Full House - Making Easy Programming For the Masses
The American sitcom has one rule: never be funny
As a child, I remember watching Full House, and wondering, “Who were these weird people?” And, “What’s wrong with them?” These caricatures of Americans on American television were nothing like Americans you’d ever find in “real life,” and it wasn’t simply because these cartoon humans are played-by a completely different and removed class of people than ‘the average American consumer,’ for whom such shows are even made. It also wasn’t that these play-actors words were not organic and sincere productions, but cleverly scripted dialogue as written by the show’s writers, who are generally not actors themselves. More so, it wasn’t just that this single-parent, working class family lived in a McMansion in San Francisco (and never seemed to spend a moment outside, or talk about anything real), there was something far more unsettling underneath the media-mask of a 1990’s spiritual successor to something as uncannily corny as Leave it To Beaver.
As Beaver himself acted out: the sitcom is a strange imitation of real life, yet there is nothing “normal” about it, either its creation, or its writing, or the classes who produce such products. Yet, as a bland product being constructed by mass-appeal for theoretically “real people,” the strangest thing about the American sitcom is it’s written in a repressive sort of code, that is stand-in for another sort of code, the kind that would be undecipherable to real human beings, leading to the impression that the people in these sitcoms, along with the reflection of “the real human world” that they inhabit, which is also scripted for the show, was created by aliens, or, some sort of non-human entity. Even young me could begin to fathom - is someone holding these people hostage? Yes, this is beyond “fake,” but still, blink twice if yes, once if no-
Even creepier, what is this horrible disembodied laughter, where does it come from, and why? Full House was never funny. Not a single character, line, or aspect of Full House ever made a real living human being laugh, yet for some inexplicable reason, laughter erupted with every banal situation and word. Since then, I’ve learned much more about the American sitcom. A sitcom isn’t art, but is distinguished by its lack of art, a sort of total contrivance and unreality that requires no suspension of disbelief, but is somehow there, acceptable. Am I asserting some people were and are prisoners of their TV? Not quite, for what I bring to light is how easy these shows go down the American consumer gullet, so as to create no pressure, tension or dyspepsia. You’re just one of the CBS, ABC, MBC, and most recently, the FOX family, you can suppose.1
The American sitcom has one rule: never be funny. A real American sitcom, which is the wonder bread of Television along with its spicier “everything bagel” equivalent in the soap operas (primarily for women), is never created with the intention to make people laugh, but only engage so as to maintain their attention (the desire is neutralized in the lack of humor, spice, and zest of the wonder bread programming (or sitcom) in a semi-glazed, reduced state of consciousness by way of this programming, which is so asinine as to create no real resistance in the viewer. With this lack of resistance, also arises the inability to take any possible resistance as serious, no different than the characters, the plots, the shows. The message of the shows are clear: Americans are not a serious people, and they are not meant to be taken seriously, no matter their position inside or outside the family. More laughs, more clapter: enthralled. To create the thrall: you are the programming. You carry the message you were programmed to: from gestures and grunts to speaking, to writing, to acting, to recording, to broadcasting, to the telegraph, social media, and even a text like the “good news” of the Holy Bible itself - in all mediums the same occurrence is taking place: people are sending the messages of the ultimate consequences of their beings (and those which came before): an education of how to act (what will get you paid, and punished, very narrow lines, very low pay in most cases). This has nothing to do with morality, and not yet even value judgments. Here, it is only to note it is happening, and has been been happening for a long time.
To wit, the sitcom, at least prior to FOX network staking their cynical claim with modernity’s non-tragic last-man hero Al Bundy, was little more than Sesame Street for “a more adult population” - which is to say a poorly masked Public Service Announcement (now kiss and make up, be good little stooges, etc.) by hidden societal fungineers, putting forth their own Platonic and Christian Ideal: the American Family Institution needs to be FCC approved, and look and sound like this: utter claptrap that kept bad writers and hack middlemen working far longer than it ever should have.
If a sitcom is never funny, why call it a comedy? Answer: double-speak, double-think. If the sitcom is written in code as I stated earlier here, then the code for the code tells you everything you need to know about the repression itself, especially when it comes to representing men as idiots, oafs, losers, Al Bundys, Homer Simpsons, and other supposedly lovable idiots.
It’s called “comedy” only because you can’t call it interesting, or thrilling, or drama, or any other sort of theater a hapless viewer, or impressionable child, might actually want to stumble into as they flip through the ever-rising number of channels. Comedy as a name and brand here is not only more accessible, but carries a connotation of zest, spice, something surprising, tasty, exciting, which is to say, painful or dangerous, yet, sitcoms are the epitome of “safe programming.” That’s why they’re made. The sitcom, as fruit of the Corporate Network, is a private orchard where money trees blossom, and this orchard is a corporately-owned and managed safe-space for advertisers. One that constantly reminds the viewer, as if a warning: you’re a valued member of the Cosby family.
