Police Squad!

Saw Police Squad! (thanks, Chris!) It was a six-episode Leslie Nielsen cop comedy. Its humor was based on zany wordplay and nuttiness. There's a couple of recurring gags which give a flavor of the show's tone: Every episode opens with a guest-star... who dies as soon as they are introduced, never to be referred to again. Every episode has the protagonist cop visiting his man-on-the-street, a wizened shoe-shine boy who is always bribed into coughing up the pivotal clue. After the protagonist leaves, some other person (a doctor, a baseball player, an advice columnist) bribes him for help on their problem ("Why, I don't know nuthin' about brain surgery, mister.") During the end credits, the characters freeze-frame, but are clearly just standing still. During one of these moments, their prisoner looks around, confused, and then escapes. It's not high-brow, but it's goofy and genial.

I marathon-ed the series, somewhat unwisely. The humor really was intended to grow with repeated call-backs and as you notice the running gags, but of course all put together it's slightly exhausting. Once again, the bizarre way I watch videos gets in the way of my enjoyment. Well, it's a hard life. This isn't to imply that I didn't enjoy the series, mind you. Quite the contrary: I enjoyed the nuttiness and the goofy silliness. It's never crass, or cruel, or bitter. There's some very slightly dark humor, but it's of a very gentle, soft kind. A crying doll will be crushed, for example, crying like a baby. It's shown post-crushing, one arm coming out of its forehead. The image is a bit grotesque but only shown briefly, such is the gentility of this series.

Most of the jokes are derived from puns and wordplay but, even though I could see some of them coming, I was usually blindsided. In the last episode, a drug baron tells the cops that their car can be found at the docks. The car is shown in a doctor's office ("the doc's," get it?) There's another running joke: every time the protagonist offers someone a cigarette he says "cigarette?" And they look at it before responding "yes, I know." There's also a lot of visual gags and subverted expectations and a lot of just solid comedy. The show has a stand-up comic's sense of a good set-up rewarded with a delightful little one-liner.

So, I think I did the show a disservice with the way I consumed it, but it was fairly solid even so. It's full of goofy little gags and hilarious send-ups of the Perry-Mason-cop-show genre. This was a solid set of episodes which I enjoyed a lot.