Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Assignment 6: History of Television Comedy

Browse through the History of Comedy articles on PBS. Please comment on how you think comedy has evolved from its historical backgrounds to modern television.
Posted by at

4 comments:

  1. BertezBertezApril 4, 2009 at 5:34 PM

    there may be a bias here as satire has a very short self life but i feel that satire has really come in to it's own recently. I would imagine this is because with the rise of television we got more aquanited with our world event and learned more about them good and bad. This means that worlds events lost their aura of grandeur and scale and gained an aura of ridicules-ness that paved the way for good satire

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownApril 5, 2009 at 9:14 AM

    hmm interesting point. You don't think that Satire could have become more popular due to increased cynicism in our modern time?

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownApril 5, 2009 at 9:37 AM

    Also, I liked the debate at the end of the television article about censorship in comedy when it comes to cable. I'm all for freedom of speech in regards to comedy, and I would never advocate for the FCC to regulate cable, but I do understand the argument that once you start dropping 'F bombs' there isn't much farther you can go. I saw the South Park where they said shit 162 times, and it definitely lost it's impact by shit number 161. (on a side note though, that was sorta the 'moral' of that episode, that people should reserve curse words for really exceptional times or else it looses it's impact.) But I don't think that this means comedy should be censored. Its just a matter of taste and skill. This is one of the reasons I don't like comedians like Sarah Silverman, who rely solely the concept that if you expect someone to say one thing and they say something vulgar instead it's funny.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AdamApril 5, 2009 at 6:25 PM

    Ben, why do you think satire has a short shelf life? I've seen political cartoons from centuries ago that communicate their point (seemingly) just as effectively as they did hundreds of years ago. It seems like satire can function just as it was intended to at any time as long as you know its social context.

    That said, I haven't seen enough comedy from this era to know its relative prevalence. If you're talking about the rise of faux-news satire like the Daily Show, then yes, it does seem like the Internet and the rise of high-speed information have facilitated our understanding of national and global events to the point where we're all familiar enough with the headlines to poke fun at them on a daily basis.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)