Why So Serious?

Comedy gets kind of a bad rap. On the one hand, a comedy might be considered a perfectly acceptable vehicle for a goofy little idea, an energetic lead, and a lot of humorous dialogue. But everybody knows that if you want fiction that plumbs the depth of human emotion, that has heart and soul and is willing to challenge you intellectually and empathetically, you need to look under serious drama.

The general phrasing of things gives away how we feel about this. If a writer has a story or character they want the audience to really invest in, or an actor wants to be appreciated for a deeply nuanced role, they want the audience (and critics) to take them seriously. The amount of respect an entertainer receives seems irrevocably tied to how serious they take themselves and their craft. And it applies to every media: either you're Leonardo DiCaprio, or you're Jack Black; either you're Stanley Kubrick, or you're Shawn Levy; either you're Radiohead, or you're LMFAO.

And this distinction is more extreme now that it ever was before. Silent actor Charlie Chaplin was incredibly well respected for his physical comedy and was able to perfectly balance silliness with anti-Nazi social commentary. With the exception of classic Star Trek, most of television's great strides in racial equality took the form of sitcoms. Jackie Chan made a career out of films where any moment could bring either unbelievable stunts or simple slapstick. Even as late as 1997, we got The Fifth Element, one of the best action movies ever made, and it was more than willing to engage in its fair share of schtick.

Great action movie, or the greatest action movie?

The point being that drama, emotion, social commentary, or just sheer undeniable skill as a performer used to cooperate with comedy, but nowadays it feels like the only action movies with comic relief are Michael Bay pictures.

And you really have to stretch to call those “humorous” or “relieving”.

This era of distinctly separate comedy and drama had its own beginning in each of the media individually, but the thing that seemed to spur it all on in the mainstream pop culture was the Bourne Identity. Despite the fact that it shares a nearly identical plot with Jackie Chan's arguably superior Who Am I?, this humorless and baleful look at the life of a rogue, brainwashed assassin started gritty and depressing, and would only get moreso in the following two sequels. Meanwhile, Hollywood (and the rest of the medias) have been playing catchup ever since, constantly one upping each other in terms of how dismal they can make life for their protagonists.

I think partly it's just that everybody wants their creations to be taken as seriously by audiences as they the creators take it, and the only way they know how to be sure it will be is to flat out demand the audience do so. Obviously, there's some commercialist creators who took a look at the Bourne Identities, the Dark Knights, and the Hunger Games and said, “Whoa, personal tragedy is way in right now, I need to get me some of that.”

“Put the plucky sidekick back in the box, we've got some expositional families to kill.”

But a lot of these I honestly think are the result of writers who don't want their hard work to go unrecognized. Take a look at Young Justice, for instance. It's actually been pretty decent so far, a little angsty at first, but it has recently mostly overcome that. What I consider its biggest flaw, however, is that it seems to feel embarrassed about being a cartoon. It has a tightly knit continuity, in depth character development, shifting status quos and beautifully realistic animation, but these partly feel like the result of the writers constantly working too hard to get noticed; that they're constantly vigilant to always be serious, as if a little bit of levity will undermine all the hard work they've done. Half the time it feels like they're looking right at the camera and saying, “This is very serious, you guys, we demand that you recognize it as such.”

Thankfully, there are others out there who do understand the benefit of balancing comedy. More than that, there is a growing underbelly that for perhaps one of the first widespread times in mainstream fiction has taken to attempting to tell drama and emotional depth through the comedy. Previously, if an important lesson or dramatic moment happened in a comedy, it occurred in a break from the humor; very special episodes, or moments where the laughter died down and an announcement was made that wiped the smile right off your face. But recently there have been more and more stories that have been giving in depth character or plot development while they never stop being funny. Kieth Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis' Justice League International, originally started in 1987, chose to portray its superheroes comically, even goofily, because it was a way to look past the veneer of superheroes' public face and show their personalities when they could be themselves. There's been a resurgence of this team as of late, with two miniseries written by the original creative staff within the last couple years, and multiple episodes devoted to them on the recent Batman: The Brave and The Bold. Brave and the Bold, meanwhile, just finished its three season run of being able to make me laugh out loud with scenes like this:

