A Very Lopsided Blog.

This is to be written on the fly in the trouserless interval between getting back from walking my wife to work and the several hours in which I stare at a screen, tap out six words, curse myself for a moron, delete them, stare at the screen for another half hour, retype the same six words and finally give the sentence up for a lost cause. I call the latter process work, and am actually pretty busy with it at the moment (which I consider unfair). It is why things have been so blessedly quiet here of late and also why I intend to keep this short, messy and mildly obscene.

Point 1. A Thought On Comedy.

We watched the first two eps of Season 3 of THE INBETWEENERS last night. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to carry on with it as I thought the second season not quite as strong as the first. However, my wife is less precious than me and we'd heard some good things about it, so we decided to give it a shot. I thought the first episode very funny, the second one slightly less so but still good. However, I also found myself suffering the same feeling of minor irritation, a sort of intellectual heartburn, which I felt whilst watching the second season.

I think this is ultimately down to the show stretching my credulity levels to breaking point with the sheer amount of cluelessness and incompetence shown by the main characters; I find it hard to believe that anyone really acts like this at school over a prolonged period of time and survives. I feel that this is essentially unrealistic, as human beings under conditions of stress (i.e. every school ever) learn and evolve systems of coping, and I think that the ability to learn and change in that context (is this what's known as a character arc?) would enhance the show no end. I know that defenders of The Inbetweeners will say I am missing the point, that it is all exaggerated for comic effect and, besides, the characters are quite plausible enough, thank you. But I think the best moments in the show always come when you get that yelp of pained recognition as they disinter the cadaver of some awfulness from your own past. For this process of identification to work, you need empathy with the character, and for empathy you need to believe that this is a real, rounded individual whose responses to catastrophe are credibly realistic (i.e. similar to your own); only then can you project onto them your own emotions and thereby experience that twist of embarrassment/horror from which the comedy derives.

This is Screenwriting 101, of course, all that stuff about having to earn the empathy of its audience. I also think it's something the show has done brilliantly at points, most memorably Jay's scene at the end of Season 2 in which he sought to conceal his heartbreak over his rejection by his first non-imaginary girlfriend by forcing his delusional banter out between choked back tears ('She wouldn't have this threesome I organised for her...my cock was too big for her.'). From the perspective of characterisation, it was the perfect way to reveal the vulnerability driving his outward, appalling persona and, from a structural point of view, his friends' response to it was the perfect way to end the season: not knowing how to articulate their sympathy, and having been shocked themselves (well, everyone apart from Neil) by their exposure to the messes and pain of almost-grown-up life, they retreat to childhood, taking him home to watch telly and eat chips and pretend they're still kids again. I hope the show manages to have some more moments like this, because I'm finding it difficult to care about the characters right now; right now, they seems like ciphers of teenagers instead of the real thing, who are autonomically going through the motions required to trigger pre-written comic set pieces. Anyway, here's Jay's scene in all its glory (skip to 05:42 for the relevant bit):

More sophisticated and nuanced characterisation is becoming the norm for comedy, where once it was only one-offs, like Reginald Perrin, which did it. Another show we've been following is COMMUNITY, which centres on the experiences of an unlikely collection of rejects, including a single mother, a disgraced lawyer, an acerbic yet wayward beatnik girl, an assortment of high-school drop-outs and Chevy Chase as an existentially confused, chauvinist retiree, as they attend community college. The first episode of the second season of this aired last week, and I thought it was an incredibly sophisticated way of resolving the cliffhangers from the final episode of Season 1. In the last ep of S01, Jeff, the lawyer and alpha male of the study group, got hideously involved in a four-way love triangle. The first episode of the new season didn't deny this had happened, nor did it succumb to a lame will they / won't they scenario. Without spoilers, it came up with a clever way of disempowering Jeff and transferring all the power over to Britta, the beatnik girl and essentially the mirror to his own egotism and therefore his predestined love interest. It was a compelling and brilliant way of acknowledging the fall-out from the previous season in which all the characters involved behaved exactly as previous episodes had indicated they would, and so it successfully reanimated the show for its second season and I cannot wait to see where they take it next, the clever bastards. 

Here's a clip from Season 1 providing a glimpse of COMMUNITY's awesomeness - click around on related links to get more of a feel of the show

REV is another comedy I've been enjoying. It is essentially a study in character in which all the laughs derive from the juxtaposition of character and situation, and I can't believe it will ever put a foot wrong in its gentle development of stories pertaining to the Reverend Smallbone and his ensemble of modern, frustrated wife, worldly archdeacon, mental best mate and disturbingly lovely headmistress. It is an exquisite (and exquisitely acted) portrait of an overlooked and wonderfully eccentric corner of English culture.

Finally, I think EASTBOUND AND DOWN is a great show. The second season's coming soon and I am very excited to see where they go with it. The greatness of this show stems only partially from the torrents of outrageous sociopathic bile unleashed by Kenny Powers, the washed-up baseball player protagonist, but also from the terrible pathos of his condition. He is a classically tragic character, checking off all the points on Aristotle's list: a great individual brought low, hubris, a shifting admixture of blindness and denial concerning his own state. It is the same comedy of remorseless misfortune and loss which we're familiar with from The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm, but here it is refined to an absurd degree. What differentiates it from its predecessors is that much of the pathos is evoked silently, through the facial contortions of Danny McBride as he struggles to contend with the seething mess of conflicting emotions inside him. This technique is so striking because it remains true to his character: the loud, offensive bully who he is (much like Jay in The Inbetweeners) would not be able to articulate the pain he's feeling and the concluding episode at the end of the last season, in which his inability to communicate manifested itself as his actual disappearance from the forecourt of a petrol station, was a genuinely affecting expression of this character trope. He is an incredible actor as well as a fine writer and I think that first season took the comedy of cruelty to a new level. I won't post the link to that moment here, as I don't want to spoil the plot. Here instead is a moment from the first episode when we first realise that there is more to Kenny Powers than the relentless boor he portrays himself to be (cue from 03:25). 

Needless to say, I do not own the copyright in any of these clips and they are only hosted here for entertainment value and if anyone threatens me they will come down immediately and I will cry and offer to hoover their apartment for a month. Possibly.

Point 2. Compassion Fail.

I was walking home this morning and I saw a basset hound loping around the posh Jardins streets with a post-operative scratch cowl around his neck. He seemed lost. At my wife's behest, I went over half-heartedly to see if he had a name in his collar, but he startled and ran way. I felt tired and didn't chase after him. I looked out for him when I came back the same way, but he wasn't to be found. Later, when I was walking back from a detour to the supermarket (fun!), a girl in the apron of her workplace, a nearby furniture shop, overtook me and rushed over the crossing I was waiting at without looking left or right. Thinking no more of it than perhaps she knew the roads better than me, I followed on in the same direction and, a little further on, came across her sitting on a doorstep. She was in a terrible state, crying, chest heaving, really very upset, and it made me feel terrible. It's such a busy, noisy, filthy road, and no one should have to sit there, on a doorstep, crying for all the world to see. Sometimes the world is a horrible place. It occurred to me that I could give her something to cheer her up. I have heard that a packet of Halls Mentho-Lyptus is accepted currency for such moments over here, but I didn't have any. All I had was a cucumber and some bleach, and neither of these seemed appropriate, so I carried on walking, feeling like a rat.

Hmm. That was meant to be a quick, off the cuff blog between walking and working - yet a couple of hours just got past me. I am still trouserless and unshowered and now I'm also starving hungry. I had better go and do something useful.