This is why the average American Cosby is so concerned with their reputation, with morality. It’s even creepier with the original Cosby, not just his Spanish Fly routine, but that he was so concerned of being seen as a moral and good person, a real stand-up member of “the African American Community” or whatever contrivances these sorts of predators generally hide behind (masses of people won’t save you), a real Christian through and through. What I hardly want to make the reader consider, is just how many real Cosby’s are out their, constrained only by their own cowardice and circumstances, lack of money or protection. I would wager all the money in the world, and its future, that there’s enough absurdity, disgust, hatred, and repressed desire/need in the average human, that 50-100% of them have to “work” on a daily basis to supposedly “suppress their immoral behavior/instincts” for the good of the species. The smallest percentage live in positions free of consequence of others. A large portion of both of these “release” or “inflict” themselves as they want, as they can, as programmed, but are considered crazy or abnormal by polite society, and the easiest ones to control typically wind up back in jail or state custody, while the millions and billions outside the world’s largest prison systems are the much more difficult beings to constrain, repress, and control. It’s not the ones inside the asylum anyone has to concern themselves with.
Cue the need of the endless signs, signals, laws, and the perpetual programming and reprogramming of the masses. Identity for Americans is as manufactureable, programmable, and disposable as the machines it is displayed on. No other people in all human history have had to undergo so many identity and mask changes before an era was over, within such short time periods - so it makes sense as to why America is (1) the mental-illness and schizophrenia capital of the world, and (2) explains the need for as much governmental safety projects, initiatives, and safe-space programming as possible. These people’s fragile minds cannot handle anything remotely real. Good thing the creation and prescription of dangerous mind-altering substances has never been more popular, and that the most popular business in the world, is civilization, the ever-more sophistication of humanity’s creations of simulations.
I saw more Full House than I care to admit, but I don’t mind admitting, for young me was a young anthropologist and psychologist, determined to see into what was on the other side of this totally manufactured simulation of reality.
And when you stare into the abyss, Full House stares back at you.
Yet the only episode I can recall, the only conflict I can recall, that sticks in my memory, was when the blonde girl wore the bigger blonde girl’s purple shirt affair (it was ugly). The sister not only took the shirt without asking, but then spilled mustard on it, and then shrunk the shirt while trying to wash it, where she gave up, and gave it to the youngest blonde girl. You’d have thought the world was ending, so catastrophic was getting a stain on what was already an ugly shirt, perhaps a sign to get rid of it anyway? But no, I was being educated: Is this why Americans are so neurotic, obsessive, covering things in plastic, taking drugs all the time? The TV enforces the thinking, the behavior? A digression, the moral of the TV story as I remember it, is as timeless as Christian as Classic as classically for simpletons and idiots: just be honest. Why did you lie to me? You should have told me the truth.
The truth? In Cosby’s America? In Weinstein’s matrix? On Epstein’s island? As packaged and sold by Cola and other advertisers? These made-for-TV wonderbread crackers are out of their damn bread box! The worst thing that could ever happen in America, amongst Americans, especially about politics, power, religion, family, or anything else, is for anyone to “tell the truth.” When the Last Eichmann lives longest, there’s no standards, measurements, or even terminology for the way present and past humanity devoured the future, spilling mustard on their ugly shirts for all eternity in the process. The devastating effects of one too many hot-dogs.
The truth would break America, if the shockwave from the death of god hadn’t already broke what was left of it, first. People tend to think of clear pictures or measured and “real” dividing lines, when in reality, breakage, its fractures, and even its implements and incidents, never need be coherent, even when the archeology may be studied from a distance.2 See that time GM let someone’s crazy wine-drunk aunt design a car, here.
This race to the bottom makes one thing clear: there’s no bottom so banal, so low, so “normal,”3 that the American Corporation and its Media wouldn’t enact it against its audience.
ZM
4/4/25
When I was a young dummy, I once parroted American-liberal talking points about FOX being for stupid conservatives, until in my late teenage years, I realized that I had never even watched FOX - and so I began to see how subtle, powerful, and successful the programming really is: people are taught to carry messages, and resist or fight others, based on the programming alone - the ideal is that it requires “no reality” or “double check” or even “central authority.” From there, its logical to see how successful the corporate propaganda was: that any of these networks are that different, is the illusion, that its about anything other than money and power, is also a mythology. Lastly, to this day, loyal legions of ABC, NBC, and CBS can still be heard to parrot the corporate propaganda that 1) the networks are any different, other than their corporate flavor of elephant-ass or donkey-hoof, and 2) that somehow, FOX is any different or worse, as the other three pre-existing mega-news network spread their marketing in a bid for attention-power via public broadcasting. It really is hilarious (even if otherwise a hopeless “people” and “nation”).
This is insanely complicated. If I wanted to get into it here, I’d begin with Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Nietzsche.
The world of appearance. Reality and truth, apparent, profound, simply baffling - unconcealing themselves.