and then make me cry with scenes like this:

often within the same episode. If the death of a character brought tears to your eyes, it was because they worked their way into your heart by being hilarious. Kieth Giffen and John Rogers made headlines a few years ago by creating Blue Beetle Jaime Reyes, one of the most prominent Mexican superheroes, but what made his comic among the best I've ever read was the level of characterization given to the entire supporting cast, all done through humor, and the fact that there were only two moments in two years where it stopped (briefly) feeling like a comedy. Scott Pilgrim, the movie and the comic, wowed critics and audiences alike with its honest portrayal of modern love and romance, which it presented through a hyperbolically comedic series of challenges to the main character. Community has quickly developed a reputation as the most heartfelt and emotionally deep sitcom currently on TV by embracing the humor as a means to further our care for these characters. These are all stories that understand that the best way to get an audience to take them seriously is to get the audience to want to take them seriously. Not everyone will when you spend more (or even equal) time joking than chin stroking, but not everyone will get into a constant stream of grim and gritty drama. Not everyone agrees with me, but I took Batman: The Brave and The Bold more seriously than I ever could take Young Justice, because instead of constantly demanding my attention, it was willing to just entertain me most of the time, and only occasionally would it ask me (politely, even) to pause, reflect, and feel something. This balance, this style is out there, and hopefully we'll get to see more of it, because frankly, it's way less tiring than than the modern grit we've become so used to. Until we see more of this, I'll be forgoing most of the big summer blockbusters, the new drama shows, and the upcoming comic book crossover events, and I'll be watching endless reruns of the show that perhaps best blends humor and drama, silliness and seriousness. I think you know who it is.

The Internet Just Wants a Hug

I've long believed that you can tell a lot about a civilization by its entertainment. When Romans loved to watch people fight to death in gladiator fights, it said something about what large percentages of that people found entertaining, and the same can be said today. When reality shows and Saw sequels make so much money that studios will not stop making them, it says something about the civilization that we live in. It says that a large enough percentage of our population loves watching dumb people and fictional torture that the people who bring us our entertainment will make sure we are never without a steady supply of new idiots to gawk at and fresh and innovative ways of killing people painfully. But if people in general really do love these things, how come Hollywood says it's struggling? If our entertainment is being made based on what people really want, why does everyone complain that there's nothing good on TV? The entertainment industry has begun to base nearly all of its production line on what's lucrative, but given the growing despondency of audiences, I'm starting to think that money making can be deceptive as to letting us know what people really want. After all, a movie can flop for stupid, stupid reasons, and the same can be said for success. Reality shows, while they certainly have their audience, are really so popular with TV execs because they're cheap to make when script writers aren't being paid. Meanwhile, John Carter, a great movie with a pretty high audience satisfaction rate, pulled in low audiences because of a terribly executed ad campaign and is considered a flop chiefly because its budget was way higher than what it made back. So what can give an accurate depiction of what people are looking for in entertainment? Hows about just straight up asking them?

This is what brings me to the internet.

You see, the internet right now can truly be said to be a cross section of humanity. Not long ago, that statement wouldn't have been accurate. The early internet was comprised mostly of brainy types, because only people who were good with computers could maintain or navigate early websites. Most of the sites that popped up at the beginning, therefore, catered towards the likes and dislikes of that demographic. This opened up a cycle that caused more nerdy people to flock to the internet, and more sites to pop up that were tailor made for nerds. Even as the internet grew and offered a little something for everyone, it first took the form of sites and forums for fans of certain things. Even when there were forums for sports teams and musicians, it still meant that most websites were essentially made for one demographic at a time.

