Stephen Fry’s Sitcom Cynicism

In a recent interview, Stephen Fry discussed the nature of American comedy, characterizing it as inherently optimistic: its heroes can “wisecrack their way out of any situation” and life as a whole is “improvable.”

But, as US sitcoms move away from the standards set by the likes of Cheers and Friends, how applicable is that definition today?

On the one hand, it’s impossible to ignore the gratuitous amount of wisecracking one-liners and self-improvement in shows such as How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, or Modern Family. Although their characters are flawed, they can joke about it, and everything is ultimately wrapped up in a neat uplifting package. Love them or hate them, when we watch these shows, we think “American comedy.”

And yet, when we venture beyond the big network hits that everybody on both sides of the pond watches, there is an entire bevy of shows that challenges that formula; shows like Arrested Development and Archer, Party Down and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. If we were to base our opinion of American television on these shows, we would assume it’s at least as cynical and pessimistic as its British counterpart.

Take Party Down, a show about failed actors who work for a catering company. At no point in its two season run does the show hint at these characters having many redeeming qualities; they’re all lazy, unmotivated, or egocentric in their own way. More importantly, they don’t overcome their problems or wisecrack their way into love and happiness. They’re miserable and we laugh at their misery.

Arrested Development, Archer, and It’s Always Sunny do something very similar. Each has an ensemble cast with characters that are, to put it bluntly, terrible people. They don’t see the world or those around them as inherently good or optimistic. Life, to them, is a series of events where they constantly get the short end of the stick, much like the Basil Fawltys of British comedy. They aren’t the one-dimensional happy-go-lucky heroes that Stephen Fry accuses American comedy of having. They are much more complicated and much more hapless.

But Stephen Fry’s mistake isn’t that he’s wrong. It’s that his view is incomplete. There is much more to American comedy than Ben Stiller going from zero to hero, geek to chic, while throwing around irrelevant one-liners.

My advice to anyone tired of watching unrealistic nerds hooking up with super models on a backdrop of canned laughter and contrived dialogue is simple: find any sitcom on FX, sit back, and prepare to laugh your way to a more misanthropic perspective on America and on life.