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| November 22, 2014 |
By: Curtis M. Parvin
The Avocado Opinion Dept. Waiver and Pledge
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If you are a 20-something with an internet connection and enjoy dark comedy, you have probably seen “Too Many Cooks”, a new parody skit from the writers at Adult Swim. This television network is mostly known for animated shows — Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, The Venture Bros., Robot Chicken, etc — but lately Adult Swim is branching out into live action skits/segments that still provide the same twisted sense of humor. Their most recent video “Too Many Cooks” has gone viral and is stirring up lots of controversy.
The 11 minute and 11 second video (conveniently embedded here for your viewing pleasure) is based on a popular maxim: “Too many cooks spoil the soup/broth”. Basically a cliched phrase is used to make fun of television genres from the 1980s and 1990s. One long extended credit sequence lampoons show such as Family Ties, Alf, The Cosby Show, G.I Joe, Family Matters, Full House and Star Trek: The Next Generation. A catchy, upbeat theme song plays as the tropes of these programs are cut down to size by a crazed maniac with a machete.
Frightened actors run from set to set set only to end up the victims of a big, bloody genre massacre. Comedy and violence are blended together in such a way that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish one television show from another. The main idea, supposedly, is to point out — through comedic repetition — that when too many people contribute to something, often the original idea gets “butchered”. “Too Many Cooks” has taken this to its most literal extreme.
I mentioned that this video has gone viral, but why? Why are people sharing it with their buddies? Why are those recipients sending it to other people they know? What is the appeal of “Too Many Cooks”?
A general answer would be: as the years go by, a decade’s fashion, style and language changes and becomes more obsolete. Television shows from the ’80s and ’90s have become almost parodies of themselves when these elements are taken into consideration. It is fun to look back with nostalgia at old programs we watched when we were kids and make fun of their flaws.
Moreover, members of the “screen generation” like myself grew up with home video, home computers, and the World Wide Web. Unlike our parents, 20-somethings today don’t have to wait and tune in live to watch their favorite programs. We have access to virtually anything at the click of a mouse. Reference generators like Google and Youtube have made it possible to experience pop culture trends from decades past. Remember the show Alf about a furry alien that lived with a family and ate cats? Now people can bring up clips in less that 30 seconds on their smartphones.
Technology is giving the people in their 20s encyclopedic knowledge of many genres, story arcs and tropes. But there is a dark side to all this media consumption. Just like our own computers, we store countless amounts of information so quickly that there is a danger of overheating. “Too Many Cooks” is really a violent, repetitive commentary on this sensory overload, what screenwriter (Taxi Driver and Raging Bull) Paul Schrader calls “narrative exhaustion.”
In an article for The Guardian, Schrader defines the phrase as: “the omnipresence and ubiquity of plot created by media proliferation”. He goes on: “We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines.” When we look closer at the viral video “Too Many Cooks” we begin to recognize our own hyper-awareness of genres and tropes. The major culprits nowadays for this barrage of media and pop culture are Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video and any other live streaming platform.
This makes things even harder for artists, writers, and other people that make content for a living. These creatives have to try even harder to entertain an audience that has seen everything already. “Too Many Cooks” has to include an extreme element, the serial killer, to satisfy an audience with a short attention span. In a way, the maniac with the machete is thrown into the mix to kill off what we already find familiar and stale — genre tropes and characters. In effect, old ideas are given a remixed sense of originality.
It’s not all bad, though. Familiarizing yourself with different genres and mixing them together can be a good way to create even more engrossing entertainment. Mel Brooks combined serious western cliches with comedy to make Blazing Saddles. Sam Raimi took the horror film and added Three Stooges slapstick gags on top of the violence in Evil Dead 2. I guess you could call that genre “splat-stick”, but where does that go on your movie shelf, comedy or horror? How can you categorize something with so many moving parts?
All of the burden is on the creators, not on the consumer. Creators of art need to pick and choose ideas carefully or the finished product will result in a horrible, discombobulated mess. They will lose fans if the core of the idea/show becomes diluted with excessive plot points or unnecessary references — I stopped watching Family Guy for this particular reason. As the show went on, it became less about the characters and more about references to Seth MacFarlane’s own favorite movies and TV shows.
Austin Kleon says in his book Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, “In the end, creativity isn’t just the things we choose to put in, it’s the things we choose to leave out.” He is right about a good artist being able to subtract and still preserve the integrity of the work.
If we include everything but the kitchen sink when we are creating something — in order to please everyone in the audience — excessive material may end up butchering an idea that started with an engaging premise.
Curtis M. Parvin is a Rhode Island-based writer and filmmaker. His Twitter link is in his byline above. His IMDB page is here.
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