Why Master Shake is the realest man you know ...

4 eva >u suxor!!!11!!11!

Since Christmas came with its wonderful bounty, I’ve been sitting around with my newest entertainer, Volume 4 of Aqua Teen, Seasons 5 and 6 of Seinfeld, and early seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm and enjoying the hell out of things. And then during the week sometime, I’ll reminisce and trade quotes with a friend, or to stay a little bit more recent, debate the humor in Jim spraying Michael and Dwight with the water bottle in The Office last week. Invariably though, there’s a girl around who’s been catching up on Season 7 of Friends who just can’t understand how you can possibly find those shows funny or how you can’t think that Friends or Sex and the City are just the most fabulous shows ever created. So I asked myself, really, what makes Seinfeld or CYE or ATHF continually funny shows and even cultural touchstones in some cases, while for all their popularity, Friends and Sex and the City and the like are largely throw aways? And don’t be satisfied with the quick, visceral, and stunningly obvious reaction of, “Well hell, Sex and the City just really blew ass, no two ways about it.” So, I pushed deeper and found out what, for me anyway, makes the difference. It’s pretty simple; it’s the characters and their personalities.

I’ll take Friends as the show to deconstruct, because at least it does force us deeper than just saying, “Sorry Stacy, but a show based on an ass load of shitty puns about guys or sex acts just really, well, blows.” “You dated Mr. Big. I'm dating Mr. Too Big.” WTF? This is funny to anything other than a laugh track? But I digress. The problem with Friends and its characters was two-fold.

First, the characters themselves are just empty idealizations. The zany free spirit, the neurotic mother figure, the spoiled princess, the lovelorn goof, the sweet sarcastic, the clownish buffoon, these aren’t real people. These are romantic idealizations ripped from an 80’s movie. (Not that I have a problem with 80’s movies, but they have the advantage of only having to show the character evolve over 2 hours, covering anywhere from an afternoon to maybe a couple months, as opposed to those in a TV show evolving for 8 or 10 years.) The point is that you don’t know these people in real life, not really. And if by chance you do know anyone answering to one of these descriptions, odds are about 90% that they’re stuck acting out their fixation on the Friends character or Breakfast Club character of their choice, a persona they assigned to themselves after convincing themselves how much Ally Sheedy spoke to them.

So the personalities aren’t real. And that can be fine, one could make the argument that there exist no real characters in TV, which I’ll refute in a minute, but we’ll even accept that as fact for a moment to move on to the next problem with the Friends’ personalities. The evolution of the characters didn’t serve to strengthen them. They actually devolved and ended up getting crushed by their own weight. With only these empty idealizations as a basis, the characters were fed into a self reinforcing harmonic cycle that turned them into overblown caricatures of their original selves. Joey became so buffoonish that you expected him to try to buy dinner with Monopoly money and show hilarious shock when the priggish waiter wouldn’t take it. Ross became such a puss that you expected them to have to squeegee him out of the scene after his spine completely disintegrated during another woeful, head shaking scene over a girl. Matthew Perry, during those rare times when he wasn’t on the blow, was probably dying to say, Could I be any less funny right now? And Rachel, the character who supposedly underwent this incredible growth over the duration of the show basically went from spoiled princess to spoiled princess with responsibilities like a job and motherhood, that she occasionally deals with when it suits the story line. Point being, they took these personas and dialed them up to a such a level that I felt like I was being bludgeoned with characters that were becoming increasingly less funny and more cartoonish by the week. Although there was never really a choice in the matter, it was still disgusting to see what these characters had to turn in to.


Shocked that people didn't want more of a moronic Italian?

But walk away from that world now and consider Aqua Teen, if you will. Just to push the example to the fullest, I’ll take the furthest out there case, and I will argue that these are real characters. Have you ever met a misogynistic piece of white trash with an addiction to porn, possibly of the barnyard variety? Do you know a naïve simpleton who’s easily duped into outlandish situations, contests, and schemes? Did you ever run across an egomaniacal jackass who’ll belittle anything and anyone, the kind of guy who if you knew him secondhand you’d describe as a real jackass, but he never bothers me, so …. (and you would finish that with he’s f’ing hilarious, except you can’t say that because the person who brought him up thinks he’s a complete jackass)? Do you remember the guy stuck in the middle, trying to live his life, look out for the little guy and keep the jackass in check? Guess what, you’ve met every one of these people, probably a dozen times over. And these aren’t romantic idealizations that people force onto themselves because Phoebe seemed so fun. People don’t choose to be a Carl or a Meatwad or a Shake or a Frylock. Why the hell would you? But you see them everyday because these characters are the dirty, unkempt, and often hilarious people that you have the pleasure and the misfortune of crossing paths with in life.

And the beauty of these characters and hence the shows like Seinfeld or Aqua Teen is that, absent of an act of heinous malice on the writers part, they won’t, and I would argue, can’t lapse into Friends territory. There’s no room for caricatures because they already inhabit their personas to the fullest. Could Carl possibly hate his neighbors or love diseased prostitutes more than he already does? Could Meatwad be more tricked by the next MC Pee Pants scheme or the next invitation to jump into the microwave to set a world record? Could Frylock get anymore tired of reversing the waves on the microwave to protect Meatwad? And could Shake possibly be more crass, vain, egotistical, and generally insensitive than he already his? No, I don’t think they can, because they’ve always embraced their personalities to a degree that needs no changing. They’re already engaging or sympathetic or disgusting or hilarious in an utterly real way that refuses to be overblown.

But that’s not the final piece of the puzzle. Why, now knowing what we do, do shows like that resonate with me and a considerable number of people out there? And I realized the answer lay right in front of me, in my own life. I look around at the group of friends I’ve had for 5 or 10 or, in some cases, 15 years, and I realize that everything I’ve just said applies to them as well. The ones that I don’t feel compelled to go out of my way to see, the ones that I don’t miss if I don’t see them for a month or two, the ones that I even grow tired of when I’m around them are my Friends friends. They’re the ones that have taken their role in our social structure and turned it into a horrible joke of its former self. They’ve taken their persona and consciously played to it and inflated it in such an unnatural way that I find it hard to even find them funny or engaging anymore. On the other hand though, there are my Seinfeld or my Aqua Teen friends, the ones that I still actively choose to hang out with and always have the best time with. They are as nice or stupid or hilarious or insane as they’ve always been because they’ve always been those things as fully as a person naturally could be. And that’s why years from now, your Friends friends will be remembered like that episode where Joey said something stupid and Phoebe acted spacey and Monica cleaned up socks and Ross was a puss. You remember them being funny at the time perhaps, but you really don’t remember why, because there’s no staying power to it. And in the end, you’re really not even sure you want to lay claim to being a part of it. But the others much like “the two face” or “the master of their domain” or “the high talker” or “the Foreigner belt” or even “The Drizzle” will still be funny 10 years from now, and you’ll always know why.