In search of lost comedy

For some reason I found myself thinking of Perfect Strangers today. A little bored with my work, I headed for the Web and stumbled upon the random fact that today is the 22nd anniversary of the show's debut. The show ran until 1993 and thus accumulated more than the traditional 5 years of episodes needed for syndication.

When Perfect Strangers debuted, I was a newlywed. I think my wife found it first, probably by accident while changing channels, and Balki Bartokomous's jumbled English is what caught her attention--possibly because it took her a minute or so to determine whether it was grammatically and idiomatically proper. She was a foreigner and she jumbled her English now and then, too--but she was fluent enough to get the jokes.

During the run of the show, 1986 to 1993, my wife and I lived in four apartments, changed jobs, changed careers, bought a cat. Perfect Strangers was one of those great shows that nevertheless by the time it ended you had almost forgotten it was still on the air. That wasn't really the show's fault, it's just that by 1993 we were working too hard and not watching much television. Now we're divorced, but I still have the cat.

It's easy to forget how great the physical comedy was; something that is way more difficult to pull off than most people realize. I remembered how good Mark-Linn Baker was when I saw an episode of "Hangin' with Mr. Cooper" that he directed that climaxed in a side-plitting scene involving Mark Curry smashing up a lot of glass with a golf club--there are about a million ways to do that and not be funny.

Speaking of the end of an era, tomorrow, Wednesday, March 26th, is the 366th--and thus last--new thing.