Perhaps because I fully understand that this a pain-fraught world.
I've known a good deal of pain in this short existence; it matters little whether it is my own or whether I merely share that of others. It's enough to merely know it, in many, many cases. Our world is not perfect.
Most 'sitcoms' find the precious gold in some really irredeemable dross - the situations of our lives. It's not too much to say that most of us have failed - at little things or big ones, in small (hopefully undetectable and inexpensive:)) ways or big, at most times or at all. Failure and tragedy are much more our experience than fleeting happiness and any real joy.
Most of us deal with failures remarkably similarly - we mourn, we weep, we brood.....then, some of us stop crying, move, and build again.....but almost always, we do come back to laugh at the past. In one sense, a sitcom accomplishes all this in 30 minutes, a mainlining dose of stress-busting at the very least, if you will, and a healing balm minus the pain, at the very best.
Sitcoms find a way to frame our fallenness in supportive, sometimes ultimately therapeutic ways. They provide a safe, secure cocoon from where we wounded folk can look out at life, if only for a while, and rest, laugh, learn and then step out again. For when we laugh at a sitcom, we laugh at ourselves - at our thorn in the flesh. We feel that life isn't so serious a thing after all; we can still laugh, and we can hold life with lighter reins.
This certainly is the case with the few (and I've only seen very, very few) sitcoms I have spent time watching.
In Full House, the debilitating, crippling sense of despair hangs heavily over the first four or five episodes - mom's dead, dad's too busy, grandma's going away and there's nothing to look forward to. But enter uncle Jesse and Joey, and we can still laugh, we can help each other along. We can live on now. And this one ran for eight seasons and seems to be one of the most revived of all sitcoms.
In The Hogan Family, with three boys to raise, each new day brings a terrifying new thing to deal with. But, like the song goes, "We get closer through happiness and tears, and in our hearts we share the laughter and the sadness - a special kind of madness, together through the years..."
In what is probably one of the best remembered sitcoms, M.A.S.H., the spectre of war is all but spirited away by lovingly chronicling ordinary life in the safety of the camp, with almost always very, very funny results :)
In Frasier, so what if I'm fat, balding and lonely, and so what if my dad just moved in with me....there's so much to see and live! No one finds love on the show, but everyone laughs a lot..... this one never fails to make me laugh.
In Everybody Loves Raymond, we have a not-too-bright man who cannot always articulate too well, with a wife who doesn't always understand, and a family that's worse at that, all under one roof most of the time. But the laughs keep coming - on and on and on. A lot of the laughs come from the situation itself.
In Cheers, the song says it all - "Breaking away from all your worries sure would help a lot......wouldn't you like to get away? Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you come..."
In Three's Company, it seems as if the best years of our lives are actually those in adversity - without a place to stay, or with only a couple of girls as roommates, always behind on the money, always in trouble with the landlord.
And in one of my very best of them all, Kate and Allie - a show about losers and their lives - the victories and smiles are few and far between but when they come they are larger-than-life, far beyond the sum of their parts.
In one of the most endearing of them all, an English housekeeper steps into the lives of an ordinary American family, to listen, help, laugh with and grow with - Mr. Belvedere. Wesley heals.... a lot. Children can do so much.So kick off your shoes, relax, and laugh - life isn't the no-way-out Catch-22 that haunts your dreams and steals your joy - look, many others are where you are. Or worse....... Life is for the laughs, the moments, the people, not the failures or the fallenness.
Sometime I will talk about how I came across each of these shows and how they healed me in so many ways........
If I dare to gaze at a slower time, Newhart calls itself to memory.
ReplyDeleteLarry, Darryl and Darryl.
Oh, and Leslie and Stephanie. :)
And of course..Bob..er, Dick Loudon was his screen name.
Eleven-thirty was the time.
Stephanie!!!!
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, yes. And a slower time.
I REALLY loved Newhart:) Of course the time I remember was 5:30 PM.
I also remember Anything But Love.
Why'd you have to remind me......those days were so, so soothing.