"Waiting" is impeccably written, in a sober prose that does nothing to call attention to itself and yet capably delivers images, characters, sensations, feelings, and even, in a basically oppressive and static situation, bits of comedy and glimpses of natural beauty.
Q: Can you please explain the situation of this comedy to us? A: In any sitcom, there have to be two ingredients.
David has always appeared committed to some very pure idea of situation comedy, where the situation directly leads to the comedy.
The appeal to Bellow of Ravelstein's extravagance and excitement is characteristic: the "big-souled" intellectual meeting up with the material world is the situation of most Bellow comedy.
The real foil, unfortunately, is the audience -- which will find itself in the not-unfamiliar situation of watching a comedy whose best jokes have been given away in the commercials and trailers for the film.
More entertaining, in an edgily brilliant piece of situation comedy in the style of Saki, is "Maternal Devotion".
The classic premise of situation comedy has always been that of a man trapped in his surroundings; and this is the case in Viz's finest strips, the characters poignantly locked in a doomed cycle by their giant testicles, religious fervour, undiagnosed autism, painful haemorrhoids, and terminal stupidity.
A great deal of literature (also a great deal of situation comedy) is built around imaginary cases in which one character misreads another character's code, or in which someone suffers by insisting on making explicit what the rest of the world knows is better left concealed by euphemism or denial.
Although Simon had spent more than a decade in television, pioneering, among other things, the genre of situation comedy — Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" and "The Phil Silvers Show" were two of his assignments — it took him no fewer than twenty drafts to get his first play, "Come Blow Your Horn," Broadway-ready, in 1961.
Leonard Pierce of The A.V. Club felt the script balanced all the character subplots extremely well, writing, "It's this ability to hold down the 'situation' part of situation comedy, while never scrimping on the comedy, that makes it the class of the NBC lineup the purest, if not the best, sitcom on the air".
And so it goes in the world of situation comedy.
