Speaker 2
You know, you have like, the jut appetow crew, like, they're all individually famous, but they're very much identified as a crew of people likea, like, a crowd of people. And an even shows like crashing, which is pete holmes, which is, you know, like the pete holmes show. It's like present as a show about these, like, individual comedians and how lonely they are, and how they only survive through this incredible and uplifting sense of community. And so i'm wondering, what is that shift? Am i right to perceive that shift? N my wrong to perceive it? What does that tell us about, like, the trajectory of entertainment and society in america? Well,
Speaker 1
you know, i think that actually, one of the things that's most interesting about that, this is, you know, a cultural historian's move, let's say, is to say that a lot of this is about how we tell the story, rather than what the story is. If we could ever do that, right? Because one could imagine a different narrative account of the periods that you just talked about that focused on the family or the group, sitcom, ah cheers, family ties, you know, these kinds of shows, a friends and and you could imagine defining some of these groups sort of internally rather than externally. So, for example, a we, because we think about andy samburg as sort of you might think of the lonely island one way. Certainly i suspect that andy samburg and gormas conan a keva shaffer think about the lonely island just in terms of how the dynamic works in a different way. And then there are these sort of weird conglomerations of those ideal types. Tha we're talking about too, were saturday night live is a collective where individual people burn more brightly than others, and they go out and do individual work. And then so a lot of this depends on how we tell the story. I do think, though, that your right to identify certain kinds of ideal poles of comedy, and we could put those very broadly in something in which the comedy comes from the transmuted, lived experience of an individual who is, in some sense speaking their truth. And that late eighties and nineties thing was certainly a phenomenon that comes out of lennie bruce and joan rivers and some of these others. And that allows for the experience of saying, i am x right? I am a jew, i'm african american, or im black, i'm gay. I'm going to tell these s s comedy, right? Or a kind of situational or improvisational collectivity, right? Where we say, well, you really, what we're do ing here together is kind of key, right? Whether it's the landscape of an all in the family, right? Or a bar in boston, and shears case, or a central perk coffee house. And sort of what it's like, as the jewish creators of friends said, what it's like to be kind of in your late twenties, after you've finished college and before you're maried, you know, there's a lot of a sort of mixing and bringing together in that kind of way. As you say, on some level, you could define curb your enthusiasm as the story of the larry david show, stepping out from behind that curtain of sin feld, like you said. On the other hand, it's also a real improvisational work with a cast that, as the years have gone on, have become more and more important to the functioning of the show. So, you know, a lot of it is how you tell that story. And i'm never sure to make a big, sort of top line what that means in those terms. As a result, what i will say is absolutely the case is that curbier enthusiasm would have been far more unlikely to exist without h b o doing a lot of original programming. And that shift from only a couple of conduits a couple of major network channels, to pay cable and now streaming, where the audiences required to make something successful are much smaller, really allows for a much wider diversity of expression. It could have been that that jud appetow crew that you're saying could only have had one movie or one, you know, every year. But now, you know, they can have a movie, and they a all be together, and then they can have their own shows on streaming, you know, individually, or they can have ther own little projects and or podcasts, right? And it's ok that they work for just a smaller number of people, which allows much more individual expressions to flourish.