It’s the sheer laziness and cynical nature of US comedies which sucks - develop a formula and keep shitting out episodes until there are enough for syndication. That’s it. The actual show itself is just 20 minutes of meaningless, throwaway nothing with some jokes.
Me with American Dad et al. They’re just soul-crushingly mean-spirited.
I mean if you understand that they’re satire, then they can be funny.
That being said American dad past season 9 and Family Guy past season 7 have severely declined in quality to the point where they’re not funny to me anymore.
I’ve noticed that with Family Guy in particular, the writers of that really have it in for women.
Friends is a funny show. But I’ll say that after season 5, it got progressively less and less funny.
Idk why you’re being downvoted, you’re right. The shows first few seasons were great because the humor felt original and the chemistry between the characters felt organic.
I felt like all of the characters declined. Chandler’s sarcasm became more and more forced. Ross getting divorced again and again got repetitive, I also didn’t like how they handled him having a kid. Joey’s character was lobotomized and he went from being a funny womanizer to being a child in an adult’s body. The girls stayed more consistent, but I felt like Phoebe’s shtick kind of wore off and became annoying. I also hate the ending.
I think the first half of friends is one of the best sitcom products that American TV has produced, but the second half is just mediocre.
My face when someone asks if I have watched Game Of Thrones (which hearing about it is the extend of the knowledge I have).
I’m not a fantasy person, but I had a gf who was a HUGE GoT fan. She whined enough to the point I watched it with her.
I still don’t like it.
I like tits and peter dinklage. It checked some boxes for me.
Imagine if Peter Dinklage got implants. You’d be in heaven.
Same experience here, my wife was obsessed with it and badgered me mercilessly until I finally sat down and watched… I lasted about 5 minutes before I welped and slapped both my thighs as I got up to play games
It’s not for everybody and it’s certainly not nuanced or pointed humor at all, but it’s funny and it holds up.
Some episodes have aged excellently. That one where Phoebe dates a cop, who is definitely giving off white supremacist vibes, and Chandler is going around at every opportunity reminding everyone in absolute terror: “he has a gun!”
I disagree. I grew up watching reruns and I liked it. Recently I tried watching it, and the jokes did not hold up. I’d argue that Seinfeld and Fraiser held up better. But to each their own.
To me the issue with Seinfeld is Seinfeld himself. He’s just a very bad actor and he sticks out like a sore thumb with the other characters. Watching his deadpan face in every episode kills the mood for me.
pointed humor
Nipples did augment the jokes.
Me watching any sitcom
I think sitcoms that don’t rely on laughing tracks (Scrubs, Malcolm, Better Off Ted, etc.) are genuinely funny. Else it’s give lor take. I found HIMYM really funny but not Friends.
Rewatching Malcolm in the middle right now and shit is hilarious
Hal’s roller skating dance routine for Malcolm lives rent-free in my head.
I like the episode where Dewey is addicted to cigarettes and Hal relapses on coffee because of it
Dewey smoking 2 packs a day lol
I was subjected to an endless barrage of Full House reruns… My sister was obsessed. Oh god… Oh… Just oh god.
Maybe it’s just nostalgia talking but I feel the Inbetweeners and Fresh Meat still hold up. The former one especially, if anyone wants to know what it was like growing up as a British teen in the '00s it’s basically 100% accurate.
With background laugh
Me with Big Bang Theory.
I genuinely don’t understand why anyone likes it. Every moment is pure torture to me. Humor is subjective, sure. But I just don’t get it.
… Bazinga! Ridiculously loud laughing ensues
I don’t know about others, but I can tell you the main reason why I like it.
I’ve had to work with not one, but two guys who were exactly like Sheldon Cooper from the show, in terms of intelligence and character. They also quite looked like him. That was in different cities and different jobs. Both were absolutely self-righteous and 100% full of themselves. One of them seemed to think of himself as second only to God himself. It was brutal.
So, watching the series provided me with a lot of comic relief.Anything with a laugh track in it is poison to my mind.
Then you should like friends. They played to live audience.
That’s why I miss shows with a live studio audience. It always made it a little more enjoyable when lines hit so well the audience is laughing so much the actor is clearly pausing a little longer than they thought or stuttering a bit so they can have a clear moment to say their lines
You remove the laugh track and it turns out it’s all verbal abuse.
The tv show “Kevin can F**k himself” makes fun of this exact thing. Highly recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJB6VQ0his4
This show was really well done. I wish it went in a slightly different direction, but I enjoyed it. It was a very unique take on the sitcom.
It’s such a great show
But damn it’s painful to watch
I couldn’t stand watching it because of that. The jokes themselves were passable.
What, you don’t think it’s peak comedy when the joke is “this guy isn’t white”?
