I watched a lot of sitcoms in my youth, from Family Ties to The Cosby Show to Married…With Children, all of which I loved, none of which made me laugh, even with the laugh track on. Each episode was like an anesthetic, from the beginning, when Alex Keaton or Cliff Huxtable or Al Bundy would enter with the canned applause, to the end when the same old credits rolled. Thanks to network television comedy, my life for thirty minutes seemed less dreadful.
One show that was less of an anesthetic, more of a smelling salt, was Get a Life, so comically ahead of its time that it tragically never had a time. The world wasn’t ready for Chris Elliott, nor was Chris Elliott ready for the world.
With humor too sharp, too dark, too absurd for most people, it was right up my alley because comedy must be weird enough, random enough, deranged enough for me to laugh.
The main character, Chris Peterson, is a paperboy at thirty years old who still lives in suburbia with his folks. So ridiculously childish is he, so disconnected from reality, that he’s beyond unrealistic.
He’s surrealistic.
All his parents do, most episodes, is sit at their kitchen table in their bathrobes and pass the time, either by reading the paper or doing such humdrum hobbies as taxidermy with a stuffed grizzly bear or even polishing their guns.
Chris would enter with an epiphany, wearing the same psychotically naïve smile, at which his father would roll his eyes, his mother suggest how insane he is.
One of the finest episodes, as well as the most memorable, is the one where Chris decides to attend a school for professional male modeling, an episode so rich in irony that a hip-hop group named itself after it.
One look at Chris, and you’ll see the evidence of his helpless delusion.
But the Handsome Boy Modeling School only wants his sixty dollars, nothing more, so they tell him whatever he wants to hear. If he graduates, he’ll walk the runway at a local department store.
On the first day of class, Chris meets his nemesis, the dashing aspiring male model otherwise known as Sapphire, who scoffs at Chris for not even coming close to sniffing the same league as him.
Chris retaliates by inventing a male-modeling moniker of his own: Sparkles.
His newfound calling in the fashion world lifts him so high that he fails to notice the exploitation stirring underneath.
He shows up at this first photoshoot feeling beloved, only to leave appalled, after the photographer tells him to take his shirt off. Tears roll down his face until he can take no more of the shame. He covers his naked chest and cries, “I guess I just had my first taste of the filthy side of this business. I’m a male model, not a male prostitute.”
As you can probably tell by now, this sitcom isn’t for the faint of heart.
I would be remiss not to include one of my favorites: the Donald episode. Chris resentfully has to attend the Peterson family reunion, where his indomitable cousin, Donald, graces his relatives with his appearance. While Chris is just a meager paperboy, a paperboy since preadolescence, still living under his parents’ roof, Donald is a self-made entrepreneur, the proprietor of a melon stand.
Never mind that his cousin resembles a smug version of David Cassidy. Chris dreads the family reunion, as much as his father does for hosting it, all because of Donald, that damn Donald.
All he hears is Donald this, Donald that, until Donald makes his epic entrance to the picnic in Chris’s backyard. One of the relatives even says, “I heard tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy with a chance of Donald.”
Chris breaks down into such a tizzy over all the attention glazing Donald that he passes out at the reunion. When Chris finally regains his consciousness, cousin Donald fashionably shows up. Already, the moment they reconnect, after being so many years apart, Donald belittles Chris to his face, taunting him for still delivering papers while flaunting the nine hundred dollars that he has saved in his bank account.
Everyone showers Donald with so much praise that Chris can no longer handle it. He’s starving for revenge to the point where he breaks into Donald’s classic Chevette and noses around through his belongings,until he finds an envelope, unopened, addressed to Donald, which Chris opens without hesitation and discovers a treasure, a secret about his cousin so deep, so dark that it would shame him for good. He’s ten days late on a loan payment. A secret Chris would never spill. Or would he?
This is Chris’s chance at redemption in the eyes of his bitter relatives, who loathe him to the very core.
He gets to the podium in the backyard and reveals the dirt about their Donald, about all the debt he owes to the bank. The family falls into an outrage, not at their precious Donald but at Chris for trying to spit on his character. One of them points her finger at the rooftop and tells everyone to look up at Donald, who stands up there, ready to end it all from the harrowing height of a one-story house. You can just sense the tragic irony of Donald, who can bear the shame no longer, about to jump off the same home that Chris has never been able to leave.
Chris’s father demands Chris to climb to the roof and talk his cousin down, not only because he doesn’t want a bunch of cops and reporters showing up, but also because the relatives are close to murdering Chris in his own backyard.
Another episode that illustrates the schizophrenic nature of its humor has a montage of Chris in his neighborhood walking down the sidewalk, where he comes across a sweet young girl pushing a baby stroller, and when reaching to pinch the baby’s cheek, he discovers, instead of a baby, that it’s a decapitated head.
The final episode I want to mention is the one where he hears from his parents that their house will be under construction. Chris fantasizes about his bond with the construction crew entering the house with their beards and their bellies and their tool belts, and he perceives them as these myths, these Norse gods.
When they’re hammering away in the kitchen, he dresses like them and hangs out to watch them, deaf to their ridicule and hazing of him, until they accept him as one of their own. On their breaks, they let him sit with them, as they rest around at night at a campfire, where they blow the harmonica and share their philosophical wisdom, or in his backyard, where they chug beer cans, where they smoke cigarettes and catcall women who happen to be randomly walking by.
His brotherhood with them, though, is betrayed once he hears from the leader of the crew their intention to rip his parents off. Chris feels such deep hurt from these immortals that he must warn his folks about the plan.
So he tries to explain it to them with, shall I say, a hypothetical, in which your friend is a rhinoceros who’s hawking expensive sugar cubes at the moon, you suppose, only to find out that they aren’t really sugar cubes but sand and garlic made from Korea.
Chris’s father has to interrupt him. “You’re saying these moron construction workers are trying to rip me off?”
You see, this sarcastic brand of humor is not for everyone but the depraved who laugh at the stubbed toe of humanity. I, unfortunately, am one of them. And unfortunately, I haven’t watched a sitcom quite this wicked ever since. But thank God that I never tossed away this DVD set of a show so brilliant that it was cancelled after two seasons.