This is basically as unreadable as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

But all this changed. Google, Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, Tumbler, DeviantArt. Sites began to show up that were made without one particular demographic in mind, and now they're the dominant type of non-commercial website on the internet. You're not required to be a nerd or a fan in order to find something worth your while on the internet; all that is required is a computer and internet access, and it will find something that is right up your alley, even if that thing is just talking to the friends you already have. And what this means is that the internet now truly can represent all of mankind (or at least the ones with wifi). And what does this mean for things that the internet latches onto? It means that if a show is big on the internet, it's big with representatives of all demographics. Seeing as how the folks that make our entertainment for us are more concerned with what's successful than what's popular, taking a look at what's the most talked about on the internet is a much better way for people like me to judge the rest of humanity based on what they fill their heads with when they're bored.

As I've begun to look into what the internet finds entertaining, the results have actually vastly improved my outlook on mankind. Want to know why? Let me begin with a specific example.

I'm a really big fan of the show Community, which as you may know (or statistically, not) is on the verge of cancellation. To be more accurate, is basically canceled already with a shortened season coming up before the end. Now, the show hasn't really had the best of times with the ratings, partially because it's been up against Big Bang Theory. Community itself is a show about a group of people in a community college, and and while it certainly has its share of nerdy references, it's moreso a show with a little bit for everybody, the kind of show that anyone with a sense of humor should find accessible. Big Bang Theory, on the other hand, is a show about outdated nerd stereotypes from 80's films, and the dialogue of every episode consists 50% of references to whatever geek fare is closest to mainstream at that particular moment.

In case you couldn't tell, I'm not really a fan.

The interesting part? Big Bang Theory is doing splendidly in the ratings (which is completely inexplicable from my point of view), while Community is doing poorly ratings wise, with the exception of its huge internet presence.

Now, my point isn't that the internet is great simply because it has vastly superior taste to the Nielson families. It's something more; it's why the internet loves Community so much, but can only give an unenthusiastic “meh” to Big Bang Theory, despite the fact that it seems like it would be (ostensibly) aimed directly at them.

Why wouldn't nerds enjoy this accurate, loving depiction of their culture?

Gawker recently asked this question, and their answer is, I think, a good reason to give the internet a second chance. Essentially, it boiled down to the way each show portrayed the relationships between the characters; Big Bang Theory just shows us some people who hang out together and plays their personal conversations for laughs; Community portrays a group of people coming together, becoming friends, and overcoming obstacles to remain friends. The point of one show is “ha, those nerdy types sure are a hoot, aren't they?”, while the point of the other is, “let's all be buddies here”.

And the internet is eating it up.

Gawker's conclusion was that the internet finds appealing entertainment that emphasizes friendship, closeness, communication, and, if you will, a sense of community. I find this suggestion very encouraging, and it got me to take a closer look at what else is popular. Stuff like My Little Pony. Have you heard of Bronies? That's the name given to the vast hordes of adult, male fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It sounds horrible, mostly because any portmanteau that features the word “bro” is horrible. But when you stop to think about it, it's actually kind of sweet. I was morbidly curious when I heard how oddly popular My Little Pony was, so I watched the pilot. I'm not going to lie, I kind of loved it. The aesthetic was obviously not made with me in mind, but there was a core essence of kindness that I enjoyed thoroughly. There was an extended sequence where one by one, each of the protagonists (I can't say “each of the ponies” and still have you take this sentence seriously) individually overcomes an obstacle through some unique, positive trait and gets the group one step closer to their goal. This even included taming a furious manticore (I know, right) by removing a thorn from its paw, and I'm not afraid to say I teared up a little there.

I'm not going to continue watching My Little Pony, mostly because I simply cannot allow myself to belong to a group with “bro” in its name, and also because as much as it was my perfect idea of a fairy tale, I just can't watch a show about ponies.

Also, the dragon sidekick is pretty annoying, and gives me a serious Max from Dragon Tales vibe, which is entirely the wrong kind of nostalgia.

