Sitcoms

Is everyone a smartass now though? Is it a 1970's generational thing? Because I, too, am witty and sarcastic and neither of parents were particularly witty. Sometimes I sort of think it comes from TV. What if we're all actually part of a sitcom? Every so often, I think, "Wouldn't it be cool if my life was really part of a sitcom?" Except it would really be not so cool because if you weren't funny enough, then your show would get cancelled, or your character would end up with their own spin-off (which would tank after the first season because the network moved it to Saturday night after reruns of Golden Girls) or because the recurring guest star with big boobs all of a sudden made the ratings go up and she got first billing and you ended up getting sent to visit your parents in Toledo, so you're only on every third show.

One of my brothers spent a summer living at home with our mother, and sometimes to escape her (because she had an uncanny ability to drive us crazy), Owen would just hang out in the garage, sitting in an old recliner, listening to public radio and surreptitiously smoking pot and/or drinking beer. Every so often, Mom or a neighbor or a family friend or someone would just drop by to talk, kind of like on a sitcom where everyone has their front door unlocked and people just walk in, to strike up some incredibly funny conversation, or to accidentally overhear and misinterpret something. So my brothers and I pretended we were all in this sitcom called Owen's Garage. Every time, something happened, like when Owen got a job and moved back to the city, it was really the network execs tweaking the show for better ratings. A summer of hot forest fires! A tire blowing on the freeway! Buying a condo without telling his girlfriend because it meant he have to explain why he was moving out of her apartment and not taking her with him! All too funny and all designed to boost ratings. Of course, eventually, ratings must have really dropped, because at the end of the final season, his character was killed off. Ratings surged at this unexpected turn of events, but of course, once you kill a character off you can't bring them back. Unless you're a star in Dallas, which isn't a sitcom.