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TV 101: Stupid Is As Stupid Does, Especially on NBC
by Dr. Ryan Vaughan, PhD (no, seriously), posted Mar 2nd 2011 5:00PM
Roughly eight years ago a subtle movement began to emerge on television screens across the country. It was a movement that you might not have thought twice about, your vision somewhat clouded by a blond, large-breasted blitzkreig and a sense of superiority that kept the true duplicitous nature of the movement creeping steadily forward.I say "creeping" because that's exactly what it did. It lurked around our children with its mustache of fame and its van with a wolf air-brushed on the side of delusion, waiting for the perfect opportunity to offer them the sweet candy of glamorized stupidity.
Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie made being stupid cool. They made their way to the "top" by tacitly promoting a teen culture of vapidity. While they never overtly stated this intention, it nonetheless became an undercurrent of their respective shows: 'Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica' and 'The Simple Life.'
Who cares? Me. Why? Because it seems as though this movement has transcended its basic cable roots and moved into the mainstream, where it can reach a much broader audience via the major networks.
There are characters so dense -- barely grasping even the simplest of day-to-day tasks such as talking and being -- around the televisual landscape that it's enough to make one wonder why these characters exist. Why are they so painfully (and entertainingly) dumb, and what does their seemingly calculated presence say about us?
NBC would seem to be the biggest culprit in this crime against intelligence. On its biggest comedy night of the week, the network brings some of the dumbest characters to the forefront: Troy from 'Community,' Erin from 'The Office,' Andy from 'Parks and Recreation,' and Tracy from '30 Rock,' and while they all provide plenty of entertainment, they do so with an almost profound lack of brain juices.
This is fine. I understand the inherent escapist nature of television and the fact that it is, fundamentally, a mode of entertainment, but at whose expense? There's nothing that says TV can only be used as a means of escape from our lives, a means of frivolous, mind-numbing escape. Since the Norman Lear sitcoms of the '70s, these kinds of shows have been not only entertaining and funny, but also about something, but with characters like those listed above, that notion can become quietly overlooked, if not altogether ignored.
Take 'The Office' for example. Surely Michael Scott had enough cultural ignorance and raw boneheadedness to keep us all fat and giggly for years of syndication to come. His morbid naïveté is what drove the series for so long, but it wasn't an irredeemable idiocy. We could always justify Michael keeping his job somehow because his sales prowess was unmatched, if not completely by accident, and often Michael learned something through his negligence, or at least we did.
Now Erin, Michael's secretary, makes Michael look like Einstein and Stephen Hawking by comparison. Her sole purpose on the show is to act dumb and look cute, but what kind of viewer needs to see such degrading levels of intellect in order to reassure themselves that "at least I'm better than that?" I don't know what's worse: the fact that we might need this kind of reinforcement, or the fact that networks really think we need it.
Considering the times in which we live, these characters are even more perplexing. With the economy having a hissy-fit, it's hardly feasible, or even close to reassuring to have what amounts to a court jester employed simply for fun. How does watching Andy Dwyer engage in epic buffoonery yet continue to keep his job, frequently popping in with an opinion or suggestion so inane that you wait for the episode titled "Andy Gets Tested for Learning Disabilities," make anyone feel better about our current economic plight? If nothing else, it trivializes that plight.
I suppose a lot of this comes down to the fine line between laughing at and laughing with. Laughing at someone or something has a pejorative connotation, one that creates distance between the parties involved. Laughing with someone is an entirely different concept. It arguably brings people closer together to forge a mutual understanding, and maybe this is where my frustration lies. These characters don't offer anything for us to laugh with, they only give us lines and actions to laugh at. This reduces our relationship to television to something hollow and dismissive when it could just as easily be full and engaging.
In the case of Troy and Tracy, there's a little more leeway. They're "supposed" to be stupid, and before you all lose your voices calling me a racist, I'm going to give you much softer stereotypes to be outraged about. Troy is a community college student and Tracy is an overblown celebrity. These two very specific cross-sections of our culture are presumed to already be at a cognitive disadvantage, so we can understand or accept their cluelessness a little easier.
Never mind the fact that everyone else on 'Community' is a community college student, yet they don't exhibit the diminished capacity for understanding -- except for Pierce, but he's old and carries with him all the associated cultural stigmas. And Tracy occupies the "at" end of the laugh spectrum, diametrically opposed by Kenneth at the "with" end. Their respective dimwittedness just seems gratuitous, and if you're into gratuitous stupidity, why not just listen to Nickelback?
I would be remiss if I didn't end this by saying how much I love these characters. We're often most critical of the things we love the most. Just ask my wife, and kids, and Burger King drive-thru attendant. I think Andy Dwyer is such an integral part of 'Parks and Recreation's' success and humor, and I think the same about everyone else mentioned here. This isn't hating, but more like evaluating. It's important to think about things like these that we so often take for granted.
So, what do these kinds of characters say about us? For every Charlie from 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' exposing the distinct disadvantages of dizzying illiteracy, there seems to be three or four Andy Dwyers using their limited mental resources to perpetuate the idea that it's cool or at least fun, to be paralyzingly air-headed. It's one, harmless thing if we want these types, and another, wholly different and frightening thing if we need them to make ourselves feel better.
Dr. Vaughan teaches English/media/humor courses at Binghamton University in upstate New York, and he just farted. You can also check out his blog or find him on Facebook.
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