"Guess The Joke"

I hate sitcoms. I hate all of them with extreme prejudice. It is based on a very heavy formula which has remained unchanged in its core throughout time. It is a set of characters who act relatively normal and then have periodic bouts of being completely out of character.

Whenever I watch sitcoms, I play a game called "Guess the Joke". It is a game I created when I was a child and realized that even when watching an episode of any sitcom for the first time, I had nigh psychic powers in predicting when a joke was going to happen and what the joke would be.

Of course, I'm not psychic; I'm just observant. It's all formula. Characters act in a particular manner like any average Joe would. But then something...off...happens. Somebody uses a word that's uncommon. They say a phrase that is out of the ordinary. Somebody responds to a stressful situation by saying something unnecessarily mean or somebody responds unreasonably harshly to a comment that was obviously not intended to be offensive (that is the basis of a similar game called Guess the Fight).

I've watched a great many sitcoms. I've watched them from different decades and about different subjects. But they all end up the same. I can forgive the fact that episodes are very often interchangeable. It's comedy, not drama. "At the end of the episode, everything's always right back to normal." But even within their format, there is a general lack of creativity, and that is what makes me so frustrated with them.

Structure is great. It allows for creativity within confines. The ultimate example of such is Dinosaur Comics. The same six panels for every single comic, and yet continuously new and interesting and funny. Sitcoms are the opposite. They are confines without creativity. They are the same tired premises and jokes day after day. It is a concept which should have potential, but consistently fails.

Writing is a serial act, so in a sense, you are always creating serial works (though they may have completely different characters, settings, premises, etc). Make sure that you keep doing something new. If you can recognize that you've used a certain trick or angle before, then it is definitely time to move on.


By the way. Guess the Joke is rather unofficial; there are no strict rules, but if you want to play along, the gist of it is that you announce in what the punchline of any joke is in the brief pause before the character says the joke. You get some points for correctly predicting when the joke is (e.g. if another line is said that isn't a punchline, you get no points) and then if they use the same joke or a close-enough variant, you get additional points. There is no way to win this game because you have to watch a sitcom to play and every time you are correct in predicting, you are driven further mad by reinforcing how pathetic and stale sitcom writing is. (I suppose you could turn it into a drinking game, but on behalf of your livers, I beg you not to.)