Coupling

UK Televisions Series written by Steven Moffat

I probably would have enjoyed Commedia dell’arte, given the opportunity to understand Italian. For that matter, give me French and I’d have gotten a kick out of a good Comedy of Manners. At least, Moliere has been translated into English and Oliver Goldsmith wrote in English. Of course, all those works have original settings in times gone by. Imaginative theatrical directors will transplant the action to modern day, but that often plays as clever more than apropos. If only people were still writing comedies that made fun of modern social behavior. Ah, yes, the television situation comedy.

From The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy through Friends, Seinfeld, and The Big Bang Theory, it’s easy to perceive the half hour television comedy as a form that arose in the early 1950s and has evolved ever since. In reality, we erected barriers of time and space between performers and audience while shortening the duration, but essentially we work with stock characters playing through familiar situations for laughs. We like the jokes our ancestors enjoyed.

Steven Moffat has found great fame with Sherlock and Doctor Who. His horror mini-series, Jekyll, may become a major Hollywood film. Before all that, Moffat created Coupling, a British sitcom that generally got described as the BBC Friends, despite the key difference that they did not live in the same building. They were older and the characters don’t really map onto one another across the two shows. And sex proved to be a much greater factor in the Coupling plot lines.

Both shows felt like

a breath of fresh air when they started and both shows overstayed their welcome. But we’re here to praise Coupling, which it fully deserves. More than any show that I can think of, the actors inhabited their roles to such an extent that I can’t imagine anyone else playing them. When I think of Commedia dell’arte, I imagine portrayals that are inextricably linked to each actor, but also grant a freedom within each role to improvise. Nowadays, when we think of improvisation, we expect a breakdown of that fourth wall between stage and seats, but trickier is that living portrayal where acting choices seem so natural that we make assumptions about where the acting begins and ends.

And that’s where the writing shines, also. Creating characters to building seamless dialogue, Moffat has a certain deft touch that feels almost Moliere-esque. In Sherlock, we accept the outlandish portrayal of the protagonist “thinking” because it blends with the situation and the surroundings well enough that we grant the flight of fancy.

More so than any other dramatic form, comedy grants us the freedom to ignore the past. The moments that we memorialize are distinct, practically living outside of time. We don’t tie them to any other emotion because the laugh, the pleasure, carries enough power to overwhelm the guilt and pain and sadness that power so much else of our shared experiences driving our drama.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 144 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

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Heart of Darkness

Book written by Joseph Conrad

English class in America follows a pretty standard progression as you move from grade to grade. They get you reading with Dick and Jane or whatever might be in vogue at the time. Then they worry about whether or not you can drag a pencil across paper in something reasonably legible. Next comes the introduction of rules- grammar and spelling. Depending on the school system and teacher inclination, this can go deep and turn into quite the series of unending drills or everyone might decide that texting and spellchecker means that this is unimportant. Through it all, books are assigned for reading.

Then, somewhere in high school, all of this is supposed to come together. The teacher turns to the class and starts asking probing questions about the book that everyone has hopefully read. With any luck, the students begin to notice a certain depth to the text before them. If it hasn’t been banned, the teacher is liable to delve deep into The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. They will likely describe it as the first great modern American novel. To prove this, they may share the scholarly work that breaks Huck’s world down between the raft and the shore, finding each to be a metaphor for some dichotomy, usually civilization and individual freedom.

I’m not knocking the analysis.

Themes in art may be placed there by the creator, but the audience takes away what it will. We could argue all day about how much Mark Twain intended with his tale, but I’m not sure his intentions matter to the reader. Of course, the secondary matter of having an interpretation explained clouds the discussion. If someone tells you that Twain’s book is racist, for instance, then does it become so for you? Is that a less valid reaction than reading other unintended depth? As near as I can tell, the most important distinction is how we view the artist as a person. If neither was Twain’s intention, then that makes him a little less brilliant, but also a better human being.

The other great river novel in English is Heart of Darkness. I have little doubt that Conrad meant every bit of thematic statement in his book. Considering that he wrote near the tail end of Twain’s life, the difference is illustrative. Both Finn and Marlow are on journeys of discovery. Both end with returns to home and civilization. Finn goes down river while Marlow goes up. Proceed with your Ph.D. thesis from here…

Conrad, like his contemporary Franz Kafka, marks an interesting break with earlier authors. As if he attended all those high school classes where meaning was found beneath the surface of the text, Conrad overtly imbued his work for later interpretation. At the same time as other art forms became self-aware, Conrad initiated the modern novel.

What’s it all about?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 145 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out release regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry post irregularly. Receive notifications on Facebook by friending or following Craig.

Images may be subject to copyright.