Intern Aaron Sankin’s take on the recent live SF appearance of Michael Ian Black and Michael Showalter, two of the creators of the show Stella
The first time I saw Stella I was instantly enraptured. It was clever, it was funny, and, most of all, it was zany. Zany like the old Marx brothers movies (which, for my money, are the funniest things to have ever been committed to celluloid); zany like the Animaniacs cartoons that entertained me for many a Cheerio-filled Saturday morning. Zany in a way that modern comedy no longer is. Hip comedy now days is frantic and schizophrenic but zany it is not. Family Guy, the show that is currently pushing the televised comedic envelope these days, has all the elements of zaniness—the non-stop barrage of jokes, the relative minimum of importance put things like plot and character development, pratfalls—but lacks the childlike innocence that true zaniness requires.
