Any sort of "my husband/wife/spouse is lazy/a nag/useless" or from the opposite perspective "I'm lazy/a nag/useless, I'm so lucky my husband/wife/spouse is a sucker and puts up with my bumbling incompetence".
I feel like the cursed inverse of this is The Orville, where they’re divorced and then drama and jokes about being divorced is half the show. It was in what I saw of season 1 anyway, it was so relentless I couldn’t stand another minute of it.
If you can stand a bit more, the show does become a lot more than what those first few episodes imply.
Yet somehow I still love Married with Children.
It works in that show because the entire family are losers, and they all get mocked by all the others, regularly.
True equality, lol.
I think Married With Children has managed to come through unscathed because of Ed O'Neil and who he is as a person. He's so much the opposite of Al Bundy and has always been very open about that. The show as a result falls into that same category as South Park or All in the Family; We understand that the jokes are meant to be satire via absurdity; It's so over the top and the actor is so different in real life that we just get it.
Compare that to something like Home Improvement, where we know that the humour isn't meant to be absurdist, and we know that Tim Allen really is a douche.
Pretty much every segment of Jerry's stand up routine in Seinfeld. I have no idea how that man became a famous comedian.
Because that shit was actually funny 35 to 40 years ago. It just didn’t age well.
Tastes change.
His stand-up was bad back then too
40 years ago in the UK it was shown at 8am as a filler program when nobody was watching, because it was so painfully contrived
I don't find Jerry funny, like at all. I like Costanza but I adore Kramer
Jerry was a straight guy in the show, is funny because he is not funny. He's just a normal guy with a few good observations
He's there to anchor the show
Was it supposed to be funny? I thought the joke was that he was a terrible hackneyed comedian.
How rude they are to Jerry in Parks & Rec. Doing a rewatch of it now and wow it is way worse than I remembered, and starts way earlier. It's not a flanderisation thing, there was a season 2 joke that made me have to pause and go online just to see how many other people felt the same way as me.
I find it funny because of the sheer absurdity of it. There's absolutely no reason to dislike Jerry. He affable and unassuming, a good family man and just generally a good guy. Yet everyone inexplicably hates him, even Chris. It's makes absolutely no sense and that disconnect is what makes it funny to me.
If they hated him for a reason it would be mean spirited. Instead, it's just over the top silly and fits in with the humor of the show.
The bit where Leslie throws his painting in the lake is one of my favorite moments. It's just so exorbitantly stupid that it makes me laugh.
Personally I don't have as much of an issue with when they're poking fun at him per se, but when they denegrate or damage things he has clearly worked hard on and put a lot of passion into, that's crossing a line for me. It becomes incredibly mean-spirited.
There are two examples in this compilation video. One at the linked time, and another at 6:33. Especially with how happy he is to see Leslie in the second clip until she destroys his art. It's honestly heart-breaking. The pie to the face that came a little bit before that was also hard to watch and really felt mean. Dunno if that's because of how cold and calculated it was (vs the more usual off-the-cuff comments), or because it was a physical act rather than verbal, or something else. But I didn't like it.
Ok, the time stamped one is pretty rough. They don't usually play his reaction with such honesty.
It feels cringe (to me) cause these type of people are often bullied in real life work places, again with no real reason.
It's the opposite of the Lil' Sebastian thing, where there's that horse that everyone idolizes for no discernible reason. Although with that, there's the one character who doesn't understand why they do that, so maybe that's what the Jerry thing needed? Or perhaps that would have made it even sadder lol.
Agreed. The only redeeming thing I can give the writers credit for is that they gave him an amazing family life. Even though he is the office punching bag, he is much more fulfilled outside of work than any other character is. That, and he also does love his job.
Definitely agree. I know it's supposed to be a joke "he's such a great guy we hate him" but it's physically hard to watch.
I was kinda uncomfortable with his interactions with Chris. Chris was my favorite in the show and even his meanness towards Jerry was off-putting.
This sorta works for Tobi Flenderson in The Office tho
I think it works there because it's just Michael Scott that despises him, everyone else sees him as fairly normal from what I recall.
It will be legen... wait for it... dary!
I couldn't agree more. The idea seemed to have been "Hey, lets take a joke that was just luke warm at best to begin with, and then over use it in an attempt to wring every single spec of amusement out of it until our audience gets physically sick when they hear it"
Still a fun show though!
It is kinda brilliant though, the way they set it up.
If you don’t like the joke, you can always fall back to the meta level: this is a 40-something dad recalling how dumb and cringe-worthy he and his friends were in their 20s.
Yeah it's not really supposed to be "funny". It's just Barney being corny because that's who the character is. (When he's not being a sociopath with women.)
Plus Old Ted is an unreliable narrator.
Tap for spoiler
Old Ted is trying to justify to his kids why he wants to bone one of his best friends' ex wife,
The show really should be renamed Why I Want To Sleep With My Old Crush.
I hate how in Disney family sitcoms as well as some cartoons, there's always the stock dumb kid that gives the majority of the humor, and it's humor that gets old.
And they get dumber and dumber by every season
The example I think that got me to dislike the trope was in Austin and Ally. The character Desmond was eating a muffin with the muffin wrapper on, and one of the characters mentioned you "have to remove the wrapper before eating it", so he removes the wrapper and throws the muffin away and starts eating the wrapper because that's how he interpreted their advice. And I'm thinking has there ever been a teenager who didn't have some instinct on how to eat a muffin.
Here's the opposite; a joke that I love from a sitcom I hate: "Secret elixir, huh? Well, I'm usually more of a bourbon guy, but when push comes to shove I don't know what the hell's in that either." - Charlie Harper, "Two and a Half Men"
Some of the Scrubs jokes aged badly. I can't remember any specifically, but there was some anti-gay humor and stuff like that. The show I still appreciated enough to get through a rewatch recently and still mostly enjoyed, but some of the individual jokes were hard to sit through. Wish I could remember one lol.
On arrested development I skip the story arc of episodes related to Maeby tricking people in to thinking her mom is trans so they can be awful to her.
There is a lot of casual transphobia that was common at the time, but I just can't fucking stand those scenes.
This is in a lot of shows and not just sitcoms, but I hate contrived argumentative dialogue that's set up so that the protagonist always gets the last word with "witty" responses/comebacks. It's like watching a "I'm the attractive Chad and you are the ugly NPC" meme in real time.
Any kind of overt and heavily pushed version of their stereotyped personality is the joke.
Hawk Tua
Not a sitcom joke (yet...) but wow yeah. A moderately funny joke for about a day, but the memes have been tiresome since.
The poor girl allegedly lost her job as a preschool teacher over it, too.
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/hawk-tuah-girl
Know Your Meme says the firing is a false rumor. I don't even know that she works at a preschool... because I have not and will not research that... because I am lazy.
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