The Value of Cheap Comedy

Since I didn't post one yesterday, I thought I would double up today. And as it turns out, a discussion took place today between me and my housemates that got me thinking.

I watched a recent sketch from Saturday Night Live. Let it be known, I do not particularly care for the current generation of Saturday Night Live. Now, SNL has not always been known as the most intelligent of comic styles (the exceptions tend to be George Bush, Sarah Palin, Celebrity Jeopardy, Wild and Crazy Guys, and the occasional Weekend Update), but one thing was for certain in those cases, as well as overall in the early years of the show up to the early to mid-90's: THEY WERE CONSISTENTLY FUNNY. They made people laugh. Sure, the Chippendale's sketch with the late great duo of Chris Farley and Patrick Swayze was a pretty cheap sketch based on sheer bodily contrast... but it was HILARIOUS!

By contrast, SNL today, overall, is simply not funny. Their characters are weakly drawn and written even worse... even the memorable ones that keep recurring rely on the actors being funnier than the material they are given (Penelope comes to mind). Barring some pretty excellent Digital Shorts, SNL has fallen quite far from grace, failing to do the one thing that they could be counted on to do: make people laugh.

Well, this sketch was about a group of Irish immigrants on a boat arriving in America. One of these immigrants was played by Justin Timberlake, and the character was his great-grandfather. The whole sketch from that point forward was a very self-aware "analysis" and parody of Justin Timberlake's own career, including a pretty edgy Britney Spears reference (!!!!!!) and a great walk on from Andy Samberg (and with it a Jew joke that gets at the heart of my relationship with Alex Huntsberger).

This was in many ways a typical, simple, and straightforward sketch. No real frills, nothing particularly intellectual (outside the realm of pop-culture references). But I laughed. We all just laughed. It was FUNNY. This felt so refreshing given the fact that the same day, I watched several other sketched from the past two or three episodes that I just could not laugh at. And here was one that fulfilled the basic human need for laughter. It didn't try to do anything more than accomplish that, and there is a certain nobility in that. And it succeeded.


Here was where the discussion that took place tonight got interesting. What makes comedy "good"? One can value comedy that is smart, has something satirical to say, maintains an intellectualism amid the silliness (most notably, Monty Python comes to mind). But at the same time, I would make the argument that there is real value in comedy that does not purport to do anything but make us laugh. It can be simple, complex, cheap, smart, it doesn't really matter. Comedy's most basic function is to elicit laughter from an audience. Certain comedians or shows can attempt to do more than just that, and that can lead to GREAT comedy - comedy that both makes us laugh and makes us think. However, this is not necessarily an essential feature of "good" comedy. Personally, the Immigrant sketch made me laugh out loud. I believe that qualifies it as "good comedy". Maybe not great, influential, and lasting comedy. But GOOD, nonetheless.

As we, artists in the realm of entertainment, get bogged down by the nature and purposes and meaning of our art, one must be able to take a step back, let go of the need for "intelligence" and relish the power we have to simply make an audience laugh. There is incredible restorative power in this action, for both sides. This sort of comedy being "cheap", then, doesn't really matter. The laughs do.