Why is TV comedy nearly dead? This week, an accomplished comedy writer named Jay Martel1 tried to provide answers. Martel cited empirical evidence of comedy’s demise, a phenomenon as apparent to those of us in the field as the eruption of Mount Vesuvius probably was to people in Pompeii. The numbers are grim: Only one nominee for outstanding comedy series at the Emmys was actually a comedy.2 Though the four biggest money-making TV shows of all time are comedy sitcoms,3 only 1.7 shows made now are sitcoms, down from 12 percent in the ‘90s. Martel explains this change by citing the shift from linear TV to streaming, and I think he’s right: The medium is dictating the content. But I also think that technological factors are not the whole story.
I write a lot about the sudden death of comedy, because it baffles me. How can a genre exist for thousands of years, and then, suddenly — in 2019 — everyone decides: “that’s enough”? Most comedy writers I know are both stunned and wondering how long we can live on residual checks that arrive $3.14 at a time.4 Comedy’s death surely involves many structural and cultural factors — if I was a doctor trying to fill in the “cause of death” line on comedy’s death certificate, I wouldn’t know what to put. But I want to talk about one factor that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere else: The fact that comedy writers now come largely from improv, while they used to come largely from standup. I think the standup-to-improv shift might matter far more than most people realize.