But just look at how much this show which is designed for young girls is bringing together fans from all sorts of demographics, just because they want to be entertained by something sweet and kind. And it's all over the place. Plenty of shows get canceled every year, but which ones get noteworthy fan campaigns to save them? How about Firefly, which features a tight knit, familial crew of a spaceship. Or Kim Possible, about a tight knit, familial trio of teenagers who fight crime (and also spend time loving their own, literal families). Or Jericho, which is about a tight knit, familial group of people trying to survive in a post apocalyptic wasteland (seriously, Wikipedia even says, “Several themes regularly addressed in the show included... community identity, the value of family, and the hardships of fatherhood”.)

What about comic books? Yeah, it's true that Batman is the most popular character right now, but if you want to know what's big on the internet, look for what the publishers refer to as “fan favorites”. Fan Favorites include Birds of Prey, an all girl superhero team that has dealt with strengthening the bonds of friendship on so many levels; the All New Atom, about the adventures of Ryan Choi and his ever loyal supporting cast; Blue Beetle, which featured the teenaged Jaime Reyes coming completely clean to his whole family and best friends about having a secret superhero identity by the third issue; even Secret Six, which got about as dark as a comic about a mercenary team of supervillains could get, but still managed to make you love the characters because of how close knit and familial they were.

The lesson here? For every Yahoo Answers trolling, there's someone talking about how the happy ending to the latest Doctor Who episode made them cry. For every YouTube comments Flame War, there's a forum hoping for a full series of Super Best Friends Forever. And for every Craigslist killer, there's about 50,000 internet users who just want a hug.

Gee, maybe humanity isn't so bad after all.

Please Answer the Questions in an Orderly Fashion

The word on the street that I’ve been hearing is there's a remake of The Black Hole coming up. Now, I’d perk up in attention if any movie titled something like The Black Hole was being made, but in this case I’m actually familiar with the original. It was a Disney movie from the 70’s that was basically a vehicle for Maximilian Schell to play the greatest, crazy, space Captain Nemo ever seen, and as much as that speaks to everything in movies that I enjoy, I’ll be the first to admit the movie had some distinct flaws. Sure the special effects are dated now, but they were pretty good for the time; granted they had terrible robot sidekicks, one of which inexplicably had a bad southern accent, but you have to keep in mind it was marginally a kids’ movie. No, the gravest mistake that they made with this film was in the ending. (I’ll go ahead and warn you now: there will be spoilers aplenty ahead.) The movie’s big question throughout is what lies on the other side of the black hole. A daunting question for any film, let alone Disney’s live action department in the 70’s, but the movie builds up that question for 90 mostly awesome minutes. Closing in on the end, the gravity macguffens are failing and the giant mystery space station and its crazy German space captain and his killer robots and hypnotized space crew are being dragged into the black hole, and everything seems so cool that we can’t possibly be disappointed, we find out the answer to the film’s ongoing question, and it ruins everything.

This movie is just one in a long line of films, television shows, books, and other things that belong to a burgeoning new subgenre that I really, really want to like, and thus far have found incredibly few satisfying examples of. As the first person to have noted this (at least without researching the matter further), I take the right to name this discover, and I have called it The Impossible Question. The basic point of any example in the genre is to set up a question, similar to a murder mystery, except that the question pertains more so to the reality in which the characters live (Lost’s “What is the island?”; The Black Hole’s “What lies on the other side of the Black Hole?”; Muppets from Space’s “Where did Gonzo come from?”; etc). It seems like a new form of mystery, mostly a subgenre of sci-fi, though it definitely carries elements throughout of fantasy, horror, maybe even religious, but really anything that adds to the mood and intrigue. While there have been examples of this popping up throughout the history of fiction, as far back as I can tell to Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, it’s suddenly had a resurgence which has made it more popular and common than ever, with several new attempts at the genre coming out within the last few years. And, by and large, all these recent attempts are terrible.

