The thing about The Office, like Monty Python, is that because people at the time loved them and raved about them, if you have never seen them before you maybe expect a lot more.
Why has comedy forgotten to be funny? Page 2
It's important not to fall into the mistake of classifying shows as funny and not funny. It is all subjective. I found The Office incredibly funny. There's constant jokes in every scene but it's nuanced comedy. Very easy to miss. I've watched it back a few times and it is my favourite sitcom. It is a sitcom and it is a comedy. It was written as both and has been successful.
Some people prefer comedies which are gag-heavy. People telling each other jokes etc. Audience sitcoms tell you where the jokes are with the laughter. Subjective.
Quote: Chappers @ 24th October 2016, 2:23 PMThe thing about The Office, like Monty Python, is that because people at the time loved them and raved about them, if you have never seen them before you maybe expect a lot more.
That's true, and if you've seen the shows that have followed a similar vein before you have seen the original then the impact is also reduced. You might think the original show was cliched but it was actually the first to do it.
I watched some Laurel & Hardy the other day and it's amazing how many of their visual gags are commonplace nowadays. You can almost predict it when they do it now, but you wouldn't if you were watching it back then for the first time.
Quote: TheBlueNun @ 22nd October 2016, 3:14 PMMr TBN believes that we're all going back to a kind of Victorian-type humour, so nothing's really that funny any more
But it was funny to its contemporaries! Like Shakespeare.
As I tweeted just this week, it strikes me as quite ironic that so many modern comedies without a laughter track "to tell you where to laugh" are actually the shows in most dire need of one.
Quote: TheBlueNun @ 22nd October 2016, 3:14 PMMr TBN believes that we're all going back to a kind of Victorian-type humour, so nothing's really that funny any more, which is a shame because I love to laugh.
Standards were a lot different then and so a lot of tenuous innuendo had to be used, then as we entered the 20th century it became more and more anything goes as the decades went by...................nowadays we have the PC brigade to kill a lot of it stone dead and so we have come full circle.
There are exceptions to this in this so called modern life, but then to get away with it, it is labelled as ironic and we all laugh again with no conscience.