I have already stated how getting a laugh is the most powerful form of artistic manipulation. But some comedies linger in our hearts and minds long after the end credits roll by making us feel and care. Some films achieve this by combining comedy with a touch of tragedy, where the laughs are punctuated by a few moments of sadness. However, the most sublime comedy of all is that extremely rare type that makes us feel and care because we laugh. NewsRadio’s deeper significances and the comedy used to express them are inherently bound and inseparable. In a sense, we can say that it is the very essence of NewsRadio that Bill McNeal must torment others and that the torment must be funny.
Comedy shifts the mode of expression from perceiving the universe the way we think it is to perceiving the universe the way we want it to be. Drama only allows us to reveal the world; comedy allows us to transform it. In NewsRadio, we learn what each character wants the world to be, and through these desires we learn more about the human condition than most cinematic works ever accomplish. In NewsRadio, these desires (the content of the show) are expressed through the morally expressive comedic mise en scène (the show’s form).
Dave, the most uptight character, was always trying to maintain order. In "Who’s the Boss (Part 1)" [4-12] and "The Lam" [5-7], while the rest of the cast is behaving crazily, it is Dave who is constantly trying, mostly in vain, to re-establish normalcy. In Dave we encountered the conflict between the urge to control and order our (psychic) universe and the opposing force of things that are beyond our control. Subsequently, Dave also expressed the insecurity we feel when our attempts to order the universe fail. In "Arcade" [3-4], Dave’s uncontrollable addiction to incessantly playing the arcade video game Stargate Defender causes him to do poorly on his SATs again, just like he did in high school. The moral conflict and tension of this situation is quintessentially Dave. Dave did not always come out on top. In fact, he very often lost, not to any one person, but to a situation. With him it was never an issue of winning versus losing but a conflict of control and order versus lack of control.
Lisa’s moral conflict related to who she thought she should be. The background to the Lisa Miller character was that she was a prodigy even as a child (as she states, at five she was reading at a fourth grade level and could do long division in her head). Her character’s background combined ambition with nerdishness. She had the talent to be an anchorwoman for the station or the News Director, but had not yet ascended to either of these positions. The question for Lisa was: Does she want to become these things? While she reveled in the temporary position of News Director in "Airport" [3-17] while Dave was out of town, her stint as boss in season four ultimately led her to choose not to be the News Director. In the conflict between what she really wanted to do and what she thought she should do, the former won out.
In essence, Lisa was competitive because she felt that she should be competitive. Consequently, her obsessiveness was more a neurosis of maladjustment rather than a symptom of inner drive. In "Negotiation" [2-8], Lisa obsesses that her siblings have more successful careers than her, this leading to her brief stint as an MTV veejay. She returns to the WNYX fold because she realizes that that is what she really wants to do. The MTV thing is a fling and no more than that. If you read between the lines, you know that Lisa is never serious about changing careers, even though we sense a moment of real danger that Lisa may really change careers (Lisa gets kind of obsessive, you know). It is a classic case of Lisa doing something because she feels that she should do it. After all, it is her agent who suggests to her that moving into television would be a step up in her career. She repeatedly mentions "My agent says…" so many times that Dave asks her, "How long have you been represented by the Reverend Sun Yun Moon?" The fact that she bombs in her interview with Anthrax hardly matters because it only goes to confirm that she never really wanted a career change in the first place. The seed of Lisa’s obsessive nerdishness lies in her conditioned upbringing. In "Look Who’s Talking" [4-10] Lisa reveals the nature of her early upbringing, to which Dave replies, "Were you raised in a POW camp?" In "New Hampshire" [5-22] when faced with Lisa’s nerdy interest with New Hampshire politics, Joe comments, "One of these days I’m going to have to open you up and reprogram your motherboard." Thus, while Dave’s moral position was centrifugal (‘How do I order my universe?’), Lisa’s was centripetal (‘What is my position in the world?’).
Furthermore, the relationship between Dave and Lisa was far from smooth sailing. Later in the series, a running gag even had the staff assuming that Dave and Lisa were sleeping together again every time they started bickering in the office. Mostly, their fighting was a dramatic requirement, but their arguments were also an expression of the differing desires of two people. The reason that Dave and Lisa break up in season four was that he cared more about work than anything else, even to the detriment of everything else in his life. Lisa only seemed that way, especially when that neurosis of obsessiveness took over. As mentioned previously, Lisa’s competitiveness and diligence were manifestations of the person she thought she should be not the person she was deep down in her heart. When she was most competitive and diligent, the maladjustment caused her obsessiveness to rise accordingly. (Even as late as "Padded Suit" [5-19], where Lisa is behaving as the most well-adjusted person in the office, who else but someone with a huge streak of obsessiveness would type up a 40-page job description?) There are even moments in "Beep, Beep" [4-16] where Lisa chides Dave for putting work ahead of romance:
Lisa: "Dave, you know, there is more to life than work."
Dave: "No there isn’t. I wish you’d stop pretending you’re any different about that than I am."
Lisa: "That’s right. I’m sorry, I forgot that I am talking to the man who broke up with me because he thought that romantic entanglements could affect job performance."
