The Characters and the Jokes

In GQ's engrossing oral history of Cheers, Shawn Ryan shares this nugget of wisdom:

... on Cheers, the characters came first, and the jokes came second, which was rare. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters.

Characters before jokes? A fine ideal, but rarely achieved in the yuk-centric form of the 30-minute sitcom.

Lately, however, as I've been Netflixing my way through Cheers, I have found, much to my delight, that the writers really don't go for big laugh after big laugh. Quite a novelty in the age of 30 Rock.

Even during cold opens, when most other sitcoms fall over themselves trying to be hilarious, Cheers is often content to be charming and graceful. Take, for instance, the very first scene of the series, where Sam Malone, bartender/protagonist, handles an underage customer:



The writers are obviously not interested in funny for funny's sake. They would prefer to take their time, show us around the bar, and teach us some things about Sam. We learn that he conducts his business smoothly, with a kind of lanky insouciance. He has a sly sense of humor, but not a caustic one; he doesn't shout at the kid, tell him to get out, or even mock him all that much. As Shawn Ryan suggests, the show lets character, not the conventions of the genre, dictate the shape of the moment.

In other words, Cheers has patience. It won't sell out the humanity of Sam, Diane, Coach, Norm, and Cliff just to land a joke. (Notice I've left out Carla, my least favorite Cheers character, who frequently does seem less a person than a walking wisecrack.) Don't get me wrong: the laughs are there, lots of them. But they emerge organically from the established personalities, relationships, and conflicts.

And this sort of patience, while a virtue, exacts a cost. Viewers of TV comedy expect hilarity on the regular, and they might grow restless during long stretches of mildness. On the other hand, when a sitcom pursues a laugh quota, it absorbs another cost, a subtle but dear one.

Consider late-period Friends. Initially a gently paced program, a worthy heir to Cheers in NBC's "Must See TV" lineup, Friends eventually slipped into a morass of desperate absurdism. The jokes, of which there were far too many, began to corrode the authenticity and likability of the characters.

The notorious "unagi" subplot from season six is a case in point. Yes, it whips the studio audience into a frenzy, but only at the cost of Ross Geller going full sociopath:



I mean, yeah, pretty funny. But who the hell is that guy?

Believe it or not, in early seasons, David Schwimmer played Ross as a leading man, blending goofy self-deprecation and sturdy decency like a 1930s screwball hero. Although Schwimmer threw himself (sometimes literally) into the gags, he never compromised Ross's dignity. But by season six, unagi-Ross had surfaced, and unagi-Ross was a childish, bug-eyed weirdo.

The character had been sacrificed to the joke.

Perhaps the Cheers gang will head down the same road to perdition. I'm midway through season two, and the show has yet to go through several key transformations. (Frasier arrives in season three, Woody in season four, Rebecca in season six, etc.) But right now it's close to perfect. Especially when, every so often, it gives me permission not to laugh.