I'm long overdue to vent some more, so let's get started. I've been wanting to mention my assessments of society's current sense of humor for a long time now, and even when I find that there are some people, such as Marzgurl [link] who agree with me upon the sorry state of things, I still feel I have to post an essay getting off of my chest how bad things have gotten.

To be very simple, I generally just don't like comedy cartoons these days, and no; it's not just because I'm an adult. I used to like comedy cartoons, I still like many of the older ones, and I still like cartoons not made for comedic purposes. It's merely in terms of humor where things have gotten low.

Now, I think comedy cartoons have always been hit-and-miss. I have held a consistant dislike for Loony Toons, no matter how popular it is with everyone else, and the aforementioned everyone else won't shut the fuck up about it to me, so I won't stress it much. I also have tried to watch the shows Steven Spielberg produced in the 1990s and again, I just don't get it; everybody else seems to love them, but I really just find them annoying and weird, but also again, I don't want to pick a fight I can't win over sacred cows.

But whereas if something isn't my cup of tea, I can decline to drink it, if something I can't avoid smells like a steaming cup of shit, well, the stink is innevitable and I can't block it out, so now I have to lash back at the shit, and I hope that nobody hates me enough from the last paragraph to stop reading up to here, because I think what I say is important, even if you don't agree. The state of humor cartoons today, like many things today, strikes me as a pathetically amateurish attempt at entertainment that expects to gain the respect of audiences out of grassroots charm alone.

Let's begin on TV. If you want to trace cartoon evolution, look at the way cartoons looked in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. In the first decade, you have cartoons that are formulaic in their approach--the 1980s are infamous and a subject of mockery for that--and so their art and themes were mostly true-to-life. The 1990s saw a bit of a departure from that, but it was an artistic sort. Shows like Dexter's Laboratory, for example, had incredibly deformed character designs, but they were deformed in methodical ways; they were caricatures designed to stress certain character traits. This parting with tradition was strictly visual, but it is my belief that it may have accelerated another process by changing the way people look at the way they made cartoons. Suddenly, the gloves were off, the people suddenly believed they didn't have to do what they thought they did to make cartoons; the given example was art direction, but I don't think they stopped there, instead deciding to proceed on all fronts with reckless abandon--and occasionally, their departure was not so methodical.

Grabbing at straws for new material, and a way to gain new audiences, Cartoon Network arm Williamsstreet grabbed up stock clips they owned and reedited them in new ways. This was a creative way to do things, and sometimes it made me laugh, but I don't believe Williamsstreet ever understood why their shtick was funny. All or most of Williamsstreet's humor, successful or failed, comes from their sheer tenacity at exploring anywhere and everywhere for potential gags, with a real tendency to dwell on toilet humor, sexual humor, drug reference, and anything else that seems naughty. (More on this later.) Space Ghost: Coast to Coast was funny (if pointless) most of the time, but the spin off, The Brak Show (both shows by that name) was an abomination. Never before then had I seen a show that felt so incompetent; I got the feeling the writers were just stumbling around into the weirdest territory they could, looking for the off-chance that they'd stumble through something funny. They didn't ever; humor doesn't work that way. Or does it?!

I said I'd never before seen a comedy so pitifully incompetent as The Brak Show but that wasn't the last time I saw one. Strangely, there seems to be a real demand spike that has kept Williamsstreet's shit factory running; we have new shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force gaining runaway popularity, and here again, it's just boggling to me how it does it. Maybe it's supposed to be funny if you're stoned, but I have one key defense: There used to be shows you didn't need drugs to find funny, so needing them for this is a mark of inferiority.

As near as I can tell, whatever Williamsstreet's appeal may be to average people, its own motivations stem from being the ultimate nadir of the unconventional approach to cartooning spawned in the 1990s, thoroughly tinged with the "We don't give a fuck about doing anything normal so you shouldn't either or you're a snob" mentality. Rather than firing on all four cylinders, they are cutting the emergency brakes, the result being a nonsensical and directionless romp through futility. This new infatuation with "random humor," which is becoming vocally hated by thinking writers on the Internet almost as fast as it became an obsession for the stupid majority here, is remarkable for its total misunderstanding of what either "random" or "humor" even means. I maintain my belief that humor that is nothing-but-random, even if funny, is the lowest and least talented comedy ever, but being somewhat random remains an important part of timing most jokes, so let's dwell on it a little.

