The Idler

THE SIX MYTHS OF TV COMEDY

Sitcom Supremo GRAHAM LINEHAN – co-writer of Father Ted, Big Train and Black Books – offers a handy guide to the mistakes we make when discussing sitcoms.

1/THE LAUGHTER IS CANNED
A sitcom with a laughter track is filmed, in the words of Ted Danson, in front of a live studio audience; how many people, I dunno, two hundred, say, but they’re there. I know because I’ve seen them and I’ve sat among them (never again, mind you; like being raped in prison, sitting in an audience for a TV show is something you really only need to experience once, if at all).

It works like this. The actors run through a scene once or twice, then maybe do some pick-ups to cover whatever fluffs popped up in the main body of the scene, and then move to another set. Location stuff is shown on monitors hanging at various points around the studio.

Sometimes, you’ll hear an audience laugh at something that isn’t funny. This happens because the audience is nervous, or people are trying to be nice, or they haven’t yet acclimatised to the humour of the show. They might laugh at the build-up to a joke, their laughter drowning out the punchline. When this happens, the at-home viewer’s instinct is “What the hell was funny about that?” and to avoid it, anyone with any sense will spend time cutting laughs out.

Sometimes it is necessary to add laughs so as to smooth over a cut between two takes of the same scene, but generally that laughter you hear is the laughter that was there.

2/SITCOMS WITH A LAUGHTER TRACK ARE BETTER THAN SITCOMS WITH NO LAUGHTER TRACK
It’s true that having an audience at a TV programme is an oddly archaic idea, a dim echo of TV’s variety show past, but the thing is, it works. When Arthur (Mathews, co-writer) and I were doing Father Ted, the idea of having one minute go by where the audience were neither laughing nor on the way to laughing was so terrifying that we simply stuffed the thing full of gags (and by gags, I don’t mean smart-arse one-liners, which I hate… I just mean funny moments, vocal or visual).

The real problem with studio sitcoms is that they sometimes trick actors into playing to the audience, rather than the cameras directly in front of them. So the performance undergoes a Bruce Banner-into-Hulk transformation. Sometimes big performances are what you want, because they can be very funny, but a lot of sitcoms would benefit from everyone just calming the fuck down.

You can be too calm, though. With a few exceptions (The Larry Sanders Show, paced, The Simpsons) I find sitcoms without a laughter track to be somewhat short on the laughs front. You want to go that way, fine, but don’t blame me if you wake up one day to find you’ve written a (shudder) “comedy drama”.

And finally, just one word: Meterosexuality.

3/THE “FACTORY SYSTEM” OF WRITING WILL SAVE BRITISH SITCOMS
You want to see bad sitcoms written by twenty people sitting around a table? Get cable because there’s a shitload to choose from. The shows used as sticks to beat British writers – Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends – are the tip of a very large iceberg. But beneath the water, this iceberg is pure frozen sewage. I always judge a bad sitcom by whether you can sing the jokes… in other words, they’ve all got the same rhythm, the same scansion:

“Moesha? Do you blahdeyblah?”
“Every blahdeblah”
“I guess you blahdeblahdeblah.”
“blah”
(laughter)

I hope I’m being clear. Bad, bad, bad writing, sappy, sentimental storylines, cute kids talking cute-cute or cute-dirty. It’s a mini hell, having cable.

The best factory-written sitcom, in my view, is Seinfeld, but that show has an oddly British feel, in that all the best episodes seem strained through one writer’s sensibility, the great Larry David (by the way, when is someone going to pick up his superb HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm?). All good TV is a collaboration, but if there’s no unifying voice guiding the style of the show, as there is on so many great British sitcoms, the results are often thin and processed, like easy Singles. Although I do like Easy Singles.

4/IT’S A REALLY GOOD IDEA TO DO 24 EPISODES OF A FIRST SERIES IN ORDER TO SELL IT TO AMERICA
This is a good way of ruining a sitcom’s chances of being anything other than a waste of energy and money. I really hate that people are being advised along these lines, because a lot of talent is going to go straight down the plughole as their exhausted shows limp to the finish line, ignored by all.

5/”SEINFELD? I PREFERRED LARRY SANDERS”
Why do people still say this? They were just on at the same time. They had nothing else in common. I worry that, somewhere in the world, someone is saying to someone else “Father Ted? I preferred The Day Today”.

6/I COULD WRITE A BETTER SIT COM THAN THIS THING
No-one’s stopping you.

Taken from Idler 28.