Did online content kill TV sketch comedy
[!summary] For context: Originally I wrote this as a comment under Tomska’s “Who Killed Comedy?”, but thought it’d be worth sharing here too. The super short video summary is: with the rise of social media, and Internet video comedy on sites like YouTube and TikTok, we have killed off TV sketch comedy, meaning there might come a time when we will never have the likes of Key & Peele, or Monty Python to enrich our cultural zeitgest.
It’s sad to see TV sketch comedy go, but I’d like to believe that is the case because of how accessible it has become for an average person to create. As Tomska mentions in the video, there are so many incredible film makers that to me it feels like a fair evolution, or maybe just a metamorphosis. It’s not completely better, but it’s different. In any case, the silver lining is that the art of film-making has been democratised.
That said, it’s an interesting thought that with the death of the TV-produced sketch comedy sets, we are losing that larger narrative - the album-like feeling to the comedy set that gives you something to think about after you are done with the show. The channels who sometimes come close (or have the resources to achieve this consistently) are Almost Friday TV and Chris & Jack. They both seem to operate on a larger scale, with more budget and planning, wider networks. Basically they aren’t making shorts out of their mom’s garage, so they have the opportunity to have a more coherent throughline.
The point is, it’s not impossible to do this on YouTube, but perhaps it’s not really done commonly because of other reasons. Maybe it’s difficult to craft these larger narratives without the budget and the security of a TV production, or maybe that’s not what internet audiences want.
The closest examples to the “album-style” of sketch comedy I have are @ericbernhagen who has a series with his manic protagonist going down a self-destructive path of decay, @davidorlowitz who is currently exploring some characters damaged by their ego and social media… hmm maybe that’s all I can think off. Both are hugely underrated, which is sad to see.
One thing that TV has over YouTube is the cultural zeitgeist. I get the feeling this is the case because of how hyper-fractured online communities are. Social media content has this feeling of being isolated, targetted personally (to you, the viewer), and a little un-sharable at times. Some things that I love to watch online, I could never show anyone I know in real life, because they just would not get it. It’s nothing weird even, just quite niche, and not that funny at first glance.
It almost feels like with the portion of hyper-specific video content that I am showing to a friend, I’m also serving them a dose of whiplash. The ususpecting friend has no context of the algorithmic rabbit hole that you went down before discovering the video/channel you are sharing, so it’s usually not the vibe.
Maybe things have become too niche, so internet-y sketch comedy is not very accessible to wider public. I’m super pro indie film making but admittedly it would be a shame to lose this common area of connection that TV and cinema have created, lest we find ways to bridge these gaps ourselves.