Where Did the Humour Go?

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I started wondering about this while watching television, which feels oddly old-fashioned to admit. Not streaming in the background, not half-watching something on the desktop, but actually sitting down to watch what was meant to be a comedy. A sitcom. The kind of thing that once promised, at the very least, a few proper laughs in exchange for half an hour of your attention.

And I realised, with a faint sense of disappointment rather than outrage, that I wasn’t laughing. Not quietly, not inwardly, not even accidentally. I wasn’t offended either. I wasn’t confused. I simply wasn’t amused.

That’s the part that lingers.

It’s easy to blame age. I’m well aware that every generation reaches a point where the cultural landscape changes, and they no longer feel fully addressed by it. What once felt sharp now feels distant; what’s new feels oddly flat. That’s a familiar story, and I’m not immune to it. I’m sure some of this is me getting older, slower to warm, less impressed by novelty for its own sake.

But the feeling doesn’t come from comparing today’s sitcoms to the past and finding them different. It comes from comparing them to the very idea of what a sitcom used to be. Because there seems to be remarkably little on television now that is genuinely, unapologetically funny.

Not warm. Not worthy. Not gently amusing or faintly reassuring. Funny.

There was a time when televised sitcoms were engines of humour. The writing was the point. Characters existed to generate jokes, tension, misunderstanding, farce, and embarrassment. You tuned in expecting laughter, not instruction, not affirmation, not a carefully managed emotional experience.

Now, many modern sitcoms feel hesitant, as though they’re unsure whether laughter is still their primary function. They seem more concerned with tone, messaging, balance, and positioning than with the simple, risky act of trying to be funny and seeing what happens.

What strikes me is that this isn’t because comedy has become too offensive. In fact, very little on mainstream television today feels offensive. The edges are already smoothed. The danger has largely been removed.

Instead, it feels as though writers are working in the shadow of potential offence. Writing not in response to what has happened, but to what might happen. What might be taken the wrong way? What might be clipped, shared, misunderstood, or criticised by someone watching without context or goodwill.

That kind of anticipation changes the work. It creates a constant internal edit, a quiet pressure to justify, soften, explain, or retreat before a joke has even had a chance to live.

Comedy has never thrived in that environment.

Humour needs confidence. It needs writers to trust their audience enough to let characters be foolish, selfish, misguided, politically incorrect, or just plain wrong without stepping in to apologise for them. It needs space for silence after a punchline, for awkwardness, for the possibility that something might not land.

Older sitcoms understood this instinctively. They didn’t worry about whether a character was likeable or morally aligned. They worried about whether the situation was funny. The audience was trusted to do the rest of the work — to recognise exaggeration, irony, satire, and absurdity without being led by the hand.

Modern sitcoms often don’t seem to trust the audience as much. Characters are frequently framed as correct before they’ve done anything interesting. Flaws are softened, motivations explained, edges padded out. The humour becomes cautious, self-aware, and strangely defensive.

It’s as though the joke is no longer allowed to stand on its own merits. It has to be accompanied by reassurance.

The irony is that this doesn’t make comedy more inclusive or humane. It makes it thinner. When everyone is careful, nobody is surprised. And surprise is the lifeblood of humour.

There’s also a sense that television comedy has quietly shifted its priorities. Instead of observing human behaviour — the small hypocrisies, vanities, contradictions, and embarrassments that make people endlessly funny — it often seems more interested in affirming a particular worldview. The writing clearly and early signals its values, leaving little room for ambiguity or contradiction.

But ambiguity is where humour breathes. The best comedy has always been morally untidy. It doesn’t hand you conclusions; it hands you people behaving badly or absurdly and lets you laugh before you decide what to think about it.

I don’t miss cruelty. I don’t miss punching down. I don’t miss lazy stereotypes masquerading as jokes. What I miss is boldness. The willingness to risk being misunderstood in order to be genuinely funny.

Ageing may dull my response time, but it doesn’t explain why laughter itself feels less central to televised sitcoms. It doesn’t explain why so much modern comedy feels as though it’s been written to avoid criticism rather than provoke laughter.

When humour disappears from television, it’s rarely because audiences have changed beyond recognition. It’s because the conditions that allow humour to flourish have quietly eroded. Shorter runs, smaller risks, louder scrutiny, and a cultural atmosphere that treats jokes as statements rather than play.

Sitcoms used to be places where writers could observe the ridiculousness of everyday life and exaggerate it until it cracked open into laughter. Now they often feel like carefully managed spaces where nothing is allowed to crack too loudly.

Perhaps the genuinely funny work has migrated elsewhere. Podcasts, live comedy, small stages, conversations that aren’t endlessly replayed or dissected. Maybe television, once the natural home of sitcoms, has become too self-conscious to let them thrive.

I hope that changes. Not because I want the past back, but because laughter still matters. Not as a political tool or a moral lesson, but as a shared human release.

Funny hasn’t stopped being funny.

It’s just become harder to find on television — drowned out by caution, softened by fear, and too often replaced by the idea that being careful is the same thing as being clever.

Published by Earthly Comforts

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22 thoughts on “Where Did the Humour Go?”

  2. This is SPOT ON! Mel Brooks said the same thing, watered down or “safe” comedy is NOT comedy.

    I feel the same way. When I hear people talk about how funny a show is, it makes me want to watch. Sadly, I am disappointed 98% of the time.

    I hope it is ok to reblog.

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    1. Absolutely, please free to do so and thank you. Yes, finding humour today in/on television is really hard. I am astounded even more so at what they do view as humour. I see listings in Netflix where they say ‘okay these are funny films’ and l think, ‘Really? How are you defining the humour?” Mel Brooks was an incredibly funny man and he is still going bless him! 99! He new humour, he knew funny! Another funny man was Bob Newhart who we sadly lost a couple of years back. I used to love watching those two in their heydays.

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      2. That article by Mel highlights exactly what is wrong in today’s world, and that was 8 years ago … 8 years on and nothing has got any better, just progressively worse. It will continue to get worse until we all slope along like mindless zombies to our governments demands to act politely in a dystopian setting … yeah sure, why not … let’s do that and then you can see a setting almost like that of Demolition Man well over 30 years ago now, where society will be in two places, upstairs and down, just waiting to tick over, oh wait, isn’t that sort of happening anyway ……

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  3. Pingback: Where Did the Humour Go? – A Reblog – Various Ramblings of a Nostalgic Italian

    1. That is of course the biggest problem of today. Generations today do not see the world we were brought up seeing. I am not saying every single sitcom from even our time was awesome. I couldn’t stand Alf Garnet or even Steptoe and Son and they would never get an airing in today’s world, but even with some of the tamer ones from yesteryear, there are demographs that would find the content distasteful or offensive.

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      2. The Goodies were very funny for their time, but yes, sadly they would be completely frowned upon today 😦 Too many of the young just wouldn’t get the humour or would be too frightened to laugh in case they too were persucuted by their own generation.

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      3. I used to have European co-workers and their favourite sit coms were “Allo Allo” and an Australian show called “Acropolis Now” which sent up Greek Australian culture. Even the Greeks loved it.

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