Popular culture shapes a lot of the comedy around us, obviously. Plenty of TV shows make references to current events, and plenty more harken to other decades to appeal to an older crowd. Weekly shows like “Saturday Night Live” thrive off of popular culture; it’s a show that’s stayed relevant for more than 40 years by doing so. Period pieces take the culture of a past era and convey that era to a modern audience.
Take “Forrest Gump.” It’s deemed a classic movie. It’s timeless. Despite its settings in decade after decade, it conveys and almost teaches to the audience the culture of the setting. In this way, the movie is inclusive, and anyone from any era with a vague knowledge of recent American history can watch it and catch the jokes.
However, many works of art don’t take the time to convey popular culture and rather assume the audience knows every reference. “Saturday Night Live” is a prime example, because it’s produced for a contemporary audience. Watching an episode from the ‘70s might not be as gut-busting as an episode from last week because you don’t quite pick up the subtleties of the more nuanced jokes. This is to say those works of art may not be timeless.
A distant-future society may look on these works and consider them “of that time” and pay no mind to them. That quality is not inherently a bad thing. “Saturday Night Live” is providing plenty of potent commentary, as are shows like “The Daily Show” and “Last Week Tonight.”
I do, however, take a certain pride in writing and reading “timeless” works of art, works that can’t be pinned down to a particular time or reality. Every joke comes out of a vacuum; the audience doesn’t have to come in with any prior knowledge to indulge in the art. These works exist in their own reality and don’t rely on any other work of art or any piece of popular culture except to resonate with an audience. You know what work of comedy exists in a vacuum? “Red vs. Blue.”
“Red vs. Blue” is an episodic web series in its 14th season, produced by entertainment company Rooster Teeth. “Red vs. Blue” focuses on the antics of two groups of soldiers who are commanded to fight each other for a reason unbeknownst to them.
The series is produced through machinima: filming a work of art through a video game. In this case, “Red vs. Blue” is filmed using the “Halo” series of video games and, to an extent, exists in that video game's world. In stark juxtaposition to its presence in the first-person-shooter action-oriented video game, “Red vs. Blue” is banter-heavy and action-light.
It’s chiefly a character piece; the show tends to put by the wayside or totally ignore any sense of plot in favor of witty inter-character banter. The jokes are potent and clever, but the reason the show has remained popular for so long is its presence in a vacuum.
Disclaimer: the early seasons of “Red vs. Blue” use the word retard as an insult. The series has since dropped that behavior. Anyway.
With the exception of a few world-building details, the comedy comes strictly from the characters’ interactions. Grif is lazy, Caboose is foolish, Church is conceited and Simmons is a brown-nose. The dynamics these characters create are what drive the comedy, not references or in-jokes. The comedy, while vulgar, is organic.
It’s an impressive feat for a series birthed before YouTube and filmed through the odd medium of machinima in a video game — during a time before video games really broke into the mainstream. No matter how much the medium of the art makes you feel alienated or foreign, give the series a shot.
Michael Smith is gentleman and a scholar. His column usually appears on Tuesdays.
