What is your favourite work of art that intentionally looks fuck-ugly? There’s a section of criticism that argues that all art ought to aspire to using every single element of their medium as effectively as possible. When I was a kid, I would have been 100% behind that; as you know, Bob, one of the most influential works on my thinking is The Simpsons, which aims to not just be funny, but to tell stories and have sophisticated things to say and sophisticated character work and to do all of this using the entire medium of animation. But the older I get, the more I appreciate works that deliberately and openly half-ass some element, or even openly and joyfully look like dogshit. Always Sunny was the big shift for me – this is a show that deliberately bases large parts of its aesthetic around looking garbage. It’s largely based around constant shot-reverse-shot with each shot being a two-shot. The reason it works is because Always Sunny‘s main goal is to be funny, and you don’t actually need much to be funny. But the show’s dogshit look ends up being part of its wonderful personality; a rhythm that the audience is expected to fall in line with.

Curb Your Enthusiasm has a similar aspect to it, being a large influence on Always Sunny; it’s not as abrasively ugly, but I have seen someone describe it as looking like a cheap porno. Comedy really benefits from this kind of thing, because a lot of comedies don’t really need to shift their tone that much; they rely on the writing and performances and a particular approach to editing to work. Red VS Blue is a show that doesn’t necessarily look like dogshit but is limited by the fact that it was filmed using the Halo video games, something the writers and directors eventually really leaned in on to tell jokes. Along these same lines is 8 Bit Theater, a comic made mostly from video game sprites that eventually drew a lot of humour out of the absurd detail it put into a look that could never really be salvaged.