It’s Pat: When Is the Joke Not the Joke
Julia Sweeney recently announced that she will be the subject of an upcoming documentary, and it reminded me of a particular sketch that I think is a great example of when the joke might not be the joke you think it is.
In comedy, there is a concept called the Game of the Scene. Broadly, the Game is what’s funny about a particular scene, or sketch, or character. It’s a level of examination that most people don’t apply to comedy (way too many people are content to just keep quoting Anchorman for 20 years running), but consider what it is about your favorite sitcom characters that you find funny. It’s probably something that can be crystalized in a sentence, and it’s probably something to do with their point of view, personality, or behavior: Homer Simpson is incredibly dumb, so Homer jokes are about stupid misunderstandings. Ron Swanson is the most woodsman-y man to ever live, so Ron jokes are about being an expert craftsman. Sheldon Cooper is the most suave physics professor to ever live, so all the Sheldon jokes are about being physics James Bond. I have never seen the Big Bang Theory.
In sitcoms, the comedy mostly comes from how the characters react to various situations (it’s an elegant portmanteau). Ron steps into an everyday Lowe’s, and Ron’s reaction to being greeted by an everyday employee is the joke. But it is not always the case that the unusual character is the source of the joke. Take the Julia Sweeney/George Wendt sketch that I mentioned a couple hundred words ago: Pat at the Barbershop.
Pat steps into an everyday barbershop, but it’s the barber’s reaction to Pat that is the source of the joke. Sure, both characters get laughs in the sketch: the barber volleys a question he expects a gendered answer to, and Pat spikes a gender-neutral answer. The back and forth is what keeps the sketch moving, but it’s never Pat behaving inappropriately, it’s the barber goes on weird tangents about baldness genes and tries to brush Pat’s privates.
The recent interview with Sweeney confirmed what I’d always thought:
But even when we were writing all the sketches, we were really making fun of the other people [in the sketches] not being able to handle the fact that they couldn’t tell. The laughs all came from that.
While Pat is the unusual character in the scene, the joke is in the other characters’ reactions: they can’t determine Pat’s gender, and they try to figure it out indirectly to avoid embarrassment. Now, I get the criticisms. I don’t think Pat ages terrifically, and the modern version would be over in 15 seconds when the barber just asks for Pat’s pronouns. But there’s a difference between making fun of people being uncomfortable with an idea, and making fun of the idea itself. Feel free to keep on quoting Anchorman, but I think it’s worth putting on your high school English teacher hat and analyzing: who is actually the butt of the joke here?
Originally published on Medium