My favorite rewatch

I’ve been watching 30 Rock again. It ran for seven season starting in 2006, on NBC, of course. It’s one of a handful of shows that I seem to be able to laugh hard at again and again, so I use it for my “laughing therapy.” That’s what I call it. Anything that makes me bust a gut repeatedly—and I’m pretty easy, pretty ready to laugh—works for me, but 30 Rock is especially dense with jokes.

So this post is just a brief dash—I’ll come back to this later—but I’ve noticed the cultural shift a lot more this time watching it. I’ve started from the beginning—so, it’s 16 years later now. 30 Rock won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in its first three seasons. It’s impossible to imagine it winning today, even once. The distance between what we considered appropriate in mainstream comedy in 2006 and what we consider appropriate today is striking—even shocking.

Sticking with the Emmys for a second, the last four years have been unusual in that each year the award went to a different show. The most recent winner was Ted Lasso, the famously “nice” comedy starring Jason Sudeikis. It’s a charming and funny show, probably deserving of a win, but contrasting it with 30 Rock is a culture shock. That show was a lot of things—including charming, even sweet, at times—but nice was not one of them.

30 Rock was a true cultural satire with no sacred cows. The show ridiculed everyone it met. To be so ridiculed was a mark of love and approval, and everyone was a target. The brilliant comic writer and performer, Tina Fey, whose face was slashed by a stranger wielding a knife when she was five, knew just how awful people are—and in their abundant awfulness, how they could be a comic salve for the rest of us saps.

But her style of omni-directional ridicule (and hilarious self-deprecation), so often depended on identity, personal weakness, and ironic stereotyping, it couldn’t possibly work today. This has been my own assessment, rewatching it, even as I recognize that I revere this kind of hard-nosed satire; that it’s my favorite.

Then I happened to see this tweet—

Nussbaum is a long-time TV critic, now at The New Yorker.

Which got a lot of engagement and funny responses. There were also a number of comments criticizing the show for its style of humor—for its “punching down.” One obvious response to Nussbaum’s question—and my choice—is MILF Island, an hilariously on-target satire of the kind of reality shows running at that time. The premise of that fake show is that a group of seventeen year old boys are dropped off on an island populated by MILFs and hilarious sexcapades ensue.

I won’t explain why this joke was so hilarious in context. Today, however, it’s problematic, you see, because it is insufficiently sensitive to those who have been the victims of underage sexual abuse. (It is amusing to recall that Sudeikis had an arc on Rock during the MILF Island period; his show now would never make such a joke.)

What’s interesting to me in this is how conscious I’ve been of how some of these jokes play now in my rewatch.