To embed the picture it should be like this:
Me with Seinfeld.
I was gonna say, I’m not judging people who like Friends, because I like Seinfeld…
why would you compare the two? seinfeld is actually funny because it’s universal social observation. it’s a streetwise comedy of manners like curb your enthusiasm.
we’ve all been george when he leaves a dumb message on an answering machine and then stresses over it; we’ve all had touchy friends or acquaintances who cut ties for some petty reason. it’s often exaggerated, but it’s human and relatable.
i wouldn’t just question the taste of someone who doesn’t like seinfeld but i’d question how much awareness they have about everything going on around them.
some jokey sitcoms still hit–frasier and golden girls are witty. but most aren’t funny anymore and they weren’t all that funny in their day.
the liquid hearty meal will not be given to you
Honestly, I love friends, but I would never recommend it to younger audiences.
Humour is a very personal choice, and like colors, not everything being fun for the same people. On top of that, A TON of today’s humour descends from friends, so the jokes feel dated and simple, but they were the literal origin of many tropes, at the time it was perfection, like a chewing gum.
And most importantly, nowadays people (specially chronically online people) can’t just sit back and relax, they are always being judgemental little pricks to feel superior to everyone else, while not even trying to contextualise the time when what they are seeing was made.
Not to mention how sad it is that all the media, no matter the genre, have to pass their stupid moral compass (whether the progressive one or the conservative one). The whole sit back, relax and have a laugh is lost to them.
Is a very sad reality of hyper judgement they lived in, probably fueled by the cancer that is social media. I’m sad for them, they keep chasing the internet points thinking it will make them happy somehow, they don’t just watch something, they keep filling the checklist to then “have something to say”.
I’m so happy the internet was not a thing when I was growing up, what a brain worm I dodged, just in time to enjoy it as an adult as well. I’m really sorry for the young people today.
People today really do lack basic critical thinking to the point where it’s not just concerning, but could outright explain the decline of our society. I think it should be common sense to consume media while being mindful of its era and audience as well as being able separate the art from the artists. I think it’s ridiculous that there are people who are attacking actors for playing an outdated joke on a show 30 years ago. Like how fragile and miserable do you have to be to get that riled up while trying to watch entertainment to relax.
If I can’t comment on, upvote, downvote, report, share, like and subscribe to and article or piece of art, then what’s the point of me experiencing it at all?
The emotions that it makes you feel are yours, they’re valid on their own even if you don’t share them with the world.
Very interesting take I never thought about that at all. What about just what you consider “good” or “bad”? You think it’s better to watch whatever is in front of you/ available and have no criticism for it ? I’m most critical of media I enjoy most but not in a judgement social media way you are picturing
as always there is nuanced to everything, if I see a comedy or horror I’m not going to hold it to the same standards as a drama that is trying to convey a message, there will be a limit if it goes against my values in a crazy way, and I’ll stop watching it, but my main mentality is not there, I don’t watch it from a “defensive” position, so my alarms don’t go off as easily as other people’s, and I assume more good intent by default, which allows me to enjoy more of them, even if they “make fun” of my way of thinking or morals.
Being able to laugh about yourself or your beliefs without thinking you are “helping the other side win” in some kind of imaginary online culture war is quite healthy actually.
I was talking about objectivity and whether media is good in a sense of writing, execution and delivery. I will always give something the benefit of the doubt like you said, give something a try because you obviously never seen it. But why watch something that is clearly low effort and poorly thought out or planned? All that seems like an attention/ cash grab especially ones that try to appeal to a specific moral audience while disregarding any other viewers. My example is any show aimed at a straight white male that is very obviously disregarding any possible other viewer I consider poor writing and not well thought out.
My example is any show aimed at a straight white male that is very obviously disregarding any possible other viewer I consider poor writing and not well thought out.
This seems a bit reductionist, though I guess it depends on what you mean by “disregarding any possible other viewer”. Any examples?
If you mean racism and sexism, then that’s obviously bad. But I don’t see anything inherently wrong with having a target demographic
I think you are reading into it too much, a show, like friends that is very simply written for one target demographic means it is not very good. That’s all . I consider this a bad show that isn’t very funny. Instead of accepting it because everyone I know likes it or it’s on cable television.
My face watching Big Bang Theory
The worst part of Big Bang Theory is how bad it makes you feel when people you know recommend it to you.
“What kind of person do you think I am, exactly? And who do you think this show is for?”
Anytime someone told me I “reminded them of Sheldon” I cut that person out of my life.
If this happens to you often, then you might actually be like Sheldon…
It’s happened to me a couple times, I think folks use it instead of the term quirky or autistic because the only thing I share in common is autism. In contrast I am a violent misanthropic redneck who radiates trauma and depression in ambient enough quantities that I can instantly pack bond with veterans and Slavs.
