Is comedy getting mean?

A very good friend of mine and I were having some lively discussions with another Internet user a few days ago about Stephen Colbert. This user felt very strongly that the humor of Colbert was based in cruelty, and therefore sinful in nature. (I was arguing the other side, as was my friend). We found antecdotes and evidence supporting our position that the true butt of all of “Stephen’s” jokes is “Stephen” himself.

So after going round and round about that issue, I find this article today supporting the other side, and lumping Stephen in with the “cruel” humorists of today. It’s very hard for me to take this stand – Even O’Reilly said that he felt that Colbert’s humor was not cruel in nature. But for some reason Colbert tends to get lumped in with many other contemporary comedians, and not in a flattering way:

Some say today’s comedy is mean. Others say it’s wickedly funny
BY RAY RICHMOND
Posted Tuesday, March 13, 2007

There’s a sequence during the second season of HBO’s “Extras” during which struggling actor Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) encounters David Bowie inside a posh nightclub – only to have the legendary musician erupt into an impromptu ditty ridiculing his decision to star in a “catchphrase comedy.” As the patrons gather around the piano, Bowie belts out lyrics like “Little fat man who sold his soul,” while Millman silently sits by, just listening.

It’s the kind of painfully awkward humor Gervais and writing/directing partner Stephen Merchant perfected on their anti-sitcom BBC series “The Office,” and it seems that everywhere – from the raw hilarity of the 2006 box office sensation “Borat” to the delightfully askew approach of NBC’s own edition of “Office” – comedians are taking a page from the German school of schadenfreude when it comes to making audiences laugh. In other words, comedy is getting darker, cleverer and meaner than before.

Nowhere is that more obvious than on television. The four-camera situation comedy replete with a laugh track has gone the way of the proverbial dinosaur, replaced by edgy single-camera sitcoms on network television and even edgier programming on cable. Series such as Comedy Central’s “The Sarah Silverman Program” and its politically charged pairing “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “The Colbert Report,” along with old standbys like “South Park,” are continuing to go after today’s sophisticated audiences with aggressive – and, in some cases – transgressive humor.

The phenomenon is hardly confined to the small screen. Many insiders say that the only real rule with comedy today – be it in film, television or on the stage – is that performers now enjoy unprecedented freedom to shatter conventional boundaries and even challenge notions of good taste.

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