Motion Pictures Should Be Laughing to The Bank More Often

    
     Hollywood - It is a matter of taste whether we like our television morals and values given to us through comedy or drama.  Humor is a coping mechanism, and laughter, according to the Reader's Digest, is the best medicine.  It has been said that comedy is tragedy plus time.  Some also call comedy, lauging instead of crying, if possible.  It takes fewer face muscles to smile than to frown.
     Television drama is almost always based on an hourlong format.  Comedy is usually more fast paced than drama.  Comedy may be a variety show of three seven-minute sketches or vignettes, or it may be a 30-minute weekly episode.  Modern television drama tends to be exotic, it focuses on people whose lives are bigger than ours.  Comedy, by comparison, is local and lifelike.  Comedy is, by its very nature, philosophical, and attempts to show us a common underlying theme, regarding a sphere of activity or thought.  Comedy often simplifies the basic beliefs, concepts, and attitudes of an individual, a group, a community, or society on the whole.  Drama uses sex, violence, and drug-use as a shot of stimulation, to make us watch, or to make us continue watching.  Comedy, on the other hand, uses sex, violence, and drug-use to shed light on an aspect of these topics that we neve thought of before.  The nighttime talk show host and comedian Arsenio Hall called it, "things that make you go hmmm."  The things that make us think or something new insight has been given to.
     Some of us are in the habit of regarding tragedy as more meaningful than comedy, probably because comedy is not as heavy, it lets us laugh.  Yet, good comedy addresses everything that drama addresses, as well as a lot things drama ignores.  Comedy makes us interested in the smallest insults of life.  Comedy can put the many small elements of the human physiology (body) or psychology (mind) into proportion and gives us a new persepective on a sometimes old topic, or even a new topic (such as robots or food engineering).  The New Golden Age of Television, or the Platinum Age of Television, depending on whether your point-of-view is from things are as good now as they were when Lucille Ball (Lucy) ruled the airwaves.  Or, whether your point-of-view is that things have never been as good as they are now, starting in 1999 with the launch of the "The Sopranos."  Television has continued to take itself more seriously.  One result of this seriousness is that, what looks most seriously, often gets taken more seriously.  Therefore, the Academy Awards (Oscars) have long overlooked comedy on film.  From "The Sopranos", to "Deadwood", to "Breaking Bad", the New Golden/Platinum Age has largely been identified with drama.  If it is not exactly true that comedy gets no respect, it is true that comedy gets less respect than it deserves.  See also, www.comedycentral.com.