Sounds very…sheldon of you… wonder why they may have made that comparison…
God, have I been there.
I just assumed they thought that’s what science people are like and meant well.
You don’t like watching nerdface performances played for derisive laughter?!
But I actually do like that, it just needs to be IT Crowd or Office Space or Silicon Valley or literally anything is fucking better than BBT gah.
There’s a difference between made for nerds and nerdface.
You can tell BBT was not made for nerds, because all the supposed nerd in-jokes get trampled into ground in the service of explaining them to normies.
The one episode I saw had them refer to The One Ring as “a Lord of the Rings ring”, and then had them quote the inscription in English rather than the original Black Speech… you can almost hear some dickhead in the writers’ room saying “I don’t think the audience are going to know what that is, you need to make it clear”. You don’t see the IT Crowd explaining to the audience why Windows Vista is bad or what any of the posters in the set mean.
IT crowd did have that one gag where the character said he’s putting this fire with the rest of the fire when that should be a self-explanatory step when sorting out a fire. You have to sort it before you can out it (for any lost non-nerds that somehow ended up in here).
That’s the thing. IT Crowd or Office Space etc, ask youto laugh at the action because they are absurd, not laugh at the people. Thats why TBBT is so bad.
I want to watch IT Crowd but anything with laugh tracks loses me immediately :/
Is there a tool for removing laugh tracks on shows that feel they need to tell you when they did a funny, but are otherwise good?
Would not recommend. If you’ve seen shows like that with the laugh tracks removed, they’re dreadful. Full of dead pauses while the characters wait between their lines for the laughs to end.
Fun fact: a half hour comedy script is 22 pages (22 minutes of content, after the ad breaks). But a half hour comedy script for a show with laugh tracks is 11 pages, 11 minutes. Literally half the show’s runtime is taken up by laugh tracks.
There’s a sad set of shows from before I got tired of laugh tracks. Sad because they are harder to enjoy now that I understand the laugh track is pretty much just there to dumb down the humour.
Though that could be an interesting remake formula: take some existing show then redo it but without a laugh track or live audience. I hated how live audience shows needed a pause after each main character’s first appearance while the people present did the whole “scream because you see a new celebrity”.
Can’t recommend anything I’m afraid. But I will warn - I’ve seen edits that remove the laughing from I think it was Friends? It really ratchets the awkwardness to 200% with all the actors pausing for silence, I’m not sure what’s worse.
I’m about to blow your mind: the IT Crowd has a live studio audience. One of the specials goes over each cast member and shows bloopers and such, and you can see them in several shots. I believe they also talk briefly about the audience, though it’s been a while. If I remember right, they would take the audience reactions of two takes and sort of merge them together.
Like most British TV comedy series, it was recorded with a live studio audience, rather than a “laugh track” added later - so there’s probably no versions that exist without it.
There’s a chance that it’s a 5:1 mix rather than stereo, and might have the audience on a different channel to the main dialogue - which would then be fairly easily to remove in something like Audacity.
Otherwise your options are turning the sound off and reading text subtitles, or using an “llm-powered” vocal remover.
[Laughter]
Oh god, they wouldn’t subtitle that, would they?
Maybe they don’t do that in the UK?
I’ve seen it all the time here in hell (bet you can guess where that is).
Also this gem: “[Dramatic music plays]”
Not to mention how awkward laugh track comedies usually are when you get rid of the laughter, with everyone just standing in silence for a few seconds any time something funny happens.
That’s why you get about twenty retirees and sit them in front of your tv. Then you tickle them with a feather duster when you want them to laugh, that way you have your own live studio audience. Just remember to press record on the camera you’re filming the tv with
I don’t understand the struggle some people have with laugh tracks. You can just use your own judgement and decide for yourself if you find the things funny or not.
Not sure about others, but for me if the comedy is largely unfunny I find the laugh track to reflect an overscaled and nonsensical appreciation of this comedy which is somewhat grating. It makes the whole scene dumber to a varying degree.
On the other hand, if the comedy is good I can very easily overlook a laugh track as it paces the laughter more closely which seems to bother me far less.
[audience murmurs]
The original BBC IT crowdbdidntnhave a laugh track, did it?
I love all 3 of those - any more similar recommendations?
Better off Ted is in the similar vein of Office Space in satirizing big corporations
Hm, only other coming to mind is Mythic Quest, maybe. I don’t think it reaches the same heights of funny but still balances around nerd culture. I also have a sweet spot for Superstore but that might just stem from my time in big box retail.
Superstore just went too long. Fun show mostly.