The background to the Bill McNeal character was that he came from a "broken home." He described his family’s arguments and ‘dysfunctional’ status as a "regular Algonquin round table of ribaldry and wit." Bill’s tormenting of his co-workers was derived from his upbringing — a coping mechanism if you like. It is significant that Bill dealt with the stress of his dysfunctional upbringing by fully assimilating it into his psyche, even recalling it as not just normal but pleasurable. It is thus no surprise that Bill sees no problem with treating others the same way he was. However, Bill never crossed the line into true maliciousness, not even in "Led Zeppelin Boxed Set" [3-13] where he makes Matthew cry. This is a case of Bill overestimating how far he can push Matthew, an error he readily admits, not a purposeful attempt to hurt him. It was well-hidden beneath his callous exterior, but Bill cared for his co-workers, and there were moments such as in "Bitch Session" [2-12], "Presence" [2-19] and "Planbee" [4-2] where we saw a faint glimpse of how Bill truly felt. Bill’s incessant tormenting was a means for an intrinsically caring man, not used to and perhaps not capable of normal means of social interaction and intimacy, to reach out to others. Psychologically speaking, we could describe it as an urge to provoke a response, any response, born out of a deeper need for human contact. In the cinema our response, as the audience, to characters bears a strong similarity to the counter-transference experienced between a psychiatrist or psychologist and a patient. With Bill McNeal our counter-transference is always positive because we implicitly sense how sensitive and caring he is deep down inside that callous exterior. Bill had his own moral conflict — that between the need for human contact and intimacy and the need to protect himself through his outrageous behavior.
Jimmy James was an unqualified success in his life. He was so rich that he could do whatever he wanted, even if this was something crazy (e.g., helicopter rides during the day to visit his dogs in "Luncheon at the Waldorf" [1-6] or a round-the-world balloon expedition in "Balloon" [4-17]). He was also a professional success as a businessman and billionaire. In "Presence" [2-19] there is one gag that illustrates Jimmy’s position in the moral order of WNYX. Jimmy loses Bill McNeal to an Atlanta station in a poker game. When they read Bill’s contract they learn that the wager was valid due to an "act of God" clause — in the fine print it says, "Jimmy James will hereafter and for the purposes of this contract only be referred to as ‘God.’"
The moral conflict for Jimmy was: What does a man want from the universe when he already has everything? The answer to this is companionship. His famous "Wife Candidate List" from season two was clearly a search for companionship, but his closest friends were the WNYX staff. In the very first episode Mr. James was portrayed as a somewhat scary authority figure. However, by the second season we already saw how much he loved his WNYX staff, who were like family to him. There is a moment in "Station Sale" [2-11] where he admits as much (a beautiful piece of acting by Stephen Root, allowing us to be deeply moved by Jimmy’s statement without it ever becoming maudlin).
Beth did not have a moral conflict, but she was defined in terms of a moral position. She was impoverished in the moral order by lacking professional skills, any semblance of career success, or a decent salary. Yet Beth was comfortable with her lot in life. She had to save money by eating break room snacks for lunch, but she never whined about it. On several occasions she admitted to being paid next to nothing, but she never made a serious push for a bigger salary. Money was welcome, such as in "Stocks" [3-9], but she never showed a great concern about it, and even ends up giving Jimmy her profits from selling stock tips to Bill. Beth broadened the moral landscape of NewsRadio further down the moral scale, and established a morally valid position here.
Joe was also comfortable with his position in the moral order. As an electrician he was never in the same professional circle as the rest of the staff, but he was proficient in building incredible (if sometimes less than useful) electronic devices. That did not matter because Joe was his own man. His confidence in his own skills as an electrician was supreme and unyielding.
Catherine Duke was devised as a regal character (the last name "Duke" was intentional) with a correspondingly standoffish personality. Unfortunately, her position above the fray in the WNYX moral order was one other reason why Catherine Duke was a difficult character to write storylines for. It required a lot of imagination to bring Catherine onto the same plane as the other characters. I found Catherine to be most interesting when circumstances forced her to truly behave like one of the gang. These were moments of rare privilege, for in these moments we got to see the tension between her regal aloofness and her social interactions.
Matthew Brock’s weirdness was an outward compensation for an inner conflict. There is no avoiding a psychological analysis here. While the Matthew Brock character was ostensibly heterosexual there were a lot of homosexual jokes at his expense. In particular, both Matthew’s effeminacy and his worship of Bill McNeal had distinctly homoerotic subtexts. With Matthew Brock’s exterior outrageousness, you had to wonder…. The moral conflict here involved someone who was different from others around him trying to find a point of comfort in social and moral relationships.
NewsRadio was a very funny show, but its comedy was also used to express so much more about life and living (as well as creating lots of laughs). The WNYX family established a moral order and moral universe wherein we saw a breadth of human desires and moral conflicts. This was the content that made NewsRadio such immensely profound art. The means, or form, by which this content was expressed was the comedy — structured by moral expressiveness and fuelled and heightened by sexual tension and energy. The comedy played on, heightened, explored, elucidated, and developed the relationships between the characters. An episode like "Big Brother" [4-15] was almost exclusively about relationships — Dave and Lisa, the rest of the male staff’s tacit support for Dave and Lisa by trying to find out who Lisa is dating, as well as Beth acting sisterly towards Matthew — and finds rich comedy in playing upon them. In the nervous state of tension that these relationships existed in, we find the expression of a true breadth of human conditions — love and concern, jealousy and trust, being filial, compassion, comfort and insecurity, comradeship and separation.
17 "Led Zeppelin Boxed Set" [3-13]
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