Here's another supplement from TGWTG to prepare my point: [link]
For something to be random or humorous, it has to be abnormal. To use classical visual gags as a precedent, how funny do you think it would be to see somebody slip on a banana peel or ballbust himself by stepping on a rake/hoe/loose floorboard if you got a long, drawn-out shot of the object underfoot prior to seeing somebody step upon it? For that matter, have you ever really laughed at somebody slipping on a banana peel, now that it's a cliche that's probably at least a century old? My point, though not a new one, needs to be re-stressed here: Timing is the most important thing to comedy. Things won't be humorous or random without visibly setting themselves apart from conventional happenings surrounding them.

Williamsstreet usually doesn't get that. Their shows like ATHF have actually made unconventionality into a convention, coming full circle past their intended comic appeal. Nothing abnormal stands out as random or humorous in a show where nothing is normal to begin with; the very title makes no sense aside from one word. In fact, due to its normal abnormality, not only isn't ATHF funny to me, but it's actually one of the most boring shows I have ever watched. There are many episodes where, if I just close my eyes and ignore the way the characters appear, I get the feeling I could just be listening to any bunch of obnoxious suburban neighbors anywhere in America. Here's another blow against the supposed claim that ATHF is so random it's funny: NOTHING MUCH FUCKING HAPPENS, RANDOM OR OTHERWISE, IN MOST EPISODES! ATHF is mostly arguements in annoying voices; nothing even slightly interesting occurs to set it apart from average life, so maybe that's why they felt compelled to make their weird bits, things that may be potentially random, part of the constant flow of the show rather than involving them in scenes that were truly unexpected and humorous, because they don't have any such abrupt scenes. What you are left with is a fucking sitcom that the writers thought suddenly didn't need any jokes (not many situations either, for that matter), so they just made the characters look weird and hoped that would be enough.

But that's not the only reason I'm pissed as all fuck. I'm mad, yes, but I'd normally be no madder than I was at Teletubbies back in the 1990s. The real thing that gets me most mad is that while Aqua Teen Hunger Force makes about as much fucking sense as Teletubbies, and is maybe even less enjoyable, those bastards actually have the gall to stick it in a lineup marked as "Adult." I am twenty-four years old as of writing this, and thoroughly insulted by the implications of how our media defines "adults." Is everybody else my age just insane?! Am I just insane?! Are we all?! Well, no, I don't think we are. As with before, this stupidity, though it has found an audience for reasons I can't even begin to explain (Marijuana probably has something to do with it, though), has a cause I think I can. Just as with their interpretation of humor, Williamsstreet sees adulthood as being nothing but a sheer lack of restraint. They took their approach to cartoons, which was so no-holds barred that it fell right apart, and just went one further by removing all regard for moderation of things that earn more restrictive ratings, and the result has again come full circle and become almost immature. Maturity can be defined just as often by the presence of restraint as by the lack; there's a reason that when we get older, we learn to use the shitter, to wipe our asses, and to not talk about those things all the time! In Williamsstreet's mindset, Brak suddenly is wearing a diaper for no reason, Zorak is suddenly mentioning sex for no reason, Shake is suddenly mentioning drugs for no reason, other than so they can slap a higher rating on the show and claim it's "adult." That is the stupidest possible way to convince me of maturity. It's like some idiot buying himself a litterbox and dumping buckets of his own shit into it just so he can claim to his friends, "Look guys; I'm a cat lover!" Whereas truly mature people will think about the implications of how things that aren't appropriate for children got there in the first place, Williamsstreet never does; it just puts shit in to attract the flies that they insultingly presume adults to be.

As of now, such attempts no longer are merely an idiot's perception of adulthood; they are now the very quintessence of gratuity, and they've spilled even into the more decent attempts on Adult Swim. I used to love Robot Chicken; my info still lists it as one of my favorites (really, I need to change that), but now it's becoming as insulting as the rest of them. It makes me sick to see Seth and Matt brutally murder people at the start and end of every season, claiming of us, "They love the violence!" Perhaps they intended it as satire, but with more and more sketches becoming little more than brutal violence, I doubt it; I think they believe we laugh at the very presence of violence. I hope I speak for more people when I declare I most certainly don't. Once a show that paid almost loving tribute to old franchises in its mockeries, Robot Chicken now seems to be a hatefully homicidal monster intent on blemishing good memories.

The very concept of humor is becoming a dying one as more and more things that just aren't funny get thrown into the mix. Fuck you for doing this, Williamsstreet; stop spewing out shit shows and take a good hard look at who we really are and who you really are. A show doesn't have to assault a viewer's intelligence just because it's a cartoon, nor does it have to use every bit of un-kiddy content just because it's intended for adults. Shit is shit, no matter where you stick it.

Special Thanks to Marzgurl and Lindsay Ellis of thatguywiththeglasses.com, whose videos helped drive the point home.

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