I know nerds who love the show. Well, they’re people who made being a
nerdconsuming pop culture their whole personality. Not terribly great at analyzing said media though.Ungh I had some professor give me a bad grade on a paper for ripping to shreds the portrayal of specific characters (it was entirely appropriate for the class). They were like “maybe you just don’t understand, its supposed to be kinda offensive, but these are great representations of (thing)!”
BBT, turns out, was prof’s favorite show, like you said, their personality.
No. Absolutely no. In fact, quite the opposite of good portrayals. I lost all respect for their opinions or teaching credentials, as both are clearly worthless.
The fun things about losing respect for one teacher’s credentials is it also casts doubt on every teacher’s credentials. It was pretty depressing to learn that academia is driven more by ego than by knowledge and education.
What’s annoying about the ones I know is that they’re holier than thou “woke” types that like to remind you about how problematic your media is, but have huge blind spots for the things they like. How do they not pick up on the issues with BBT?
And you don’t like sexual assault jokes played for the same canned laughter?
friends, big bang theory, two and a half men then you switch the channel to find reskin 3737267 of the same old boring ass police show
stuff like this running all the time is why i stopped watching tv ages ago
OMFG cop procedurals. My parents watched so many of those fucking things that I sarcastically wrote an episode of one. Turns out that Federal Agent With Speaking Role IS Mr. Diddit.
ugh I really like that show, it’s one of my comfort shows, and I really like the extended Big Bang Universe. It’s sad the show gets such a bad rap but it’s also not entirely unwarranted. The characters do feel really fleshed out, like they’re actual people who are the result of their life experiences. But if you can’t stand the way that Sheldon is, or the laugh track, or any combination thereof, the show really is impenetrable.
And annoyingly Young Sheldon goes on to be a really amazing prequel, but you need to watch and enjoy BBT first to get the most out of YS.
Honestly I hated BBT for the longest time too. Only a few years ago could I actually get into it.Hating on big bang theory is how you signal your superiority online, it’s the same on lemmy as it was on reddit. Liking big bang (or friends, or…) is for normies, and sheep, and people here are /r/verysmart.
For what it’s worth I also enjoyed it, and sometimes put on a random episode (just like with friends). Haven’t seen young Sheldon tho, I don’t like prequels for some reason (same as better call Saul).
Fair. YS really is to BBT what BCS is to BB. So if you already don’t like BCS then YS is a hard sell.
Do keep an eye out for Stuart Fails to Save the Universe tho. Sci-fi sequel to BBT, sadly weekly episodes but quite enjoyable from the 2 episodes I’ve watched.
I refuse to watch that shit and know the spin off is garbage because my Maga loving dad loves that show.
Yeah that show sucks too. I never got thru an episode…
I didn’t watch The Big Bang Theory but I’ll recommend Young Sheldon, funny and good story.
Idk why you’re downvoted, reportedly ‘Young Sheldon’ is made way better. Partly because it was made without live audience.
I don’t even know that I waa being downvoted, maybe it doesn’t show in thunder ig. But Young Sheldon is funny.
Its a show blud.
In the late 90’s UK it was a huge show, everyone really liked it, it was one of the first binge serials I can remember. I’ve not watched it for 25 years, maybe worth revisiting, although reading through the comments, seems it hasn’t aged well. It’s always sunny in Philadelphia is probably a better re-watch these days, it’s like extreme (anti) Friends on crack.
Rewatched over the COVID period. Was still entertaining. The pacing is odd though when you binch watch, their relationships / life events last a few episodes (so it seems like only a few days have passed), whereas when it was a weekly event it seemed like they lasted months.
Look, no one TOLD you life was gonna be this way…
clapclapclapclap
Your job’s a joke, you’re broke,
You smell, you’re pathetic,
You shithead, you-*gets dragged away from song, kicking and screaming*
I liked Friends. It hasn’t aged particularly well, it’s not without its flaws, but it was popular for a reason.
More importantly, its success meant NBC continued to invest heavily in comedies, which gave us a golden age of much better shows. A golden age that eventually included Scrubs, 30 Rock, The Office, My Name is Earl, Parks and Rec, Community, etc.
Yeah exactly this. A lot of the humour feels very dated today, even occasionally crossing the line into offensive, but at the time it was essential viewing. There’s a reason they were the most highly paid actors in TV comedy for a while (or TV in general?), later to be pipped by the cast of Frasier IIRC.
Speaking of Frasier, unlike its star, that has aged pretty well IMO, and I would still recommend it.
My Name is Earl is one of my favorites. It just has so much feel-good to it.
I don’t think it’s the funniest show on earth, I don’t think it’s even an amazing show, but it has its moments. Pretending otherwise for internet points is cringe.
hey, i liked friends
