Classic Comedy: Was It Ever Funny? - US comedy doesn't hold up?

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Judge Dredd said:
There's some good stuff. The Simpsons, Futurama, I remember Celebrity Deathmatch back in the day, but I've not seen it since it aired and I assume it aged horribly. Naked Gun/Police Squad was one of the funniest things ever made and is American.
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I FUCKING FORGOT ABOUT NAKED GUN ITS SO PEAK HOLY SHIT
futurama by itself is an entertaining series but it isnt necessarily funny

also i just remembered silicon valley
its somewhat funny because its about a topic im knowledgeable about and is funnier than r/programmerhumor (sadly not a high bar)
 
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1) Stephen Colbert was never funny.
2) Seinfeld's humor is very New York and very Jewish. Not for everyone. Friends came along and made a more commercial and accessible copy of the formula that more people today prefer.
3) I'll add a couple old shows I've discovered in reruns recently. Soap and Mama's Family. I actually went out and bought the DVDs because I liked them that much.
 
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I'm of the opinion that SNL was only funny twice. The first time was the first couple seasons. The second is when you first started watching it, a special golden era that lasts until they replace the host of Weekend Update.

As for the actual classics? The best of Abbott and Costello or the Marx Brothers or Buster Keaton or Jack Benny outshine anything put out today.
 
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Jerk Sausage said:
Yes compare randomly selected SNL sketches and Stephen Colbert to the highlights of those, completely fair. Does all British comedy hold up? Every Monty Python sketch is gold plated? Or is this just Brit snob shit?

American mainstream comedy has been shit for ages and late night television is far beyond its golden age anywhere in the world. This is not a mystery. But please give me some hilarious British comedy of today that I'm missing out on, I'm ready to laugh.
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I love British comedy, and even I can't get into Monty Python.


Judge Dredd said:
But does it hold up today? I've not seen it start to finish. The bits I have seen, like him driving an oversized car.
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In my opinion, the John Candy part of Vacation is still funny.

 
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Scripted comedy is fine, whatever. Sketch comedy is just consistently dogshit. I don’t understand how it ever earned cultural cache.... maybe because a few guys from SCTV eventually made a couple decent movies and everyone got collective amnesia about how unwatchable 95% of this format is. That era’s over, though.

Stand-up comedy is universally bad. It always has been. The 80's were all about screaming slurs at you. The '90s were this corny little blip. Hey, you ever notice how socks disappear in the dryer? It got so bad that the parodies of “what’s the deal with airline food?” became more common than the actual airline food bits. (Even Seinfeld, the show, admitted his own act sucked.) And now we’ve boomeranged back to deranged rants, wall to wall f-bombs and n-bombs.
 
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Captain Syrup said:
Scripted comedy is fine, whatever. Sketch comedy is just consistently dogshit. I don’t understand how it ever earned cultural cache.... maybe because a few guys from SCTV eventually made a couple decent movies and everyone got collective amnesia about how unwatchable 95% of this format is. That era’s over, though.

Stand-up comedy is universally bad. It always has been. The 80's were all about screaming slurs at you. The '90s were this corny little blip. Hey, you ever notice how socks disappear in the dryer? It got so bad that the parodies of “what’s the deal with airline food?” became more common than the actual airline food bits. (Even Seinfeld, the show, admitted his own act sucked.) And now we’ve boomeranged back to deranged rants, wall to wall f-bombs and n-bombs.
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Honestly, there are a lot of Mad TV sketches that still make me laugh. They always seemed better than SNL.

Phil Hartman always saved SNL skits for me. That man was consistently funny.
 
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This thread is just going to degrade to recommendations from a certain era in order to justify that quality old comedies existed: Any Which Way But Loose, a comedy vehicle starring Clint Eastwood (who was advised not to take the project) is fucking great. There's a reason it's his best movie return ever. And I know it still holds up because I watched it like a month ago and it was a great time.
Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is another that holds up great, but it also relies on your suspension of disbelief being receptive to silly jokes. It falls apart when the French aliens show up, but that was true twenty-five years ago.
 
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TeaBaggins said:
Newsradio too.


His murder pretty much led to the cancellation.
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They had to be tasteful about Phil on NewsRadio, so they wrote him off with a heart attack. But the last scene which ever aired of him was Phil swallowing a nicotine patch like a starving raccoon because he wasn’t getting his fix fast enough. Then he gets wheeled away in an ambulance. Cruel but funny.
 
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On the subject of stand up comedians, to me it's a lot of duds these days, depending on the comedian. I did grow up watching a ton of stand up comedians, so I remember enough. I do think a lot of the ones from decades ago were hilarious, compared to ones I've seen now. For example, ones like Dave Attell (from Insomniac fame on Comedy Central in the early 00's) or Louis CK, Greg Giraldo or Patrice O'Neal (RIP to both) or ones like Anthony Jeselnik, who pretty much somehow made really dark jokes funny in my opinion, have been hilarious to me. And if I want to go across the country, Dylan Moran still makes me laugh, from either watching Black Books or his stand up, enough to make me see him twice on stage when he performed. There are some great stand up comedians.

