Point and Laugh Show

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

It's been one week since they had the fight
 With the Siamese twins and the transvestite
 Five days since that awful brawl
 They still haven't gotten the blood off the wall
 It's been three days since the bitter feud
 between the KKK and that gay Jewish black dude...

—"Weird Al" Yankovic, "Jerry Springer"

An unscripted show with real people, where the entire point is to point and laugh, "Gee, those people are stupid!" or "Gee, those people are jerks!" Everybody in the cast is either a moron, a Jerkass, insane, or all of the above. The audience sees these people humiliate themselves in public, and is comforted that no matter how messed up their own lives may be, at least there are people whose lives are more messed up still.

Sometimes, the cast includes a "No Respect" Guy, who is relatively decent but kind of a stick in the mud. The audience winds up snickering at them just as much as at the rest of the cast.

With these shows, the single most important job is that of casting director. The host doesn't need to do much; just wait for the cast of losers to show up, sit back, and enjoy the comedy. The art of casting them reached its heights (or depths) in three genres: talk shows, Reality Television, and Game Shows. The final element is putting the cast under as much stress as possible (hostile audiences for the talk show, cramped conditions and hunger for Reality Television, and seizure-inducing sets for the Game Show) so they really crack up.

Since these are real people involved in unscripted pain, there are people who can't help but sympathize with them. This is often rebutted with the claim that because they're "dumb enough" to have it filmed, they deserve to be laughed at, even though they are all essentially events that the victim could not have predicted.

A variant of the Point and Laugh Show is found in books and the Internet. Instead of rounding up losers as the television shows do, the variant uses the far more efficient technique of listing anecdotes of losers who have yet to appear on TV.

These are almost always Guilty Pleasures, and usually use Bigot vs. Bigot. Compare Sadist Show.

Examples of Point and Laugh Show include:

Talk Shows

  • The Trope Codifier of the Point and Laugh Show, and probably the best known example, is Jerry Springer. Bring on the cross-dressing dog fetishists. Bring on the albino midgets. Bring on the homicidal glue-sniffing trailer trash. Bring on the homicidal glue-sniffing cross-dressing albino midget dog fetishist trailer trash. It's an old-school circus sideshow freak attraction for the new millennium.
    • The Steve Wilkos Show is a tad saner, replacing the sideshow freaks with drug addicts, deadbeat parents, and domestic abusers. It still fits well within this trope, of course.
  • Phil Donahue may be the Trope Maker. He started out more high-minded (for that matter, so did Jerry) but switched to a Point and Laugh Show with time.
  • Morton Downey Junior pioneered the trash-talk format.
  • Sally Jesse Raphael.
  • Montel Williams, although for years he was much more high-concept and focused more on helping people.
  • Ricki Lake.
  • Maury Povich (who also started out more high-minded, but chased the Lowest Common Denominator fast).
  • Jenny Jones started off fairly normal like Jerry Springer was in the early days and had more or less the same format as Oprah for the first two seasons, but declining ratings led to the show getting a Hotter and Sexier Re-Tool, though nowadays it's mostly remembered as being the only Point and Laugh Show that led to one guest murdering another one later.
  • Semi-averted with Oprah Winfrey, who also rounds up freaks and somehow manages to seem more classy than her rivals.
  • Parodied in the South Park episode "Freak Strike", where the genetic freaks demand that talk shows display freaks who are actually true, genetic freaks, and not "just stupid trailer-trash from the South".
  • Brits may be more familiar with Vanessa Feltz, Trisha Goddard and, most notoriously, Jeremy Kyle.
  • Doctor Phil will frequently bring in guests who have no serious problems, just to gawk and criticize their lifestyle, like men who have many piercings and body modifications, or plural marriages.
  • COPS shows, well, cops dealing with people so imbecilic that it's a wonder they haven't died in freak nail clipper accidents; and people whose emotional control is one step removed from "poo-flinging monkey".
  • World's Wildest Police Chases and its brethren are what happens when the Cops subjects described above get hold of a multi-thousand pound automobile.
  • Laura Bozzo in Peru, and now in Mexico, makes Jerry Springer seem to be a prude.
  • Raffy Tulfo's public service programmes have been described by critics as a Jerry Springer analogue where subjects of complaints, especially those from indigent backgrounds, wind up being the butt of humiliation and shame from the audience who sympathise with the complainant.

Reality Television

  • The Real World is the Trope Maker for this sub-genre of the Point and Laugh Show. Cram Bigot Vs. Bigot into cramped space until they're ready to kill each other, and you're good to go.
  • Survivor is the Trope Codifier, where the cast are always a group who would never last 10 minutes working in the same office, let alone a real survival situation. One of the keys to the show's success is that the contestants have a strong incentive to keep their most obnoxious teammates around and vote off the decent ones...you want to be up against a bigger jerk than yourself in the finals.
  • Big Brother, especially the British version. One reason given for the first American season's failure in the ratings is that the audience, not other contestants, voted people off. As a result, the most obnoxious people were voted out early...and the whole point of the show was killed.
  • I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here
  • Jersey Shore
  • Road Rules
  • Any other Bunim-Murray Productions show
  • Chains of Love
  • Married by America
  • Parodied by the Sadist Show Drawn Together, where the characters frankly aren't much worse than the real people they're parodying.
  • Hot or Not?
  • The Bachelor
  • The Bachelorette
  • Joe Millionaire
  • A variant is the live-courtroom show. The People's Court tried to be high-minded, but it was eclipsed by Judge Judy and its imitators, where you weren't sure whether the plaintiff or defendant deserved to lose more.
  • The Tru TV show Bait Car—the show's Exactly What It Says on the Tin and treats the audience to people stealing a car that the police deliberately leaves on the street. Once the car is a short distance away, the police turn off the car and arrest the thieves. Hilarity Ensues when said suspects lie or give a painfully straight answer about why they stole the car.

