dual personalities

Well, Daughter #1 here. It has been awhile since I’ve contributed to the blog. Or maybe it hasn’t. The way time moves these days, you never know. There have probably been 33 news cycles, all of them dumb, and none of them “real” news. Anyway! We are battening down the hatches and stocking up the snack drawers here in Mid-MO as we get ready for the storm of the century. Or just a snowstorm. It all has the vibe of the opening of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Don’t worry, I have a supply of chips, wine, and candy. The only difference for me is that I’m really heading for more of a Delta Burke Season 3 look over here.

Anyway, again! The last time I was in St. Louis, my mother and I had a lot of success at an estate sale, getting several fun, little things that really dress up the home. One of them was this little Scrooge that cost a dollar.

I just love him. And I think I’m going to keep him out year round to a) remind me not to be a Scrooge and b) remind me to keep the spirit of Christmas all year round. I don’t know why but he brings me joy.

I recently went down a rabbit-hole of Simpsons Twitter. That is, people who tweet Simpsons lines or clips all day every day. And one interesting account that tweets “On this day in Simpsons history” about episodes that premiered that day. We’re talking people who buy Simpsons scripts on eBay and then tweet line-by-line comparisons to what ended up airing. Way down this rabbit hole, I came across this article about George Meyer, one of the writers/show runners. The article was written more than 20 years ago but this section really stood out to me:

“On most shows nowadays,” he said, “almost all the characters are stereotypes, or they embody one basic trait and very little else. And you have shows where all seven characters talk exactly like comedy writers. All the characters seem to be constantly cracking jokes—and, specifically, jokes meant to injure other people. My old girlfriend Maria once said that if anyone ever said to her even one of the things that the people on sitcoms routinely say to each other she would probably burst into tears and go running out of the room.

“When you and I were kids, the average TV comedy was about a witch, or a Martian, or a goofy frontier fort, or a comical Nazi prisoner-of-war camp. That was the mainstream. Now the average comedy is about a bunch of people who hang around in some generic urban setting having conversations and sniping at each other. I remember watching, in the sixties, an episode of ‘Get Smart’ in which some angry Indians were aiming a sixty-foot arrow at Washington, and Max said something like ‘That’s the second-biggest arrow I’ve ever seen,’ and I thought, Oh, great, shows are just going to keep getting nuttier and nuttier. I never dreamed that television comedy would turn in such a dreary direction, so that all you would see is people in living rooms putting each other down.”

I mean, he’s clearly talking about Friends and Seinfeld and even Frasier. NBC’s Must See TV Thursday lineup. But even on Designing Women, Julia really was kind of mean to Suzanne, even if she did stand up for her to that mean beauty queen that one time. I think this is why when my mom and I watch Brooklyn-99, we are really struck by how nice the characters all are to each other. For 25 years, we’ve watched comedies where people are almost exclusively rude to each other. And then we wonder why no one has any manners anymore, and no one is courteous, and no one thinks about another person’s feelings.

Of course, this is oversimplified and my degree is in English, not sociology, so I’m probably not really qualified to share my opinions, but the comment did make me think.

*the blog title is from Only Murders in the Building.