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Is there a grand unified theory behind Portlandia’s comedy?
What’s most impressive about “Portlandia” in its fourth season is that the off-kilter sketch show has a fairly narrow focus and doesn’t show any signs of wearing thin in its fourth season. Instead, the show has developed a very unique voice. Answering the question “What exactly is that voice and how does it make the show funny?” is the million dollar question.
The show can sometimes be striking in the way its sketches don’t always seem like they’re aiming for a punchline or even being comic. Take a couple sketches of the recent episode “Bahama Knights”: One sketch involves a group of women talking about how much they rock while their significant others start embellishing their praises of each other in more flowery language. The opening sketch of the episode involves a couple getting listless at a rock concert and feeling increasingly out of place. Each sketch has a punchline — In the former, the central couple don’t know any of the guests; in the latter, the couple wants to go to a concert again — but neither of them has anything joke-like in any conventional sense before the punch line. In a way, these sketches play like found art of amusing people. While a lot of the sketches are more overtly joke-like, these two sketches are a testament to the comedic style of the show: “Portlandia” is indisputably comic but the sketches don’t necessarily…
