Despite What Larraine Newman Tweets, The Bear is A Comedy
And Her Daughter’s Series Is The Best Argument Why So Many People Like Her Are Sure It Isn’t
For the last several months many people have made it very clear that The Bear has been misclassified as a comedy. This opinion has been repeated in such publications as TV Guide and The Atlantic and as I mentioned in my review of The Emmys Eugene Levy made it a punch line.
As I’ve argued on more than one occasion The Bear is a comedy and the fact that so many people are sure it is not demonstrates how much sway the old standard of what a comedy is still hangs over television in the 21st century even after so much of it has changed. There are many ways for me to frame this argument but I think the most enjoyable one, from my perspective, is to use the argument of the most recent naysayer.
As many of you might know after Liza Colon-Zayas was the surprise winner of Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy a groundbreaking comedienne made her opinion on the subject known in a tweet. This is where I must mention that while I knew that Hannah Einbinder was the daughter of an alum of Saturday Night Live I was ignorant of the fact that the alum was Larraine Newman. As the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night Live is commemorated not only in the media and the show but the silver screen, the rest of the world will soon know what a previous generation has forgotten: Newman was one of the original cast members of the show. And unlike every single member of the original cast and indeed so many in the decades that followed she was never able to achieve the mainstream fame that her fellow comediennes Jane Curtin and the late Gilda Rander managed to do.
Now I don’t pretend to deny the comedy bona fides of Newman: I’ve seen many of the episodes from that era and the sketches she was a part of and she was as good as her female counterparts and indeed quite a few of the males. `However there is a deep irony that Newman now thinks she can be the final authority on what comedy — something that I don’t even think she is aware of any more.
Saturday Night Live is considered so much of an institution by my generation that it’s been forgotten just how revolutionary it was when it debuted in 1975. Compared to not only the comedians who were then considered iconic — Bob Hope, Milton Berle and Henny Youngman -SNL was revolutionary in how it approached comedy at the time, particularly political comedy. Back then the high point of political satire came when Bob Hope made jokes about Eisenhower’s golf game or Rich Little impersonated Nixon. But to actually impersonate Gerald Ford and make him appear a bumbling buffoon on live TV was so unprecedented that many feel it may have been a factor in Ford’s eventual electoral defeat. This may be the subject of a later article by me but back in the 1970s Saturday Night Live truly took no prisoners when it came to political sacred cows. It was one thing to mumble in private about Ted Kennedy’s role in Chappaquiddick; it was another to have Bill Murray impersonate him by arriving at a speech dripping wet with seaweed in his hair — as the show did when Kennedy was considering a run for the White House. The way it utterly tore apart commercials; the way it made fun of films and television; the way it absolutely tore apart anything the previous generation held sacred was something no show considered even trying before SNL. One of the most hysterical moments in TV history came with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase began a word association test for a job interview that quickly became an exchange in racial epithets — ended with the N-word. No doubt everyone who was part of the old guard — including figures like Hope and Burns — couldn’t believe it and never accepted it. They went to their graves refusing to change and were hailed as legends but desperately out of touch when they died.
Now Newman is as old as so many of the Old Guard would have been when she broke out on SNL. And she seems completely unaware of the irony in the fact that she now considers himself the final word on what comedy is. This isn’t anything new, of course. Considering all of the railing by conservatives about being ‘woke’ most of them have come to look at how comedy isn’t funny anymore. Their definition, however, seems to be based on the idea that comedians aren’t able to use racial epitaphs in their acts or say homophobic terms or use outdated terms for gender and race. This isn’t anything new: Bill Maher has been railing against this for thirty years and has in fact made it the centerpiece of his act that he can’t use offensive terms to describe society. (I’ll just mention that he did so when he was very young and let it go at that.) But what’s really been kind of sad is that so many of the revolutionary comedians of the past — the most obvious names that occur to me are Chevy Chase and John Cleese — can’t seem to recognize that the next generation gets to define what is funny. They were in the vanguard of what comedy meant fifty years ago and they don’t seem able to accept that it’s not 1975 anymore. Great comedy is universal but the idea that a joke from 1975 doesn’t get the same reception that in a set today doesn’t always mean that the audience has changed but you have.