Police Officer: Why did you steal the car?
Car Thief: I was gonna go get me some bitches, man.

    • Special mention goes to the short-lived Snap Judgment, where the host seemed to be daring the Moral Guardians to force him off the air. Eventually they did, and he moved on to hosting a serious talk show.
    • The same network's Speeders or World's Dumbest ________ fit here as well.
  • Wife Swap
  • Supernanny has this sometimes, with parents who are Extreme Doormats and let their children hit and slap them, and parents who are the opposite and punish their children so much that it doesn't mean anything anymore.
  • Inverted unexpectedly in The Joe Schmo Show's first season, when the Joe turned out to be such a genuinely nice guy that the producers decided that they would essentially turn the concept on its head two episodes into production. It had started out as a "How much can we humiliate this guy who thinks he's on a standard house-bound reality show" show, with all but one person being actors and pretty much every Reality trope ever being brought into play. It turned into "How many Housebound-Reality tropes can we throw at this guy before he becomes Genre Savvy?". The second season didn't work out so well—there were two Joes, it was a sendup of dating-reality, neither Joe was as appealing as the original, and both caught on far too fast.
  • Most of TLC's lineup seems to be this. My Strange Addiction and My Crazy Obsession are both shows on that channel, along with specials about extremely overweight people and extreme couponers.

Game Show

  • The Trope Maker for the Game Show version is probably the original broadcast of The Gong Show. A horde of Hopeless Auditionees made fools of themselves until they were gonged out by has-been celebrities. It's hard to say whether the celebrities or the Hopeless Auditionees look worse. The more Genre Savvy auditionees did novelty acts instead of acts that required talent.
    • A similar, more recent version was 30 Seconds to Fame, where the Hopeless Auditionees had to survive 30 seconds without getting voted off the stage by the audience.
  • American Idol may be the Trope Codifier. The Hopeless Auditionees are often more popular than the ones with actual talent, and the early episodes that show pre-screenings are some of the biggest draws. The producers have long since realized that they get their best ratings by lying to the real hopeless cases, letting them think they're good, and sending them all the way to Simon Cowell. Among the fans, votefortheworst.com tries to get the Hopeless Auditionees as far as they can go.
  • Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Generally, the answer's no, but considering how many people are going to remember gradeschool trivia (assuming the subject was even taught in their school), it's definitely to be expected. But then, the contestants know what they're getting into.
  • The Blame Game (I've Got a Secret meets Judge Judy and Jerry Springer for coffee)
  • The Chair
  • Cram
  • Distraction
  • Dog Eat Dog
  • Estate of Panic
  • Fear Factor
  • Greed
  • Remote Control
  • Strip Poker
  • Although Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune are not strictly part of this genre, there is a large sub-fandom who enjoys the show because they can feel superior to the losers who punt the easiest questions. Dave Barry pointed out that while he knew the lights and noise distract you, he was sure he'd never mess up as badly...until he appeared on Wheel of Fortune himself, and found himself a deer in the (literal) headlights.
    • There is also a sub-fandom who aren't really a fandom, so much as a Hatedom for particularly smart and smug contestants who always win. Ken Jennings, who had the biggest winning streak in Jeopardy! history, got the biggest Hatedom of them all.
    • The recurring Saturday Night Live skit "Celebrity Jeopardy!" is essentially a fictional version of this.
  • America's Funniest Home Videos, but only in good fun (possibly the only optimistic take on this trope).

Literature

  • The 776 Stupidest Things Ever Said and its many sequels, by Ross Petras, were Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Petras' series and its many imitators lost much of their reason for being with the rise of the internet, when lists of dumb quotes became freely available to all.
  • Similarly, there is a whole genre of pop gonzo history (found in such places as the Uncle John's Bathroom Reader series and A Scandalous History of the Roman Emperors) that consists entirely of "look how stupid and/or obnoxious this historical figure was!" Like the dumb-quote books, the Internet has been a problem for them.
    • This genre may be Older Than Feudalism, as some of the ancient Roman historians (especially Seutonius) delighted in reporting the most petty court gossip they could find and ignoring big policy questions.
    • It's also worth noting that most of these books are crammed with fabrications, urban legends, and other lies. The worst are lists of famous last words, which are about 90% fake.
  • The book Non Campus Mentus is the most famous of several books that list bad answers on high school students' papers, featuring how Magellan "circumcised the globe" and the famous "Abe Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he built with his own two hands."
    • This, in turn, is a genre Older Than Radio, starting with the 19th-century English as She Is Taught, which had students who thought "aborigines" meant a mountain chain in North America. When Mark Twain reviewed it, he quoted the student who thought that "there are many fossils in theology departments" and added that sometimes they do get one right.
  • The Darwin Awards series, although many of the lists circulating as "Darwin Award Winners" are false lists containing urban legends. The real lists are here.

Web Original

Show Within a Show

  • Ow! My Balls! in Idiocracy.
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