The problem with the Impossible Question is partly due to its own biggest selling point; the questions are really interesting. To make a really cool, cosmic feeling, truly epic and impossible question, you need a fantastic build up. The build up, it turns out, is not that hard; you just keep asking increasingly bizarre questions and having increasingly illogical events happen.

“Oh my God, polar bear attack!”

But that turns out to be something of a problem where the writers in question seem to stand back and look at the situation and say, “Well, that build up was fantastic, it sure got the audience hooked and loving this. Wait, why are you still looking at me? What? Crap, you want more?!” They seem to forget that the more questions you ask, the more complex the answer(s) is going to have to be.

There seem to be three major cop-out answers that writers are willing to give, and have begun to rely on.

First off, and starting with the worst, some people will just not answer the question at all. Like, flat out refuse. It’s almost as if you asked someone on the street what time it was, and then they did an elongated song and dance routine before finally (breathlessly) telling you they didn’t have a watch the whole time. It might have been entertaining at the time, but the entire purpose of the interaction was voided within the last few moments. Take Cloverfield. Anyone who knows me as a person knows that I hate and loathe Cloverfield, and consider it the absolute bottom on my list of movies I’ve seen. And while I have many, many reasons, pretty high among them is the movie’s absolute refusal to answer even the most basic of questions pertaining toward its apparently nonexistent plot. “What is the monster?”; “Where did the monster come from?”; “Why is it attacking?”; “What does the monster look like?”; “Why should I care about any of these vapid, banal teenagers when I went to see a giant monster movie?”; and “Can I see the damn monster now?” are all questions that J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves just opted out of answering, despite the fact that the potential for answers was the absolute only thing getting me through the shaky camera. Another example is the upcoming Vanishing on 7^th Street (it’s not even out yet, but I Wikipedia’d it after an early release). Basic plot is people are vanishing and the literal darkness is what’s taking them. This leads to some very important questions like “What is the darkness, and why is it taking people?” but if you’re going into the movie wondering things like that, you’d best forget expecting an answer because that’s something for another day. The movie ends with everyone in the world disappearing, and there’s no real reason why. If we’re comparing this new Impossible Question genre to the Mystery genre, this is like a murder mystery that you watch for two hours, and then the detectives take one last look at the corpse before calling it quits and deciding they’ll never know who the murderer is, and then the credits roll.

The second option, somewhat less bad, but possibly more groan inducing, is that it’s been a trick question all along. Take for instance the 2009 movie Exam. The basic plot is 8 people on a job interview for a mysterious company, they’re told they have 80 minutes to answer the question, except they're not given a question. As movies who have those little wheat stalks on their posters are wont to do, human emotions swell to the breaking point, and a seemingly simple event becomes a bottle movie of epic proportions which likely shines a light on the darkest aspects of modern man.

Is this what most job interviews are like? I’ve only been on 3.

Well, how can this go wrong, we’ve already delineated exactly what the question for the film is (there’s two, really: “What’s the question again?” and “Psst, guys. Does anyone know the answer to question number 1?”) There’s a mysterious corporation involved, and hey it’s got those little wheat stalks on the poster again, how can this go wrong? Turns out that right before the clock started ticking and the emotions started swelling, the guard that brought them into the interview room asked them “Any questions?”. The one who figures it out responds with, “No.” End of movie. The entire mystery of the film is a trick question. It’s almost like there was no mystery at all, given how trivial and unimportant the answer turned out to be. I’m actually surprised there wasn’t a classic comedy drumbeat and symbol clash. It’s only a couple steps above a pun.

Which is odd, seeing as how puns have turned out so much better in this situation before.

In murder mystery terms, this is like earnestly watching a 2 and a half hour movie before they climactically reveal that the cause of death wasn’t murder at all, but only a tragically placed banana peel.

