THAT ONCE energetic form of entertainment has been dragged into an
obscure and ominous black hole since the coming of the telenovelas,
boybands, and whatever else the damned hells had sought to bring to
birth sometime in the late 90's. By "that once energetic form…etc…"
I am referring to a former favorite pastime called television. An
uncountable mass of programs suffered this abysmal plunge: among them,
the comedy profession.
The electric variant of the profession had fared quite well in the
beginning (when I refer to beginning, I mean around the 90's, since
that's pretty much a beginning to me, being born in 1984). There were
a few interesting shows back then, like "Buddy and So,l""Tropang
Trumpo," and a handful of others that I can't seem to recall
at the moment.
"Tropang Trumpo" started well enough, but slowly dwindled
in the later years (no doubt stemming from their seemingly overenthusiastic
tendency to recycle jokes way too often), eventually fading like a
star winking out of existence. "Buddy and Sol" seems to
have lasted longer (though they expired at an earlier date than the
aforementioned, they also begun at an earlier time), but after a while
they have done almost every possible thing in a comedy series and
everyone decided to venture to other forms. "Ober da Bakod"
had an almost solid plot. After a while though, it slowly drifted
from its original intention because of the all too frequent changes
made to the casts.
Nowadays, viewers see comedy on television in another form, having
both old and new elements: none of them good. "Old elements"
is actually a better word for jokes that have been done to death a
hundred times hence, while "new elements" pertain to how
these "writers" shamelessly exhibit them in the effort of
yielding an unfathomable heap of jewels for them to gloat over.
Examples of the above mentioned include a particular program in a
famous station, that virtually does not possess a script and contains
a cast of blundering halfwits, which leads to a show that is not a
show and something that is not funny but insulting to a viewer's intelligence.
Another particular program of this famous station contributes to the
insolence in an entirely different way: insulting gender, nationality,
and human features. While I do not begrudge spoofing of a particular
nationality, I cannot forgive the insult they wielded like a sword
to one country whose culture—despite some of their shortcomings
in the past—I respect. There is, after all, a difference between
spoof and insult. A "spoof" can be an exaggeration of the
nature of a particular thing, person, etc. in other words, it still
retains the original nature of that person. For example, we can portray
Clinton as a red-faced drunkard (and call him something like "Clythwon"),
but portraying Mahatma Gandhi into some kind of weirdo is already
an insult. The creative directors of that show also claim that we
all laugh at the sight of ugly people, and are hypocrites for reacting
to their ideas of televising such a "spectacle." The point
is that we were not like that before, and they are doing nothing to
prevent such a horrid opinion from being spread; the blood of many
flow in their hands. You try to wander into what this famous station
calls adversary, and in that other station you find that you can't
really sort their comedy because it is exactly the same, the only
difference is that there's some extra "preaching" going
on in their programs.
A good alternative to all this dreary routine would have been some
spoof about some fictional characters or works—that are not too
serious (which are usual in anime shows from Japan). There are many
other alternatives if one would only look hard at literature (the
problem would be if they read good literature, which apparently, they
do not) and more than a dozen other things.
It's really disappointing to find out how far the industry had plunged
into such a depth of idiocy and corruption. I hardly watch television
anymore, and am currently happy in the company of my books and other
hobbies. I had it with the telenovelas and other bullshit, especially
comedy shows. No matter how much I try to make something out of it,
it's just not funny anymore.