But my god, I can't name a single stand up comedian these days who stands out enough for me to name.

Captain Syrup said:
They had to be tasteful about Phil on NewsRadio, so they wrote him off with a heart attack. But the last scene which ever aired of him was Phil swallowing a nicotine patch like a starving raccoon because he wasn’t getting his fix fast enough. Then he gets wheeled away in an ambulance. Cruel but funny.
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Speaking of classic comedy, Newsradio is still hilarious to me when it comes to older sitcom comedies. Roseanne had her moments too, until that dreaded season 9. But seasons 1 to 5 still hold up, which funny enough Tom Arnold was behind a lot of that.
 
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TeaBaggins said:
Speaking of classic comedy, Newsradio is still hilarious to me when it comes to older sitcom comedies. Roseanne had her moments too, until that dreaded season 9. But seasons 1 to 5 still hold up, which funny enough Tom Arnold was behind a lot of that.
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I wish they'd release a high-def version to breathe new life into the series. The Lauren Graham episodes--particularly The Public Domain--are some of my favorites sitcom episodes.
 
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Stab You in the Back said:
I wish they'd release a high-def version to breathe new life into the series. The Lauren Graham episodes--particularly The Public Domain--are some of my favorites sitcom episodes.
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It's one of the few shows where the cast genuinely liked each other, and you can see it in their performances. The dvd releases that came out before actually has a ton of cast commentaries, and they're all worth the price of the season buys.

I do wonder how long the show would have lasted if Phil Hartman didn't die. And I do think that one of the biggest reasons Newsradio was funnier than other shows is because of people like Phil Hartman, Dave Foley, and even Andy Dick, who all had background in comedy.
 
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American comedy movies I will laugh at to this day:
Animal House
Airplane!
Blazing Saddles

British comedy Movies:
Monty Python (most-Holy Grail, Meaning of Life being my favorites)

I will say this- back in the dark ages, PBS played the Monty Python series, and we would go into school the next Monday and quote the best bits to each other.

I've seen MASH so many times that I know every episode plot on sight. Golden Girls (1985-1992) and Bob Newhart (1972-1978) are also entertaining enough I will stop and check which episode it is. SOAP was hilarious (Billy Crystal as a closeted gay twink!) and occasionally I'll binge watch a few episodes. Drew Carey was funny, great cast.

Other than Monty Python, UK TV comedy of the same era seem very class-oriented. Which isn't something Americans easily relate to.
To the Manor Born comes to mind. However, I loved Absolutely Fabulous, Father Ted is pretty funny, Black Adder was also shown on PBS (though the Olde English accents were sometimes tough to understand) , as was Fawlty Towers. PBS picked up a great deal of BBC content in the 70's, so maybe we saw more of your stuff than you saw of ours.

ETA: as much as you complain about US comedy, you fuckers put out Benny Hill. Pot, meet kettle.
 
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TeaBaggins said:
Speaking of classic comedy, Newsradio is still hilarious to me when it comes to older sitcom comedies. Roseanne had her moments too, until that dreaded season 9. But seasons 1 to 5 still hold up, which funny enough Tom Arnold was behind a lot of that.
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The last season could’ve worked if hadn’t decided to become a sermon at the finish line. Coping with Dan’s death, she is “editing her life." She's struggling with her sister coming out as a dyke, her daughters’ taste in men (something that carries into The Conners).

But instead of committing to that: half the time she’s doing her “I’m just a straight-shooting working-class broad”, the other half she’s auditioning to be the next Joan Rivers.

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Roseanne even had a short-lived talk show, I caught a couple episodes, she was dressed like a leather witch and just sort of vibing in her own dimension.
Gregis said:
Christ, when I clicked this thread I was expecting to see a debate about like Laurel and Hardy
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Sock Cucker said:
American comedy movies I will laugh at to this day:
Animal House
Airplane!
Blazing Saddles

British comedy Movies:
Monty Python (most-Holy Grail, Meaning of Life being my favorites)

I will say this- back in the dark ages, PBS played the Monty Python series, and we would go into school the next Monday and quote the best bits to each other.

I've seen MASH so many times that I know every episode plot on sight. Golden Girls (1985-1992) and Bob Newhart (1972-1978) are also entertaining enough I will stop and check which episode it is. SOAP was hilarious (Billy Crystal as a closeted gay twink!) and occasionally I'll binge watch a few episodes. Drew Carey was funny, great cast.

Other than Monty Python, UK TV comedy of the same era seem very class-oriented. Which isn't something Americans easily relate to.
To the Manor Born comes to mind. However, I loved Absolutely Fabulous, Father Ted is pretty funny, Black Adder was also shown on PBS (though the Olde English accents were sometimes tough to understand) , as was Fawlty Towers. PBS picked up a great deal of BBC content in the 70's, so maybe we saw more of your stuff than you saw of ours.

ETA: as much as you complain about US comedy, you fuckers put out Benny Hill. Pot, meet kettle.
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Monty Python's Spamalot musical is fucking hilarious as well. I said I couldn't get into the show, but the musical was one of the funniest I've ever seen.
 
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