No, there’s no reason I chose this photo for this caption! John P. “He Said, She Said” is a somewhat awkward, always earnest attempt to grapple with the differences in how society treats men versus women “He Said, She Said” mostly avoids talking about Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s own issues with joking about these sorts of topics in its early days. So here’s what’s a little bit weird about NBC’s Brooklyn Nine-Nine: The longer it runs, the nicer it gets. ( How I Met Your Mother, a show I loved for many years, was one of the worst for this style of humor.) It’s why so many comedies tilt, in their later years, toward lame, would-be “edgy” humor at the expense of others. And all along, the idea that you could just make fun of somebody is right there, an easy button to push that usually will garner laughs.Ĭouple this with how easy it is to get laughs by targeting those who are different in some way - by making a big, easy fat joke at the expense of an overweight guest star, for example, or doing a storyline about one of the characters being attracted to a trans woman. It’s hard to tell a joke that doesn’t have someone to be its butt, and it’s even harder to keep coming up with funny, fresh jokes season after season. It’s simply the path of least resistance. Not every sitcom becomes meaner as it gets older, but a lot of them do. They were so mean to him and so dismissive of him that if you thought about the show from his perspective for even one second, it was much, much tougher to take. (He was married to a character played by Christie Brinkley!)īut by the time Parks got to its last couple of seasons, the abuse that Jerry’s coworkers heaped on him increasingly beggared belief. The joke about Jerry was always that the staff of the Pawnee Parks & Recreation department treated him poorly, that he was the butt of every office joke, and the show counterbalanced his difficult work life by giving him the greatest home life imaginable. Here’s a case in point: Jerry from Parks & Recreation. What felt like affectionate teasing in earlier seasons becomes more and more vicious as it gets harder and harder to make viewers laugh. The longer a show runs, the more its jokes start to trend toward the characters picking on each other. It is in the nature of TV comedies to become meaner as they get older. The episode of the week for February 26 through March 2 is “He Said, She Said,” the eighth episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ s sixth season. Every week, we pick a new episode of the week.

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