Where did all of the great comedies go?
Claiming that the comedy genre is “dead” is quite the statement… but think about it for a second. When is the last time you rushed to a movie theatre to see a blockbuster comedy? When is the last time you made sure you were seated for a TV show that was meant to make you laugh out loud?
It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when the art and acceptance of comedy dissipated, but it’s sometime in the last 10 to 15 years, right? And nowadays, there’s not much that really stands out above the rest when it comes to being funny. Think about movies like Superbad, 40 Year Old Virgin, This Is The End, Tropic Thunder, Step Brothers… none of those movies would get made today.
One veteran sitcom actor thinks they know why all of the comedies went kaput.
Patricia Heaton, who starred in hit shows like Everybody Loves Raymond and The Middle, thinks that the decline of comedy has spawned from a change in the writer’s room. According to her, what used to be a free for all process that did anything and everything to find something funny has now turned into an unhealthy amount of checks and balances.
To be more specific, Heaton revealed on The Rubin Report that she’s spoken a lot to writers out there, and one person who has been at it for a long time says that modern day writer’s rooms are more focused on not being offensive over being funny:
“I know a really veteran comedy writer said he was in a writer’s room where a bunch of the writers were in their 20s. And they had a character that was like a Marine. He didn’t like to hug anybody, he didn’t want guys hugging him. He would tense up. And they were writing this character and one of the young writers said, ‘Well that’s really homophobic, we can’t write that.’
How does a character change and evolve unless they start in some place? Why not just have him start there and we see by the end, maybe grudgingly, but by the end, he accepts a hug? You can’t have that ending unless you have that beginning. There’s a certain wokeness, I think, in some young people.”
Heaton went on to talk about another situation that she was directly involved in that had to do with a writer’s room for a show that never aired. She says that the studio that was behind the show felt pressured to hire a diverse grouping of writers for their writer’s room. In theory, that was good for checking off the diversity box.
But Heaton says that once they got all the writers together, they argued about what could offend people more than they came up with punchlines. And the longtime actress says that she remembers being worried from the get-go:
“The first thing I heard was like where they came from or what ethnicity they were or what sexuality they identified as and I kept thinking, ‘Yeah, but can they write comedy?'”
To be clear, those aren’t the only things that have contributed to the decline in comedy. Later in the conversation, Patricia Heaton touched on how the introduction of streaming services blew up the “good ol’ days” of television, and basically diluted everything… including the money. She also mentioned the negative impact of the pandemic, the writer’s strike and the actor’s strike all happening back-to-back-to-back.
There’s a whole lot that’s played a role in comedy teetering on the verge of extinction. But if you asked Patricia Heaton, it certainly sounds like she blames comedy’s downfall on what’s happening in writer’s rooms.
You can hear her talk more about it in the interview below:
