often see today however strikes me as either hopelessly unimaginative or, worse, just plain lazy. A closet door is opened to send a cascade of boxes onto a character's head. Full stop. End of bit. Time to move on. In a classic bit of slapstick, such a stunt would be the beginning of an endlessly evolving and wonderfully stupefying series of mishaps. But today, one character tells another something shocking (e.g.Person A is having sex with more than 2 people! Shocking!) and invariably liquid will be spilled, usually spit far and wide from the unsuspecting lips of the listener.
Has anyone ever really seen a spit take occur in real life? I haven't. I have seen people desperately purse their lips with a mouthful of liquid while laughing and trying not to choke. But I've never seen someone actually just let rip with a torrent of their beverage all over a kitchen table. Maybe I'm just not traveling in the right circles.
I'm concerned that the new vocabulary of short-hand (or half-baked) comedy is passing for real comedy with greater and greater success. I suspect that part of this can be explained by the fact that the new generation of audiences have been raised on television, where recycling is both a science and an art.
That's why, when a real comedy comes along, one that actually earns its laughs the old-fashioned way, through the hard work of character and plot, I desperately want to see it succeed. Call me a dreamer, but I still believe that when audiences are exposed to quality, they grow to demand it.
But if they're never offered anything more than someone slipping and falling or being caught in their underwear, they'll learn to chuckle at nothing and settle for less.
And that makes me angry enough to spit.
