Sitcoms taking more risks
5 stars of current shows talk about the changing landscape of television comedy
So much of television is about exploring the human condition, and we don’t just mean all the “Real Housewives” shows. Even comedy series today delve into morality, social mores and “otherness,” in sometimes outrageous ways. “There’s just a lot more risks being taken,” these days, notes television staple Tony Shalhoub.
Shalhoub joined LA Times television critic Lorraine Ali and comic performers D’Arcy Carden (“The Good Place”), Terry Crews (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”) and Ramy Youssef (“Ramy”) in a roundtable about the landscape of comedy on television. Here are excerpts of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Q: How do you describe “The Good Place”?
D’Arcy Carden: It’s an afterlife comedy. No, to describe it, you’re either going to be lying or you’re going to be spoiling something, right? I guess we’ve been doing this now for a few years, I should get better at it.
Tony Shalhoub: I think it’s true of so much TV right now. In the old days, there was a one-line for almost everything. It was like it’s this and it’s set in a bar and dah-dah-dah-dah. And now, so much television is layered in a way that viewers receive it differently, they interpret it differently.
Q: I’m not even sure that I would call “Ramy” a comedy.
Ramy Youssef: I guess it’s like a dark comedy about a Muslim family. And we really get to look at a really specific type of family, in a way that we haven’t been able to before. It’s just hyper-specific in a way that I can’t imagine it living in a different time. There’s no tagline, there’s just the tone and there’s a vibe and people are like, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting. I think I heard about that.” Part of it is the internet, right? So, it’s like the internet helps you figure out shows.
Q: This is a pretty diverse crew, I’m assuming most of us didn’t see ourselves on TV growing up?
Terry Crews: As a black man watching TV, I know what the universal white family is. I watched “The Brady Bunch” and grew up in that world. I know what “Friends” is like. What’s so weird is you can walk in that world. You have to be a part of that world. And then you come home and it’s like — hey, it’s a whole different thing. It’s “Sanford and Son,” it’s “Good Times.” And when those shows came on it was like, “OK, that’s our thing.”
And you know what flipped me out? It’s like my big inspiration in comedy was Carol Burnett. Watching Carol Burnett, Harvey Korman, Vicki Lawrence. And to this day, I mean, I still get goosebumps when I look — I have all the old stuff and I still watch it and it works every time. But then I remember when Richard Pryor had his special and I was like, “Oh, my God! This is us and Carol Burnett all in one!”
Q: Tony, your early inspirations, were they comedians, actors?
Shalhoub: Well, I started out really in the theater and I always assumed I’d just have a life in the theater. Not because that was necessarily my goal, but I thought that was the only real viable path. I wasn’t ruling out film and television, but I didn’t see me out there. It was hard to find where I would fit in in that. And the emphasis in my training was to play different characters, nothing too close to yourself. So I very fortunately then transitioned into film and television, but as a character guy, so there wasn’t any one specific person or path to follow. I just, like you, I want to be part of changing the conventional perception.
Youssef: Perception is a big one. It was really cool knowing that Monk was an Arab dude, because that’s not what the role was. And it was just really cool to know that you were just playing a character. All I had growing up was like “Aladdin,” maybe I could be animated — or terrorist roles. And then when I started auditioning, I would go in for them and they were like, “You don’t look enough like a terrorist,” which was so frustrating.
Like I wanted the role. “Hey, I’ll do it.” And they were like, “Nah, man, no one’s gonna buy that.”
So then I played roles where my character’s name is Kevin. And now I get to show an Arab family. It’s an Arab Muslim family but there’s so many different types of Muslims. And so, I even felt this weight with my show, where Muslims will watch it and they’ll be like, “Well, that’s not mine.” And I’m like, “Well, I know, I couldn’t do all of it.” I actually went out of my way to not show your Muslim experience or your Muslim story, because I only want to tell mine. And I want to make space for you to tell yours.
Gina Rodriguez: I felt this extreme pressure when I was playing Jane to represent the entire Latinx community, which is impossible. You support the one and then, the monies come and now we have space for three, right? And then we have space for eight.
Q: Do you feel like the role that comedy plays now is — I don’t want to say more important than ever, but there’s so many ways that you can tackle this. It can be super topical. It can be escapist.
Carden: I do think that comedy is more important than ever — for sure, escapism. I know that when things are getting real rough, my favorite thing to do is to just be like, “Tonight, I am not thinking about that,” and just watch whatever thing is going to make me laugh and not think about it.
But then some shows are tackling important issues in a way that to be able to laugh at it is so healthy. And I know that a lot of us are feeling anxiety and this new weight of the world, and to look at it through a different lens and to look at it through comedy to me is super helpful.
Shalhoub: Well, it helps to put things in context sometimes and helps us to organize it and compartmentalize it in a way so we’re not feeling overwhelmed by the chaos or the avalanche of information and truths and untruths and conflicting realities. You watch things, comedies and they in a way help us to articulate and hopefully form strong opinions and beliefs.
Rodriguez: I find that comedy for us has really helped us tackle these really devastating, horrific, like, family separations and whatnot that’s happening in our country right now.
Youssef: I just think it becomes really dangerous when comedy has to provide answers and like when people look at it for how the world should be. Are you supposed to show things in an ideal state? Because then that becomes, like, sci-fi, you know? I think showing people being messy and showing them being wrong and showing them in their humanity is something that we can do, but it becomes difficult because there’s this weight put on comedy to be part of change and I’m like, “I don’t think it changes anything.”
Crews: You know, that’s a great point. Sidney Poitier said — and it blew me away — he said, “Entertainment does not solve problems.” He said, “It highlights them, it puts a light under them, it holds up the problem, it dissects the problem. It does all these things to the problem except solve it.”