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At some point in our shared and admittedly traumatic recent past, we appear to have decided that the greatest virtue a TV comedy can have is that it makes us feel nice, hopeful even. Witness Schitt’s Creek, winner of nine Emmy Awards, or Ted Lasso, which has taken home 10, roughly one Emmy for every two episodes put to air.
I mean, my god. I don’t begrudge the world nice things. But Ted Lasso is to comedy what being slapped in the face with a wet newspaper is to boxing.
Ted Lasso is nice, not funny.
Yet, the show gripped people. Everyone I knew was recommending it to me as if all my friends and family had been inducted into a blood cult whose sole purpose was to spread the word of Ted. “It’s just so nice,” they’d say. “I mean, not like ha ha funny, but nice.”
Nice it might be, but the only thing about Ted Lasso that could be described as comedy is the premise itself: a small-town American football coach becomes the manager of a Premier League soccer team despite not knowing anything at all about soccer. This is a great pitch and worked exceedingly well during the 30-second ads in which the character Ted Lasso was born.
Then Ted starts speaking, and you realise that you, the viewer, are trapped in a self-help seminar being run by a guy who sleeps in his car.
Now, obviously, there’s a long and despondent history of comfortable TV comedy, much of it exceedingly successful. (I see you, all 279 episodes of The Big Bang Theory.)
But in Ted Lasso something more malign has occurred. The low-stakes, low-demand ethos that defines traditional network sitcom design has merged with the cultural imperative toward self-care and personal improvement to create a show that’s less comedy than it is fan fiction for progressives who feel like they’re being bullied by the present historic moment.
I blame Parks and Recreation. A superlative comedy and one of the best shows of this millennium, it nonetheless taught a generation of emerging comedy writers that “nice” and “funny” were ideal bedfellows.
But what people miss in Parks and Recreation is the darkness lingering just below the surface, darkness showing corrupt and inept government, venal corporations and petty and vengeful humans. That the characters might overcome these external and internal forces, episode after episode, was what gave the show its irrepressible spirit.
In 2010, the humour researchers (yes, it’s a thing) Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren proposed what they called the “benign violation” theory of comedy. Basically, things become funny when they violate our sense of the correct order of things, but in a way that we perceive as non-threatening.
Non-threatening Ted Lasso certainly is. But I’ve felt more violated during a routine hug with my mother. Watching punchlines being served up as though they’re a scoop of vanilla soft serve, I’m reminded of the comedian Russell Howard describing his creative process: “You’re not a joke!” “But I’m dressed as one!”
And lest things get too frivolous, the show is always ready to neutralise the mood with a classic oh-gee Lasso-ism such as, “If you care about someone and you got a little love in your heart, there ain’t nothing you can’t get through together,” a line of such limitless vacuity it feels like it’s breaking physics.
One gets the feeling that Ted Lasso is grasping for a point about kindness and vulnerability and the need for men to show more of both, but the show’s in-built aversion to anything resembling darkness means that it hits with the impact of a ’90s after-school special for sheltered teens.
Yet the truly infuriating thing about Ted Lasso’s much-applauded attempts to Make A Point is that we find ourselves in a golden age of meaningful comedy. Shows like Rerservation Dogs, Fleabag, This Way Up, I May Destroy You, Barry, Atlanta, We Are Ladyparts and Bad Sisters (to name a few) all offer emotionally nuanced, finely balanced portrayals of flawed characters grappling with some of our era’s most profound issues.
These shows understand that good comedy, as with all good art, helps us make sense of the world, to comprehend the incomprehensible. Bad comedy, as with all bad art, presents to us a limp and unquestioned reflection of that world and then makes you want to burn it to the ground along with everyone inside it.
I would, perhaps, take less issue with Ted Lasso if it didn’t so obviously see in itself the trappings of importance. One can too easily imagine the cast and crew looking at each other after a day’s work and whispering, “We’re making the world a better place”.
Spoiler alert: they weren’t. Hamstrung by its reckless dedication to niceness, the promise of an episode of Ted Lasso is less collective improvement than it is to usher one 30 minutes closer to the blessed oblivion of sleep. And perhaps that was a worthy endeavour while the privations of the pandemic era took from us so much that was bright and familiar. But comedy it certainly ain’t.
Ted Lasso season three will stream on Apple TV+ from March 15.
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