Comedy, cancer and public health
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m of the opinion that a joke works or it doesn’t. And if you try to explain it, you end up performing an autopsy. That said, Peacock launches the documentary special “Good One: A Show About Jokes” based on a podcast of the same name.
Mike Birbiglia appears here, before an audience in Providence, Rhode Island, trying out a series of jokes to see if they work and if any themes emerge worthy of material for a more detailed special. His audience is fully aware of its role as crash-test dummies in his comic laboratory.
Produced by talk show host Seth Meyers, who also appears, “Good One” does a lot of agonizing over the business of being funny, using pretentious terms like “process” and “craft” to beat the humor, if not the life, out of the funny.
Streaming on Prime Video, “Tig Notaro: Hello Again” captures the comedian discussing her personal and domestic lives and significant health scares. After battling cancer, the “hard work” of “crafting” jokes through a “process” may not seem like such a life-and-death struggle.
› The “American Experience” (9 p.m., PBS, TV-14, check local listings) documentary “The Cancer Doctors” travels back a half a century to 1958, when women first lined up, often by the hundreds, to undergo a pap smear, a simple test that dramatically cut the number of deaths from cervical cancer, an affliction that had claimed upward of 40,000 women per year.
The first practical procedure known to screen for cancerous cells, the pap smear was a long time in gestation and the result of a decades-long cooperation between a Greek immigrant, Dr. George Papanicolaou, a Japaneseborn illustrator, Hashime Murayama, and a Black female OBGYN specialist from Philadelphia, Dr. Helen Dickens.
› Another salute to unsung medical heroes, “The Invisible Shield” (10 p.m., PBS, TV-PG, check local listings) explores those working in the field of public health. As experts strenuously argue in the film’s introduction, the life expectancy of the average American has risen since 1900 from slightly under 50 to slightly over 80.
Much of that increased longevity has come from measures like public sanitation and widespread vaccinations that eliminated childhood diseases. Before these efforts, it was common for families to bury a child or several children before they reached adolescence.
“Shield” discusses many of the ways that public health workers nip epidemics in the bud, saving thousands, if not millions, of lives. Many people only become aware of public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, a crisis that also revealed the vulnerability of society to behaviors based on fear, greed, superstition and disinformation that can undercut popular support for public health measures.
› “The Truth vs. Alex Jones” (9 p.m., HBO, TV-MA) chronicles the radio host’s efforts to portray the 2012 Sandy Hook school shootings as a hoax, and the grieving parents of murdered grammar school children who took him to court.