Why Sunny’s Not Funny

What makes a show funny? What makes a show good? Can a show be funny without being good? With an impalpably large and loyal audience, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of those shows random friends and strangers rave about over the years and you end up watching on Netflix, getting addicted to it like crack—though you’d hardly kill your mother to watch it.

With four late-twentysomething friends running an Irish pub in Philly, it’s not exactly Cheers—a show that brought disparate characters together for a successfully synergistic tension of backgrounds and personalities. A bar is a great place to convene people from all walks of life. In Sunny, though, a bar is only a convenient prop to set up easy one-joke episodes (i.e. underage drinking). Nothing on the show seems to be based in any kind of reality. Thus, it’s all one long “improv” sketch with new suggested plot fillers supplied every twenty minutes.

This is a pattern for the show. Just as the background fails to knot itself to the core of the show (which is as hollow as a tree trunk), the characters are dependably flat, one-dimensional, and unreasonably callous. Seinfeld may have started to slip into nihilistic self-caricature toward the end of its run, but its characters were rich enough by then to see the show through. Even Arrested Development, an overrated but clever and skillfully made dysfunctional melo-comedy, gave us deeper, more interesting people than these four walking props.

After one, episode, you know exactly what to expect. There are no surprises, no multiple arcs or layers. Cynicism rules the day as the show blindly races headfirst for the most offensive punchline and the cheapest laugh. In rebellion against decades of sitcom conventions, this new brand of “comedy” pits yuppy comedy teams against one another in a race to check the most socially provocative topics off the list inherited from better shows like All in the Family and (even) Married with Children, many of which are plain vanilla by now. The pilot tackles race relations…really?

At best, Sunny is a live-action South Park where supposedly taboo subjects (rehashed from superior shows that have dealt with these issues far more deftly) are Sunny’s thrust and reason for being. At worst, it’s a discarded rough draft of Arrested Development executed by UCB rejects. Curb Your Enthusiasm and Extras are the only shows that have successfully driven cynically charged vehicles because even they have found ways to embrace their characters, to at least allow for the possibility of heart and depth. Sunny has successfully exploited the general public’s thirst for ADD comedy, but like any addiction, the drug is going to run its course and leave you craving more with no lasting satisfaction.