I’ve been thinking about comedy in relation to Mindy Kaling’s statement that the Office couldn’t be made today. Similar to repeated statements that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. And while I think that both of those are true, I think that it’s often framed in the wrong direction.
It’s often framed as if it’s something bad about then or something bad about now, that we should be able to make the Office or Blazing Saddles today and that’s just not how comedy works. Because one of the key things of comedy is that successful comedy often points out something that is completely normal and points out how absurd it is in a way that helps society realize how absurd it is and move on.
That’s the thing with Blazing Saddles or the Office for that matter. The Office is a comedy that is about how absurd workplace culture is and how weird it was that we were treating some of the aspects of workplace culture as normal. Michael Scott as a character was normal at the time when the Office started. When the Office kicked off, that was just a normal boss, everyone had a boss like Michael Scott and the idea that what he was doing was extremely toxic was the joke. It was like “hey, isn’t it weird that this is the kind of person that everyone gets as a boss, this greedy, venal, absolutely petty, completely incompetent person as a boss.” Who regularly sexually harasses, has zero boundaries about what is workplace appropriate and what is not. That’s what the Office points out, it’s the whole point of the Office.
I have kind of an odd perspective on the Office, because I never watched the Office until this year, and it was very interesting to see as a slice of history about what workplace culture was and such. Blazing Saddles was skewering racism, especially 70’s racism, off the particular kind. It’s part of the larger context of ‘isn’t it kind of absurd how we act around Black people in positions of authority.’ Because it was the 70s and there was a lot of change going on that had Black people in positions of authority that they hadn’t been in in most people’s lifetimes.
Those comedies couldn’t be made today, but it’s because they were successful comedies, because part of what they were doing was pointing something out about the present moment that was absurd and people actually listened. And now, there’s a lot more discussion about toxic workplace culture, there’s a lot more discussion about the absurdity of racism against qualified Black people in positions of authority.
So, it’s not that there’s something wrong with now that we can’t make the Office or Blazing Saddles, it’s that what we need to be talking about now is different. Because those worked, because those were good comedies of their time. Does that mean that they’re comfortable for modern audiences to watch? No, it doesn’t. Really good comedy is often uncomfortable, but for comedians, if you’re telling the same jokes now that you were telling 30 years ago, you are behind the times. What you had to say has already been heard. That’s what it comes down to.
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