The New Comedy is So Old

It has to be the weirdest entertainment story of the year. The BBC has suspended two of its top comedy stars for broadcasting a vulgar prank phone call to one of the Corporation’s comedy legends. I’ll get to the bizarre details in a second, but the episode illustrates something that I’ve been observing as my daughter grows up: It is becoming harder and harder to find family comedy that amuses both adults and children and is free of vulgarity. In fact, comedy appears to have lost a dimension it has had since around 400 BC.

The incident involved Russell Brand, the wild-haired, lanky, stand-up comic who nonplussed American audiences as host of this year’s MTV Video Music Awards and who was possibly the best thing in the year's best comedy, Forgetting Sarah Marshall. His partner-in-crime was Jonathan Ross, a sort of English David Letterman. For their show, they called up the elderly British performer Andrew Sachs. On only getting the answering machine, they proceeded to make vulgar remark after vulgar remark about Brand sleeping with his granddaughter — who, to add to the weirdness, dances under the name Voluptua for an ensemble called The Satanic Sluts (I am not making this up) — and suggesting the 78 year-old would kill himself on hearing the message.

After a host of complaints, most of them only after the event became a news story, the BBC suspended both of the highly-paid stars (Ross is on a three-year, £18 million contract with the public service broadcaster). It was the BBC’s equivalent of detention, and it was quite appropriate for such sophomoric indulgence. Yet the phone call wasn’t really worthy of attention for what the stars said, but for whom they said it to. Andrew Sachs is a British comedy legend because he played the clueless Spanish waiter Manuel in John Cleese’s masterpiece, Fawlty Towers. In a sense, this was a vicious attack by a “new comedy” on the old. It was like Seth Rogen going up to George Burns and suggesting he used his cigar for sexual gratification.

Yet this is triumphalism. It is hard to find vestiges of the old comedy anywhere. My daughter is now at an age where I would like us to be watching family comedies together, so we can both laugh at the same things, and I could introduce her to the more adult concepts. For instance, at her age, my favorite show was The Goodies, which had absurd slapstick plots such as puppets taking over the British government, but which explored political debates — of the three main characters, one was a pompous conservative, another a layabout socialist. But where are such funny, smart, age-appropriate shows today?

Frankly, it seems impossible to find a show that airs at after 8 p.m. on any of the major networks that is not obsessed with sex. CBS’s excellent Monday night line-up is filled with it; even the wonderful Big Bang Theory regularly contrasts the nerds’ lack of sex life with that of normal people. The best comedy on television, NBC’s 30 Rock, contains running plot elements like one character’s attempts to create a pornographic video game. Casual sex abounds, yet even the rare shows where a happily married couple is the focus, like Fox’s Till Death, find little other than sex to revolve around.

Now this is not to say that sex is not funny or that it should be bowdlerized out of comedy. As should be obvious, I really enjoy all these shows. The problem is monotony. Just a few years ago, while Friends was just as obsessed with sex as How I Met Your Mother, a family could sit around Home Improvement and laugh together. Today, though, there is simply no current equivalent of Family Matters or The Cosby Show.

Clever children's shows provide the closest contemporary parallel. Some of the cartoons on Nick and Cartoon Network are written for children, but clearly attempt to keep adult viewers in mind. There are frequent jokes that only adults will get — references in Spongebob Squarepants to time periods of eleven minutes, or in The Fairly Oddparents, when the female fairy Wanda transforms into an Oscar, and the male fairy Cosmo exclaims, “Finally, I’ve got a trophy wife! Shouldn’t you be younger?” Yet even this isn’t the same thing. These are shows written with a nod and a wink to the adult, but they do not allow the adult and child to share the same humor.

The simple fact is that modern American — and British, as far as I can tell — comedy has mostly repudiated a strand of comedy that goes back to 400 BC. Before then, comedy was much as it is now, earthy and sex-based. Then something happened. The Athenian comic dramatists, even the master of that “old” form, Aristophanes, started introducing other elements. Comedy became more and more based on misunderstandings (the comedy of errors) and identifiable “characters,” who could be expected to act in certain ways. This “new comedy” reached its height in Hellenistic Athens with Menander and translated (sometimes literally) into Latin with Terence and Plautus, and then, after the renaissance, reasserted itself into European theater through Shakespeare, Moliere, and their successors.

Yet new comedy did not kill off the old. Aristophanes remained admired throughout antiquity. Shakespeare could write scenes as bawdy as anything Judd Apatow has recently produced. Restoration drama produced both the wit of Congreve and the near obscenity of Wycherly. Burlesque existed alongside Capra. Around WWII, English audiences laughed at Will Hay at the cinema and Max Miller in the theater. Man About the House, the English predecessor to Three’s Company, which is credited with bringing sex comedy to television, existed at the same time as Dad’s Army, in which a band of incompetent geriatrics attempted to provide the last line of defense against German invasion. Yet the family-friendly comedies of the past fifty years all belonged clearly to the new comedy side of the aisle.

The point is that for almost two and a half millennia, these two forms of comedy have existed side-by-side. Yet suddenly, and without warning, the new comedy of Menander and Shakespeare seems to have disappeared. Where can we see it now? Juno — a comedy about teen sex and potential adultery? Pixar's intelligent, gentle-spirited films may offer the lone redoubt. Just look at this list of nominees for “Best comedy of 2007.” This year’s won’t be much better. All of a sudden, it seems new comedy — the comedy of error, character, and situation — has been nearly discarded.

In that respect, Brand and Ross, whose idea of funny is to ask British conservative leader David Cameron if he masturbated to a picture of Margaret Thatcher when younger, represent perfectly the triumph of old comedy, with poor old Andrew Sachs as the defeated symbol of new comedy. Yet it is the old comedy that calls itself new. The real new comedy may have breathed its last. How fitting that the last breath is filled with an Aristophanic fart.

Iain Murray is a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.