3 things: Ithaca Festival; thoughts on watchings sitcoms; Vicky's return

[edenfalling]

1. Every year around the start of June Ithaca throws a four-day (okay, three-day plus a parade) town festival called, unimaginatively, the Ithaca Festival. And every year it rains.

Last year was deeply unusual in that rain did not fall on the parade -- which was ironic, since the organizers had accepted the inevitability of rain and made rain the theme.

This year the parade also escaped precipitation, and the weather forecasts were for clear skies Friday through Sunday. I was beginning to doubt the foundations of the universe.

But it rained on Saturday. All is well once again. :-)

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2. The Joseph Gordon-Levitt project continues! I have now watched four episodes of 3rd Rock from the Sun. It's been a strange experience, since I have not regularly watched sitcoms since the days my sister was addicted to Full House. (My television habits were largely driven by the habits of the people I lived with, since even when I had a TV, I almost never turned it on of my own volition after I outgrew PBS kids' shows and the few cartoon shows I really liked got cancelled.) Also, I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick. So a lot of comedy is difficult for me to watch.

The thing is, I am discovering it's massively less painful to watch people make hideous fools of themselves in a comedy than it is to watch people make hideous fools of themselves in a drama, or even in a dramedy.

It's about expectations, I think. I go into a comedy expecting people to be exaggeratedly stupid and embarrass themselves, so I am not caught by surprise the way I am when funny and/or embarrassing scenes appear in more serious shows. Also, I am not usually according the characters the same level of belief -- I don't grant them the same depth of interior life -- so I am not as deeply hurt/embarrassed on their behalf. If I know what's coming, and what level of realism applies, I can react appropriately instead of cringing away in almost physical pain. (In other words, I can keep from getting too attached. Even in a comedy, if I start getting attached to characters -- if I start believing in their emotional reality -- the sympathetic embarrassment squick kicks right back in. -_-)

Despite this comedy buffer effect, I have needed to hit the pause button several times each episode, and so far I've had to watch at least one scene per episode in short 1- to 5-second bursts, but that is still much better than I usually do.

(I may discuss the actual show some other time. For now, I will simply say that it is deeply stupid but in a genuinely funny way, that it's very much a product of the 90s, and that I find all the cast members likeable even when their characters are, well, dicks. *wry*)

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3. Vicky is back in NJ and has acquired a temporary cell phone. She has about seventeen other things she needs to get done -- it is apparently rather tricky to reconstruct a life after being out of the country for a year -- but I think once she has a few more days to breathe, things will start falling into place. And I can text her whenever I want, which is nice. Email and Skype are all very well and good, but they lack a certain immediacy that a phone can create.

Comments

[leahnari.livejournal.com]

Yay!
Yeah, 3rd Rock is as you say. I also have a sympathetic embarrassment squick, and with this show, Dick is the primary trigger (very much his namesake - one of the things that drives me nuts is that he doesn't seem to learn from episode to episode, but it's a sitcom, why am I looking for character development/depth?), but he's so over the top that it does make it a little easier to accept as within the bounds of the comedy's reality. >_> If that makes sense.
Glad you're finding it funny, though. What do you think of Tommy?

[edenfalling]

I have only watched through episode 6 of season 1, so at this point Tommy has not had a plot of his own -- which is noteworthy since Dick, of course, always gets a plot, Sally has had the bad date plot and the temporarily-in-charge plot, and even Harry had the minor plot where he briefly adopted a dog. (Tommy's reanimated frog science project doesn't count, since it happened mostly offscreen and wound up as a point in Sally's plot.) I speculate that the writers were a little wary of leaning too heavily on JGL when they had several adult actors who were more known quantities, and therefore relegated Tommy to playing either comic relief or straight man to the other three... at least at first. Presumably that gets better later on.

So far, he seems to be defined by being utterly at the mercy of his teenage hormones, and by being slightly less completely nuts than his teammates. (But only slightly. *grin* He's still the guy who handed a metal golf club and a metal chain to Harry when Harry was supposed to climb a telephone pole in the middle of a thunderstorm. Which, you'd think a species whose knowledge of science is advanced enough for space travel and reanimating frogs would know about electrical conduction, but it's a sitcom. Rule of Funny trumps logic every time.)

[leahnari.livejournal.com]

Rule of Funny trumps logic every time.
Exactly. And there are pros and cons to that.

I speculate that the writers were a little wary of leaning too heavily on JGL...
I think you're right there; I forgot that his stuff came later. But he does come into his own soon enough, IIRC.

[edenfalling]

I think you're right there; I forgot that his stuff came later. But he does come into his own soon enough, IIRC.

Quite soon, apparently! I just finished watching episode 7 ("Lonely Dick"), wherein Mary goes on a vacation, Harry and Sally explore the world of beauty products, and Tommy meets August, who will, so the internet tells me, be his first girlfriend. So he has already gotten a small plot of his own. :-)

He also has an awesome moment where, when Dick brings him to Mary's house on the theory that, as the Information Officer, he should know how to defeat a lock... he calmly breaks one of the decorative window panes, reaches in, and turns the doorknob. :-D