The cliché factory

A few days ago, Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, devoted his weekly email newsletter to the subject of “The Great Clichés.” A cliché, as Mankoff defines it, is a restricted comic situation “that would be incomprehensible if the other versions had not first appeared,” and he provides a list of examples that should ring bells for all readers of the magazine, from the ubiquitous “desert island” to “The-End-Is-Nigh Guy.” Here are a few of my favorites:

Atlas holding up the world; big fish eating little fish; burglars in masks; cave paintings; chalk outline at crime scene; crawling through desert; galley slaves; guru on mountain; mobsters and victim with cement shoes; man in stocks; police lineup; two guys in horse costume.

Inevitably, Mankoff’s list includes a few questionable choices, while also omitting what seem like obvious contenders. (Why “metal detector,” but not “Adam and Eve?”) But it’s still something that writers of all kinds will want to clip and save. Mankoff doesn’t make the point explicitly, but most gag artists probably keep a similar list of clichés as a starting point for ideas, as we read in Mort Gerberg’s excellent book Cartooning:

List familiar situations—clichés. You might break them down into categories, like domestic (couple at breakfast, couple watching television); business (boss berating employee, secretary taking dictation); historic (Paul Revere’s ride, Washington crossing the Delaware); even famous cartoon clichés (the desert island, the Indian snake charmer)…Then change something a little bit.

As it happened, when I saw Mankoff’s newsletter, I had already been thinking about a far more harmful kind of comedy cliché. Last week, Kal Penn went on Twitter to post some of the scripts from his years auditioning as a struggling actor, and they amount to an alternative list of clichés kept by bad comedy writers, consciously or otherwise: “Gandhi lookalike,” “snake charmer,” “foreign student.” One character has a “slight Hindi accent,” another is a “Pakistani computer geek who dresses like Beck and is in a perpetual state of perspiration,” while a third delivers dialogue that is “peppered with Indian cultural references…[His] idiomatic conversation is hit and miss.” A typical one-liner: “We are propagating like flies on elephant dung.” One script describes a South Asian character’s “spastic techno pop moves,” with Penn adding that “the big joke was an accent and too much cologne.” (It recalls the Morrissey song “Bengali in Platforms,” which included the notorious line: “Life is hard enough when you belong here.” You could amend it to read: “Being a comedy writer is hard enough when you belong here.”) Penn closes by praising shows with writers “who didn’t have to use external things to mask subpar writing,” which cuts to the real issue here. The real person in “a perpetual state of perspiration” isn’t the character, but the scriptwriter. Reading the teleplay for an awful sitcom is a deadening experience in itself, but it’s even more depressing to realize that in most cases, the writer is falling back on a stereotype to cover up the desperate unfunniness of the writing. When Penn once asked if he could play a role without an accent, in order to “make it funny on the merits,” he was told that he couldn’t, probably because everybody else knew that the merits were nonexistent.

So why is one list harmless and the other one toxic? In part, it’s because we’ve caught them at different stages of evolution. The list of comedy conventions that we find acceptable is constantly being culled and refined, and certain art forms are slightly in advance of the others. Because of its cultural position, The New Yorker is particularly subject to outside pressures, as it learned a decade ago with its Obama terrorist cover—which demonstrated that there are jokes and images that aren’t acceptable even if the magazine’s attitude is clear. Turn back the clock, and Mankoff’s list would include conventions that probably wouldn’t fly today. Gerberg’s list, like Penn’s, includes “snake charmer,” which Mankoff omits, and he leaves out “Cowboys and Indians,” a cartoon perennial that seems to be disappearing. And it can be hard to reconstruct this history, because the offenders tend to be consigned to the memory hole. When you read a lot of old magazine fiction, as I do, you inevitably find racist stereotypes that would be utterly unthinkable today, but most of the stories in which they appear have long since been forgotten. (One exception, unfortunately, is the Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Three Gables,” which opens with a horrifying racial caricature that most Holmes fans must wish didn’t exist.) If we don’t see such figures as often today, it isn’t necessarily because we’ve become more enlightened, but because we’ve collectively agreed to remove certain figures from the catalog of stock comedy characters, while papering over their use in the past. A list of clichés is a snapshot of a culture’s inner life, and we don’t always like what it says. The demeaning parts still offered to Penn and actors of similar backgrounds have survived for longer than they should have, but sitcoms that trade in such stereotypes will be unwatchable in a decade or two, if they haven’t already been consigned to oblivion.

Of course, most comedy writers aren’t thinking in terms of decades, but about getting through the next five minutes. And these stereotypes endure precisely because they’re seen as useful, in a shallow, short-term kind of way. There’s a reason why such caricatures are more visible in comedy than in drama: comedy is simply harder to write, but we always want more of it, so it’s inevitable that writers on a deadline will fall back on lazy conventions. The really insidious thing about these clichés is that they sort of work, at least to the extent of being approved by a producer without raising any red flags. Any laughter that they inspire is the equivalent of empty calories, but they persist because they fill a cynical need. As Penn points out, most writers wouldn’t bother with them at all if they could come up with something better. Stereotypes, like all clichés, are a kind of fallback option, a cheap trick that you deploy if you need a laugh and can’t think of another way to get one. Clichés can be a precious commodity, and all writers resort to them occasionally. They’re particularly valuable for gag cartoonists, who can’t rely on a good idea from last week to fill the blank space on the page—they’ve got to produce, and sometimes that means yet another variation on an old theme. But there’s a big difference between “Two guys in a horse costume” and “Gandhi lookalike.” Being able to make that distinction isn’t a matter of political correctness, but of craft. The real solution is to teach people to be better writers, so that they won’t even be tempted to resort to such tired solutions. This might seem like a daunting task, but in fact, it happens all the time. A cliché factory operates on the principle of supply and demand. And it shuts down as soon as people no longer find it funny.