I’ve mostly lost my taste for dramatic relief. It’s not that I don’t appreciate a good sweet or sad moment, but learning how to construct drama and trying to construct comedy, I’ve come to learn the ease of the former and the difficulty of the latter, and now so many ‘serious’ moments in ostensible comedies end up coming off to me as the writer lacking either the imagination or the courage to commit to only comedy – to try and find the funniest thing to happen at this precise second of screentime. My old faves that traffic in dramatic relief – M*A*S*H, Shortpacked!, Futurama – show the exception to this in that the dramatic moments are exactly as sincere as the humour; the serious moments are told in much the same language and for much the same purpose.

But I do have two more examples. The first is 30 Rock (SPOILERS ahead), where there always a mixed core of sweetness and meanness that it balanced better and better as it went along. It’s a perfect example of “saying everything in the same language” because the sweet moments are always as absurd as everything else; the most forced moment for me was the final bit closure Jack got with with mother, and that still involved a late-in-life lesbian relationship from a renowned bigot, Jenna trying to upstage the funeral with her kinky crossdressing boyfriend, and Jack’s absolute insistence that she hated him despite the increasing evidence otherwise.

This extends to its other serious elements, most notably Jack and Liz’s friendship. As I’ve said before, there’s a real beating heart there, and I was genuinely invested in the conflict they risked ending it over. When Jack gives her his speech about going on the boat trip to find himself, it’s not just sweet because we’re invested in him as a person, it’s sweet because he’s really sharing their friendship one last time, giving her one last lecture that’s really an expression of himself.

My other favourite example isn’t a show, but a band. The Doug Anthony All-Stars were an Australian comedy trio who sang songs about politics, incest, murdering hippies, and (my favourite) dog-fucking. They wore outfits that, infamously, they never washed, partly because of the watercolour paintings attached to the back and partly because they loved the idea of being smelly and horrible to be around; Tim Ferguson has a great story about Paul McDermott discovering mold on his uniform that he chose to destroy with sheer force of will.

On the other hand, they’d have one song towards the end of every concert that they would sing completely straight-faced. There would be neither explanation nor setup, and they would continue on with the concert as if they hadn’t sung it at all. To my eye, this was a genuine moment of dramatic relief, in exactly the same way people use the phrase ‘comic relief’. It was their way of saying, yes, we could have been doing this the entire time and have been choosing not to; it puts into context just how silly and crass they were being the whole night. These are the kinds of emotions we are coming here to avoid.

(Note: I’d forgotten I’d already revisited this concept back in, uh, April, but fuck it, this is good stuff)