(no subject)
My sense of humor is so influenced by the greats from the golden age of comedy--I grew up watching Laurel & Hardy, Groucho, Lucy, Jack Benny, Burns & Allen, Buster Keaton, Phil Silvers....In a sense I'm kind of a product of another era....I think one thing that has kept me from trying out comedy material like that is a sense that my style of humor would not fly in this more dummed-down/crude/bathroom humor era we're in.
His quote from Dick Cavett is even more acerbic:
I'm grateful as hell that I got to live in what was the true Golden Age of comedy in America. And sadly, like so much that is in decline today, it has passed. The great George Burns lamented that, lacking vaudeville, there is "no place for kids to be bad anymore." He needn't have worried. Now there is. And its name is cable television. One marvels at its inexhaustible outpouring of witless junk labeled "comedy."
There’s a lot of moronic humor out there now, but there was a lot back then, too - the only difference is that while we have to sort through a few Dharma and Gregs or Caroline in the Citys to find something good, time has already filtered out the mediocre from the ‘Golden Age,’ so the good stuff tends to be all that’s left. Even still, some traces of the truly awful shows linger on, and one only need listen to a few minutes of The Aldrich Family, Fibber McGee and Molly, and that wretched lump of afterbirth, Baby Snooks, to realize that the Golden Years had their fair share of tarnish, too.*
Likewise, cable TV has produced a lot of witless junk, but those shows don’t tend to last, and the few minutes spent sampling Arli$$ or The Comeback before purging all recollection of them until their traumatic memories are resurfaced by a passing reference in a snide LiveJournal post are a small price to pay for a Mr. Show, Da Ali G Show, Extras, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Larry Sanders Show, etc. And these examples are just HBO’s contributions; in their heyday, The Simpsons were just as biting as any of Jack Benny or Fred Allen’s satire, Lunch with Soupy Sales was good, but it was no Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and Seinfeld had infinitely better writing than I Love Lucy.
Tastes weren't less crude then or any more sophisticated now; it just takes a while to find the quality.
* I know these existed because I was in one such 'Golden Age of Comedy' play in Middle School. It was called Shock of His Life and was worse than having the gizzards at KFC.