And the biggest irony is, of course, that Einbinder was nominated for her work on Hacks. I know that Newman was understandably upset her daughter lost — what mother wouldn’t — but I really wonder if she actually watched her daughter’s show. Because Hacks as anyone who is a fan (of which, make no mistake, I unabashedly am) knows that it is the story of a female comedienne whose been doing the same act since the 1970s and doesn’t feel any need to change — until she meets Einbinder’s character and begins to accept that she must evolve along with the times.
I still don’t know who exactly Deborah Vance is modeled after. Given the history Vance has with late night it’s very likely its Joan Rivers. But it could just as easily have been modeled about a comedienne like Newman someone who has been cruising on her early celebrity for a very long time and sees no need to change anything she’s been doing for her act. (Think a female Joe Piscopo or Rob Schneider and you might see what I’m driving at.) It’s made Deb incredibly wealthy and she has an empire that is utterly unrivaled in fashion and is loved by her fans. But she’s also (and this would be keeping with the stories we hear of so many comedians and actors from the 1970s and 1980s) a habit of treating everyone around her like a servant and regularly abusing them.
I don’t know how much input Einbinder has into the creative decisions when it comes to characters on the show but considering how gifted Lucia Aniello and everyone who works for Hacks is when it comes to casting decisions as well as letting them occasionally have input into gags (the behind the scenes excerpts show as much) I think it’s at least a possibility. Deb has had a very difficult relationship with her daughter DJ (Kaitlin Olson) when the series begins. Her daughter has been struggling with rehab and anxiety and the two of them have basically given up on each other by the start of the series. Gingerly Ava (who as we shall see also has a difficult relationship with her mother) plays a role in the two of them reconnecting. By Season 3 the two of them have a pretty good relationship.
But there’s a scene in the third season that seems pertinent. DJ invites her mother to her NA meeting where she is about to receive her five-year chip. Deb reluctantly agrees to come and while she’s there, she tells a joke and spends the rest of the meeting performing. DJ is understandably angry at the end of it: “My sponsor likes you more than I do,” she tells her and its something that Deb can’t seem to grasp. That same episode DJ gets a chance to roast her mother on live television — and she absolutely kills. It’s clear in the aftermath that Deb is impressed. But then DJ says: “I get it now. Performing…it’s your addiction. You can’t stop doing it.” Einbinder isn’t involved in any of these scenes but I truly think that there has to be some childhood experience that she used during these scenes.
During Season 3, I should mention, the show finally addresses cancel culture — something the showrunners had been discussing since the pilot. It comes while Deb is in the hunt for the job for late-night and she’s going to Berkeley to get an honorary degree. She’s received a warning sign that she might not get the job just before and when she’s at Berkeley a supercut of all of the material she’s done that is offensive over the years starts circulating on the internet — and everyone at the campus sees it and demands Berkeley cancel her.
Ava pulls Deb aside and tells her about it. Deb’s reaction is how horrible this is. Ava is sympathetic to Deb but can’t resist: “Being called on the consequences of your actions?” And with a straight face Deb says: “Yes!” (There’s a line there about her reference to Monica Lewinsky that I truly think you should see.) During that night it seems that Deb very well may have lost late night and she brings up the fact that she’s been cancelled. And she is genuinely furious. “This generation thinks I’m out of touch? I was fined by the FCC for doing the first joke about abortion!” When Deb tries to console her that no one gets cancels, she counters: “White men don’t get cancelled. It’s different for us.” And Ava who is so much the model of the GEN Z social media type, really can’t argue with this.
What makes Hacks a great show — and is one of the reasons I think its one of the great shows of this generation — is that it shows the ability of being able to bridge the gap between the past and the present. As co-dependent and toxic as their relationship can be the showrunners frequently do consider Deb and Ava’s relationship ‘a love story’. Halfway through Season 3 one of Deb’s oldest lovers tells Ava, who is drunk and unhappy, that he’s never seen Deb try as hard to be better than in the past few years and that has to be because of Ava’s involvement. Deb demonstrates over and over throughout the show that she has the capacity to change and its telling that the most critical part of the series is that her mainstream success comes when she realizes that she has to change her act. Deb Vance has been a pattern for forty years; it’s comfortable for her, she’s happy there and she’s fine with everything she considers comedy to be. But Ava makes it clear that change is not always a bad thing and that success and happiness can come when you embrace it. Deb represents the old guard of comedy, Ava the new breed. And it’s only when, however reluctantly, Deb accepts Ava’s point of view that she begins to find career success — and not coincidentally, an ability to come to terms with who she is.