Lastly, we have what is probably the most common answer: let’s get Meta-Physical. The thing with this one is that it’s secretly what you want the answer to be, it just turns out that you didn’t really think it through that much. When these kinds of stories get really, intensely complex, and they involve these ever growing questions that are so cosmic and profound, you want to the answer to be equally cosmic and profound. But there’s a lot of trouble in trying to make it so. For starters, meta-physical, somewhat spiritual answers deal more in the mystical than in the science fiction realm. This means the answer is going to be kind of a hackneyed catchall, like “this character is special because he is The One”, or “the deal with all the craziness is that this is a cosmic battleground between the absolute forces of good and evil”. Even if they attempt to go for a science fiction backed answer, it will inevitably turn into some kind of catchall answer that is just advanced and misunderstood enough at the time the story is written, like nanites, neutrinos, the super-collider, or electromagnetism. But in either case, they will still be trying to marry the science fiction with the quasi-mystical, and the effect is way too simplistic of an answer to cover the multitude complexities of the questions asked.

Secondly, cosmic is different to every person. Taking into consideration the set of religious beliefs that each audience member subscribes to is difficult, and this difficulty is multiplied by the extremely personal attributes every person ascribes to their set of beliefs on their own accord. To make things mystical and cosmic that work for every audience member, without alienating anybody, means that you have to take what was already a disappointingly one word answer like, “God”, and rework it until it's acceptably faceless, like “an anthropomorphized image of all things good in the universe”.

Someday, we’ll all end up in that big, diverse, politically correct safe haven in the sky.

This is probably the most widespread of all answers to the impossible question today. The Black Hole is one of the earliest that I can think of. Have you figured out what was on the other side of the black hole? Yeah, it’s heaven and hell. 2012 decided that the end of the world was caused by Neutrinos doing something science-magic, and yet it still turned into the Biblical flood, complete with arcs. Though "John from Cincinnati" was cancelled before it managed to tell us what it was about, it was stated by its creators that it was somehow about finding God through surfing. Easily the best example of this was Lost, which basically had everything I talked about up there as their ending. Everyone who ever wondered what kind of an island had so many weird things on it waited 6 years to find out that it was the battleground between anthropomorphized Good vs. Evil, and that electro-magnetism was magic, and that in the end it was all okay because everyone died and went to heaven (eventually).

I’d like to say that the murder mystery equivalent is watching a 3 hour movie to find out that the killer was the Devil, but it doesn’t really matter because the victim went to heaven, except that comparison would be incorrect. It’s really more like watching something for 85 hours, and then finding out that the killer was the Devil, but it doesn’t really matter because the victim went to heaven.

For anyone, like me, who sincerely wants to like this genre, do not give up hope. There are good examples in the past, there are a few good ones out there right now, and that means that there will be some, however few, in the future. By delineating what makes the bad ones bad, and pointing out some good ones, I hope to make a small difference in this genre myself. So here’s some good examples: "The Twilight Zone", and to a lesser extent, "The Outer Limits". The anthology format really allowed you to ask multiple questions, and get a great answer every time, every single episode, and even better, if you don’t like one, the next episode is a fresh start! Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, possibly the progenitor of the entire sub-genre, is one of the first and one of the best. And then there’s "Doctor Who". Old and new, most episodes of "Doctor Who" follow this format, except where they ask a bizarre series of questions, they answer them better than you ever thought possible. I’ll go ahead and give you a small spoiler, the answer is almost always aliens, but that’s the beauty of it: in basing a show in a world where technology and alien species make just about anything possible, the answers can literally be anything, and thus they don’t have to rely on cheap tricks like nanites (and even if they do, there will be much more to it than that.) Not to mention that the British are largely a Godless nation, so you don’t have to worry about the answer turning out to be a literal Deus Ex Machina. So, go out to your nearest (British) video store today and rent all the seasons of "Doctor Who" you can. There are questions to be asked, and they will answer them with aliens.

They also do this a lot, too.