Short Attention Spans . . . Wait, What?
We can’t pay attention to anything much longer than a couple of minutes anymore. I watch my teenage kids rabidly surf their ipods and, sometimes, the car radio, with a weird mix of devotion and impatience. Even when they find a song they absolutely love, they bounce out of it within a minute or so because it doesn’t hold their interest.
And this is music they love!
You’ve read about the death of the album, right? This is worse. It’s the death of the three-minute song! They’re fine with a sample of a couple of lines and a hook, and then on to another one.
It’s the same with TV, too, when they bother to watch it. As soon as a joke misses, or the narrative lags, or, god forbid, a commercial comes on, they are either on to another program, or, more likely, gone from the room completely.
Which is a long way of getting to my point: the Geico Cavemen TV show on ABC failed because it tried to take a 5-line joke and milk it for 22 minutes every week, complete with backstories and exposition. Turns out we just thought they were funny in 30-second doses, like Max Headroom, or Gilbert Gottfried. It’s a basic tenet of comedy–get on, get off, get in, get out–that they violated by pushing the characters beyond their punchlines.
I think about this all the time when I see rich, funny, laugh-out-loud ideas crash and burn when they’re pushed beyond their limits. Tenacious D, for instance. Or anything with Mr. Bean. SNL is notorious for milking a two-minute idea well beyond the laughs, especially when they take characters to the big screen; Coneheads, The Ladies Man, Pat, Mary Katherine Gallagher . . . all one-trick ponies that couldn’t make it past the first reel, laughs-wise.
I’ve always thought the movie industry should bring back shorts, the 15-minute quick hits that drove the growth of cinema in the 1920s and ’30s. It would be a perfect medium for ideas–and characters–with short life spans, and give new life to the movie industry, where even 90-minute films are now often decried as “too long” by our ADD-afflicted audiences. And the small doses might help us like Jim Carrey again. Or Larry the Cable Guy.
