Beavis and Butthead were dicks.
Don’t get me wrong, they make me laugh, but they’re dicks.
They hate everything but heavy metal, chicks, tacos and fire. Everything sucks.
They watch music videos and rip on them. They treat Stewart and Daria like shit.
They hate school and are pissed that they have to be anywhere but on their
couch. They delight in the misery of everyone around them.
They’re funny, but they’re dicks.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is Gary and Joel
of FX’s “Unsupervised.” When a high-strung girl named Megan mourns that no one
likes her, Gary and Joel chime in that they do, only to be dismissed by Megan
because “It doesn’t count. You guys like
everyone.” And the guys just keep on smiling.
And that seems to be the defining characteristic of the
leads of “Unsupervised,” two latch-key kids with little or no parental
guidance. Talking about how he keeps his house clean while his stepmom is out
of town, Gary brags “I friggin’ vacuumed the stairs yesterday!” to which Joel
responds “You got to. It’s important to
be proud of where you live.” There isn’t a trace of irony or sarcasm from
either. A new student wants to score
drugs? “You don’t even need ‘em. Nurture your frickin’ body with sunshine
instead of pollutin’ it with chemicals, you frickin’ idiot.” A dentist makes a
self deprecating remark? “What? Hey, you listen to me. You do one of the most
important jobs in the world. Without you, we wouldn’t have no smiles.”
The comedy of cynicism is easy. Take something you don’t
like and exaggerate how much you don’t like it.
Everyone who tries hard is lame. Enjoy things BECAUSE they are bad, not
despite it. Check out the episode of Newsradio
“Airport” and watch Phil Hartman’s Bill McNeil discover that his being nice
to people ironically stopped being ironic and started being sincere, and he
actually feels GOOD about it. He reacts as though he discovered he had wings.
You always need some sincere characters to bounce off of,
but in general, main characters on TV lean towards the cynical. They make fun
of other people’s dumb ideas and comment on the action, almost as a surrogate
for the audience. It’s easy to write comedy when the characters just insult
each other. Shows like “The Big Bang Theory” and “Two and a Half Men” have sold
into syndication based on fundamentally mean characters that really don’t seem
to like each other.
But there’s a fairly recent trend on TV of positive,
enthusiastic characters getting their time in the sun. Aside from Gary and
Joel, there is Leslie Knope, as played by Amy Poehler, on “Parks and
Recreation.” Leslie is a woman who believes that there is no better way to get
big things done than to hold a public forum. She believes in the power of
democracy, no matter how many times it fails. She believes in the people around
her, despite all the evidence demonstrating that her faith is misplaced. She
believes that whipped cream is a condiment that belongs on every meal. She is, essentially, a wide-eyed teenage
girl, all grown up. When she says that
Pawnee, the city she serves as Assistant Director of the Parks Department,
which holds the distinction of being America’s fattest city and home to more
atrocities against Indians than it has street lights, she isn’t trying to
convince you. She is stating a fact.
And it is her optimism that fuels many of the stories and a
lot of the comedy on the show. In recent episodes, she has fought to avoid
running a negative campaign, rallied the entire Parks Department around finding
a man for her best friend and tried to get one single potential voter to like
her, by force if necessary. Her optimism has run up against world-weary
cynicism time and time again, but she always comes out smiling, proving that
belief in people’s better angels, or a just world, or that people you love will
come through, is a smarter point of view than expecting the worst and lamenting
that you’re proved right.
But there has never been, and likely never will be again, a
character to compare for sheer unbridled enthusiasm with Sue Heck. As portrayed
by Eden Sher on “The Middle,” Sue Heck is an optimist who borders on the
delusional. After (correctly) believing that her family forgot her birthday,
she is woken up in the middle of the night by her parents and a half-assed “surprise
party” in which she is given her mom’s old cell phone. And how does she react?
With a big grin and “So I cried myself to sleep for nothing?!” She treats her
own emotional heartache as though it was the punch line to her folk’s great
prank. When her boyfriend moves away, she is genuinely thrilled that he makes friends
with a smart, pretty, funny girl who just broke up with her boyfriend, and is
just as genuinely shocked when he breaks up with her for this new girl.
We live in a cynical world. Pretending it’s anything else is
a fool’s errand. Especially during an election cycle, it is easy to look around
and be disgusted by lies, selfishness and negativity. But there is something
wonderful about characters that look at that same world and see infinite
opportunity and hope. They don’t comment on the world around them so much as
they strive to make that world fit the one they see in their heads. They become
agents for change. They act, rather than react. They want things, whether they
be a pair of underwear that isn’t a hand me down, a seat on a small town city
council or Justin Bieber tickets, and they go after them, regardless of
naysayers or difficulty. They become
characters we don’t just want to watch; They become characters we want in our
lives.*
*Man, that feels maudlin and sentimental, but that is still how I'm ending this.
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