What does this have to do with The Bear being a comedy? Well, among the loudest voices objecting to this classification are the old guard of which Newman is the most recent example of it. They have a fixed idea of what comedy is and they are resistant to anything that flies in the face of what they consider it to be. Part of this built in nostalgia for the past but it is also baked into the idea the only way to do comedy a certain way is the way you spent your life doing it. I don’t know if Einbinder’s opinion on The Bear as a comedy but Ava would at least be more open to the idea that it was.
And the thing is, I think Deb Vance would too. One of the critical parts of Hacks comes in Season 2 when after spending most of the season on the road trying to find way to make an act work, she finds the only way to do so is to find a way to laugh at her past. In this case, it means facing the greatest trauma — when her husband left her for her sister not long before she had a chance at late night. She realizes that old standard — comedy is tragedy plus time — is true and that she can make gold by doing so.
So there’s an argument that if Deb Vance saw The Bear that she could very easily see the humor in it. Because much of what happens on The Bear is objectively funny if you look at it a certain way. ‘Fishes’ the show that won Emmys for Jamie Lee Curtis and Jon Bernthal this year seems like a raw emotional episode that is incredibly painful to watch. But so much of it is based on the idea of absurdity that it is exactly the kind of thing that with the distance of time could be considered hysterical. When Curtis drives her car through the wall of the house at the climax of the episode, it’s a horrifying moment. But it’s the kind of moment that Deb Vance could easily turn into a funny story years later.
Indeed its that very example that makes me wonder why Newman can’t consider The Bear a comedy. When she was still on SNL Pryor was going through a massive cocaine addiction, suffering multiple failed marriages and had a heart attack — all of which ended up being part of his act sometimes within months of them happening. Objectively speaking setting yourself on fire is horrifying and it nearly killed Pryor. But after he recovered, he made the story and everything about the centerpiece of a concert film. Nothing that happened to Pryor — or indeed so many of the comedians during this period — can be considered funny when it was happening. But the ones we consider the greatest — and Newman was friends with all of them — were able to make it funny.
What The Bear does is challenge what we consider funny by showing us the part that we don’t see in all of those acts. Don’t kid yourself; if someone like Christopher Titus or Jerrod Carmichael told some of the same plots we saw on The Bear, you’d be laughing hysterically. Objectively everything that happens on the show during Season 2 was hysterical. The reason it’s not clear that its funny is because it’s happening now. Years later after the restaurant has a Michelin star and everybody’s a millionaire, all of them will be able to laugh about everything that happening the night of the dress rehearsal — including Carmy locking himself in the freezer while the rush was going on. But none of them know that now and neither does the audience. And because Storer and his writers makes us care about the characters — and more importantly because we want them to succeed — every single thing that goes wrong hits the viewer as hard as it does them.
When a wall falls down in the kitchen, there’s no laugh track to tell us that it’s a joke. None of the characters share a look at the audience. They don’t have asides telling us how they feel that makes us laugh at them. And as a result what we would laugh at it if it happened in a 1980s sitcom or even something like Abbott Elementary doesn’t register the same way as it does on The Bear. It’s not funny to them, so we’re not sure if its funny for us.
As I said yesterday I was overjoyed when Hacks won the Emmy for Best Comedy this Sunday and I was dismayed that Einbinder didn’t win. But it’s not because I don’t think The Bear was misclassified. Both The Bear and Hacks are among the best examples of what comedy can be during this decade. But they have a completely different approach. Neither is traditional in the way that comedy was even five years ago but that doesn’t mean that Hacks is clearly a comedy and The Bear clearly isn’t. And it’s not like Hacks isn’t willing to look at deep issues — or indeed, some of the same issues — that The Bear just in a different way.
So I understand why so many people think The Bear isn’t a comedy in the traditional sense. But that Newman, who helped redefine what a comedy was half a century ago, can’t see the potential for it to evolve doesn’t mean she’s right when she says it isn’t. If anything, it makes it clear that she’s like a lot of the comedians we keep seeing throughout Hacks and that Deb Vance was at one time. She has an idea of what comedy is and she doesn’t seem capable of changing her mind. I do hope that after the Emmys her daughter goes to tell her not only that she was fine losing but that she’s wrong about her opinion of The Bear. Of all people she might be the best equipped to help explain that to the old guard.