Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?: Hyper-Irony in Robot Chicken, Part 1

“Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“I don’t know. Why did the chicken cross the road?”

“To get to the other side!”

Everyone knows this joke, so much so that it is no longer funny. And yet, is has become a sort of symbol for comedy. Though no one laughs at it, it has almost become synonymous with the word “joke.”

It is also the beginning of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show Robot Chicken (RC) created by Seth Green and Mathew Senreich. In the opening, a mad scientist (we know he’s mad because his hair is messy and he has a maniacal grin on his face) finds a chicken, presumably dead, in the middle of the road. The opening obviously references the classic joke that no one finds humorous anymore. However, in this version of the joke, the chicken has failed to complete its passage across the road. In fact, it is lying dead in the middle of the road. The old joke has been left incomplete, perhaps even died itself. The mad scientist takes the chicken back to his laboratory and rebuilds it as a cyborg that is half machine and half organic. A melodramatic voice announces, “It’s alive!” Then the scientist forces his resurrected creation, a la A Clockwork Orange, to watch the comedy sketches that comprise the show.

In just the opening, we see exactly what RC’s take on comedy is, as well as what it sets out to do to with comedy.

Just like the robot chicken, the show itself is a combination of the new and the old. Despite their crude humor and ever-current pop culture references, in many ways, the RC sketches are no different than previous forms of comedy. They are incredibly brief, some lasting merely a second or two, but comedy, unlike drama, is a fast-paced medium. A joke can’t have a long lead-up, otherwise the audience will become bored. Stand-up comics often offer jokes that are one-liners before moving on to new material. Sketch comedy is also not new in television. The Ed Sullivan show and others like it offered their viewers a wide variety of entertainment, and if audience members found one act boring, well, another, more interesting one would soon follow it. Monty Python’s Flying Circus also bombarded its viewers with comedy sketch after comedy sketch, some sketchs being very brief and others weaving themselves throughout the show. Saturday Night Liveoften focuses on short sketches that parody some form of popular cutlture. RC uses this same technique. Its humor is quick, with little build-up or introduction. As soon as we’ve seen the joke, we’re on to the next one, and if one sketch fails to satisfy, well, a new one will be on shortly. The humor itself would probably have shocked and disgusted Ed Sullivanviewers and may be too risque for even Monty Python or the not-yet-read-for-Prime-Time players, but the style in which it is presented is not unlike old-time variety or sketch comedy shows.

The humor itself often relies on parody, either by stretching the object of ridicule to its ludicrous extreme, such as the militarism of George W. Bush or the violence present in U.S. television, or by inverting a well-known pop culture phenomenon. (The kind and loving Care Bears become racists promoting ethnic cleansing.) The show, like most comedy, also often relies on stereotypes, such as the recurring nerd character, who may be brilliant but cannot overcome his social awkwardness to find a girlfriend. Parody, in any of these forms, is nothing new. Even the ancient Greeks used parody to critique their social institutions, so parody is nothing new to comedy.

Though RC is not completely new, it is also different from any show that has come before it. And in the opening, the mad scientists does not remake the chicken only to have it complete its road-crossing journey. Instead, the old seems to be thrown out in favor of a new one. The chicken may be resurrected, but the joke itself is not. As John Cleese might say, “And now, it’s time for something completely different.”

In many ways, RC is a response to our postmodern, technology-driven lives. The chicken itself is half biological, half machine, just as we have built our lives around our machines. We carry phones with us everywhere that can connect us to the internet in a matter of seconds. We check our emails daily, if not hourly. Cars, buses, and airplanes carry us to our destinations. Our homes can be heated or cooled, regardless of the temperatures outside. We are a sort of cybog, a robot human that is so reliant on technology that it might as well be physically attached to us. RC is responding to that change. Our lives are fast-paced, and require a fast-paced television show. After all, one RC episode only lasts fifteen minutes, while other shows are at least half an hour long. We expect web pages to download in seconds, we express ourselves through 140 characters on Twitter, and we want our entertainment to be as immediate and brief. RC delivers with bite (or byte?) sized humor.

However, to say that RC is merely pandering to an audience whose attention spans are stretched thin is to miss the show’s full significance in the evolution of comedy. Specifically, the show relies almost entirely on what Carl Matheson called “hyper-irony.” In his article “The Simpsons, Hyper-Irony, and the Meaning of Life,” Matheson tracks the changes in American comedy up until The Simpsons, which he cites as the first show to make use of hyper-irony, often through quotationalism, a “rapid-fire sequence of [pop culture] allusions” used in “a constant process of under-cutting.” One cannot understand the humor of The Simpsons, he asserts, unless one has a thorough background in popular culture.

For those of you who don’t have the time to read Matheson’s argument, I will summarize it thus (Although, seriously, go read it. It’s entertaining, well-written, and academic. A rare combination, indeed!): What makes The Simpsons different from the shows that came before it that referenced popular culture is that The Simpsons lacks any sort of moral agenda. It does not parody or allude to popular culture in order to promote any sort of values, be they liberal or conservative, but instead merely references for the sake of referencing. Matheson’s explanaition for the continuous use of allusions is that in our postmodern society, all authority is in question and we lack a solid place in which to put our faith. In such a social climate, Matheson asserts, contemporary artists often go back to the past for inspiration. However, because even history if one of the forms of authority in question, this inspiration from the past is often under-cut. What results is a constant flow of references, and those who can catch the most references are lucky enough to be “in the know.” They are members of what Matheson calls “the cult of knowingness.” This cult is built, Matheson claims, by the idea that even though there may be no ultimate truth, one can demonstrate one’s superior understanding of a set of intellectual rules. The point is not to have a depth of knowledge, but to have a broad understanding of a variety of ideological positions…and popular culture. One then proceeds to tear down any sort of ideological ediface that claims to have an understanding of ultimate knowledge. In other words, anything and everything is up for grabs as an object of parody. However, in the process of tearing down every source of ultimate truth, the show itself lacks any sort of ideological ground to stand on.

The Simpsons may have begun to maximize quotationalism and hyper-irony in comedy, but the show has since stalled. Both society and The Simpsons have changed since Matheson’s essay, and the show is now something of family-values comedy with liberal-leaning politics. While it paved the way for many of the popular comedy shows today and has had a huge influence on American entertainment, it has not been able to uphold its hyper-ironic stance for twenty-two seasons. I believe that the nature of The Simpsons as a situation comedy prevents it from being able to uphold a hyper-ironic worldview indefinitely, and that shows in sketch comedy form, like RC, are the natural progression of hyper-ironic comedy.

Stay Tuned for Part 2!