Raising Expectations on Raising Hope

There's something about FOX's Raising Hope that always makes me laugh. It's more than just well written jokes. Tons of thirty minute comedies have those and can't keep viewers entertained. Have you ever gone to see a stand up comedian and been incredibly bored by their act, but when you look back on their material, you realize that most of their observational humor should have been pretty funny? They're jokes were well written, but they didn't make you laugh. Well the same thing can happen in television. Well written jokes don't always translate into comedy. There's something about the way a joke is used, the way it's placed in a script or spaced throughout a season, that has the power to make it hilarious. Raising Hope has mastered the art of joke placement.

The episode starts off with Bert naked and hiding from Maw Maw behind a pillow. Pretty much the entire teaser is a long-form of a joke that has made recurring appearances throughout the first season. The senile Maw Maw has mistaken one of the Chance family men for her dead husband and has decided to have her way with them. Seeing the look of shear terror on Bert's face, I couldn't stop the storm of internal laughter from shaking my stomach.

Then, they ended the teaser with a reasonably funny joke where Bert asks Jimmy, "you think this kind of stuff happens in other people's houses in the middle of the night, and they're just too embarrassed to talk about it?" Jimmy's lackluster but hopeful "Man, I hope so" left me wanting a little more out of the joke that led into the opening credits. I was actually disappointed for a moment before I forgot about it. Little did I know that their teaser ending joke was really just a thirty minute set up.

At the end of the episode, Maw Maw, still senile, has once again set her romantic sights on Jimmy to fulfill the role of her dead husband. As Jimmy furiously rubs hot sauce on his neck to discourage any inappropriate necking, he repeats his father's earlier question with a note of desperation in his voice. "Do you think other families have to deal with this stuff, but they're just too embarrassed to talk about it?" Virginia's simple "nope" is a punchline you see coming as soon as the joke starts being retold, but it still managed to break a literal LOL from between my lips.

Another notable mention of Raising Hope's excellent use of the recurring joke comes early in the episode after we find out that Virginia's cousin is dropping by to pay a visit. Mama Chance starts having one of her panic attacks, and we get to see the third incarnation of Virginia's "thing" involving Bert's finger and a stroking of the nose. A little ridiculous at first, but unlike Family Guy's drawn out jokes I criticized in the last post, this one seems to get funnier the more they use it. Think of it as the difference between Peter holding his knee and the recurring and escalating incarnations of the Chicken Fight. It's the difference between "they're still doing that?" and "they're doing it again!"

Anyway. Raising Hope also has a talent for finding visual humor. It's these visual jokes where baby Hope steals the show every time. After Virginia gets done telling her story about her no-good cousin and admits that her last attempt to keep the cousin away involved her declaring "Maw Maw died." The camera immediately cuts to the dumbstruck look on Bert and Jimmy's faces, as though to say, "I can't believe you'd stoop that low..." It's another predictable and mildly funny moment, but then they cut to a shot of baby Hope, with exactly the same look on her face, and once again, I laughed out loud, this time joined by my little brother, who doesn't even regularly watch the show. Later on in the episode, when Hope gets her hands on a laser pointer, and you see the red dot flickering across people's faces for an entire scene of dialogue, I couldn't stop chuckling. Their commitment to the joke made it funny, like the Family Guy knee bit is supposed to, but Raising Hope actually pulled it off by putting the ongoing humor in the background, rather than making it the focus of the scene.

Of course, every once in a while, a joke is just funny. Regardless of how it is placed in the script or tied into other events, you're going to laugh. The Maw Maw scavenger hunt, where Jimmy, Sabrina and an increasing number of friends pile into the van to chase Maw Maw from friend to friend all the way back home was exactly that kind of joke. Pretty much anything with Cloris Leachman in it is a win for me.

So what am I saying? Raising Hope is funny in that excellent classic sitcom kind of way. You don't expect a lot but it manages to blow you away with predictable jokes and a little bit of redneck absurdity because they're used brilliantly. It's a different kind of funny from a show like Community which goes out of its way to stretch the boundaries of the conventional sitcom. Raising Hope manages to make the boundaries work for them by staying inside.

Every week, Raising Hope manages to raise the bar on what viewers should be able expect from the least of our thirty minute comedies.