Children's Hospital and the Quick Comedy Question

Rob Coddry as Dr Blake Downs in Adult Swim's Children's Hospital

Recently, I’ve started watching the excellent TV comedy series Children’s Hospital. Ostensibly a spoof of the Hospital drama genre (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, you know the drill), it branches out rather quickly into being a wilfully silly exercise in absurdity and ripping apart the conventions of genre TV. There’s a doctor who was a cop who quit after 9/11. There’s a nurse who falls in love with her patient - who happens to be a 6-year-old with advanced ageing disease. There’s a doctor who tries to use the healing power of laughter, with results that aren’t quite so funny for the patients. Basically, it’s hilarious, and it’s yet another feather in the cap of the most inventive, creative comedy network going. 

Watching this show, I’ve come to realise that Adult Swim is probably my favourite comedy channel right now. I’ve always tended to like their shows, right from the days that they produced cheap off-beat surrealist animation - I can still remember stumbing across Aqua Teen Hunger Force on CNX (RIP) and having my puny teenage mind blown. I remember then watching Space Ghost: Coast to Coast and loving its sense of nostalgia-distortion (I even managed to fit my love of this into an essay at Uni). I remember watching Xavier: Renegade Angel for the first time and not being entirely sure what I’d just seen, and being simultaneously amazed and appalled by what followed. I’ve also greatly enjoyed their expansion into live action programming, be it the wilfully obtuse surrealism of Tim and Eric Awesome Show or the caustically absurd naturalism of Delocated, probably the best comedy that not enough people I know have watched. Children’s Hospital is the latest in a long list of programmes that have rocked my world.

Adult Swim appear to have a very appealing mantra: we’ll give you a very tiny budget in return for also giving you creative freedom. Obviously this system requires either extremely passionate workers or comedians who don’t have to worry about money per se, but it certainly must have a significant level of appeal considering the sheer quantity of the American alternative comedy scene who have been in their various shows. Sure, getting the monies is good, but getting to fulfil your comedic vision on your terms is something that rarely comes around. It almost certainly helps that the shorts are so short.

I’ve stated it before, but I’ll state it again: we all learned the wrong lessons from The Fast Show. Everybody seemed to think that overly-repetitive catchphrase comedy was the way forward. In fact, the only way that this was really inventive in The Fast Show was the way they would run it into the ground and completely overdo it (although they would be inventive in their callbacks, crossover of characters and their misuse and misappropriation of characters). What we should have been paying attention to was what could be achieved with comedy in short bursts. The clue was in the title. 

  Comedy works well in short bursts, especially rapid-fire surrealist comedy. I’m not entirely sure why that is, but I suspect it’s because in shorter-form comedy you have less time to adjust to the parameters of the world created, and so it is easier to keep the audience off-balance and maintain the element of surprise. There’s also the fact that at its heart, comedy is a much more binary medium than most others - either you laugh or you don’t. For the most part it requires less-setup. Is the sole purpose of comedy to make you laugh? Of course not, but it should be seen as one of the main aims. Shorter comedy is also far less likely to outstay its welcome - few comedies have ever got me as angry as Green Wing, not because it was shit (although it was) but because it was a nine hour-long episode commission. It had three times the airtime of the average comedy series, yet about a third of the material. That’s not a good ratio. That’s far too much padding (speeding up and slowing down the action does not count as humour). It was especially galling to see Channel 4 basically repeat the mistakes of the past with the excerable Campus.

A lot of people like to rag on the BBC’s comedy output, and for the most part with good reason. This is especially true for BBC3 with its ‘youth’ audience. This ends up resulting in a series of banal shows by ‘comdedians called Russell’ to quote the great Stewart Lee, which aim for too broad an audience and end up piling up lowest common denominator pap (bizarre exception: the puppet show Mongrels, one of my favourite new shows of last year). Now I understand that the BBC have to justify their licence fee to a certain extent, but I don’t see why they should rigidly stick to what they have, especially considering the the at best variable quality. Couldn’t BBC3 just have a block of programming made up of short, cheap 10 minute programmes in which comedians have been given a small budget in return for fitting whatever they want into that 10 minutes? Couldn’t they just let some talented comedians loose, free of the expectations and the need to bring in an audience? 

 
What’s especially frustrating about this is that there is a precedent for this on the BBC. Up until some point in the early 2000s, there was often a 50 minute documentary on BBC2, leaving 10 minutes of airtime to fill to even out the schdule back to . This gap would often be plugged up by a comedy show of some sort. This little block of programming saw many different shows. Some, like the Richard E. Grant and Arabella Weir vehicle Posh Nosh weren’t as successful (which is odd, considering the relative star power) but some like Stella Street and Look Around You spawned longer series on the same channel (interestingly, Robert Popper was on The Sound of Young America this week and dropped the nugget of info that the BBC woudn't let them make another 10 minute series of Look Around You on the basis that those slots were for 'new' comedy). My personal favourite was We Are History, the Marcus Brigstocke spoof of history shows such as Time Team and the shows of Simon Schama. These shows always felt like something different and more experimental and sururrealist than the usual BBC fare. They also proved a pretty effective proving ground for talent - seeing who can produce something funny with limited resources and with economical use of time. 

 
So come on BBC. There’s no reason why an Adult Swim style block of programming couldn’t work in this country. Budgetary excuses don’t really cut it considering the whole point is to it as cheaply as possible, and I’m pretty sure it’s possible to find the airtime. You’ve even done it before, and it was pretty successful for you. I bet you could pull it off again. Failing that, maybe E4 could find a half-hour to fill (after all, they’re losing something like 30 hours a week of programming by losing Friends). I just want someone to start making good experimental TV comedy again. Why is that too much to ask?