How ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT Does Running Gags Deep Dive

Now the story of a wealthy family who lost everything and the one son who had no choice but to keep them all together. That's right, today we're talking about Arrested Development, the critically acclaimed comedy and cult classic from Mitch Hurwitz that everyone discovered just a few years too late. It follows the quirky and rich Bluth family after their father's arrested and their assets are frozen, leaving them in limbo, a sort of arrested development. There it is. The show is chocked full of jokes, firing one after the other so quickly that it's nearly impossible to catch them all at first glance. TV critic Alan Sepinwall described it as an incredible Rube Goldberg contraption of a sitcom. And honestly, I can't think of a better description. Every joke builds on the previous one, carrying momentum from one moment to the next before bringing all of its moving parts together for a big payoff. But how does Arrested do it? How does it wring comedy out of every last second of its 21-minute runtime? The answer is by creating its own language of running gags, character types, double meanings, and much, much more. So that's what I'm gonna talk about today, how Arrested Development sets up and delivers its jokes. Although Netflix revived the show in 2013, it's undeniably a different show than when it first ran on Fox in the mid-2000s. So we're only gonna be talking about those original three seasons. And we're gonna look at Arrested in a lot of detail, so consider this your spoiler warning. I'm Jackson, and this is Ideas at Play. So what do I mean when I say that Arrested Development creates its own language? Well, it might be easier if we start with an example. Take the idea of a catchphrase. "'Cause I'm the Fonz, hey!" Okay, meet me at the bar in 15 minutes, and suit up! How you doin'? These are expressions recognized for the repetition. A lot of times, the use and reuse of these phrases can change their meaning over time, especially as the context changes. They're kind of like memes in that way, boiling down a sentiment into a brief moment that viewers can then be transported to immediately as soon as they're mentioned. The best ones summarize a character down to their essential parts. Take Joey's how you doin'. The accent tells us he's New York Italian, the delivery tells us that he's confident, we can tell that he's experienced and on the prowl so often that he has his approach refined to three words, which also tells us that he's not terribly sophisticated or smart. Every time Joey repeats it, we're reminded of all of these character traits. Arrested Development takes this idea and runs with it, offering us new catchphrases all the time and repeating them early and often so that they get stuck in your head. Listen to how many times we hear, "'No touching' and "'There's always money in the banana stand' before they're combined for a final punchline. Always money in the banana stand. Messing around. No touching. No touching. Always money in the banana stand. $250,000 lining the walls of the banana stand. What? Cash, Michael. Why didn't you tell me that? How much clearer can I say? There's always money in the banana stand. No touching. No touching. The reason this happens so excessively right off the bat is so that other characters can pick it up and run with it. There was 250 cc's of your father in that banana stand. No touching. The first instance establishes the joke, the next couple establish a pattern, and then the punchline subverts our expectations. Oh, no, stop it, stop it, stop it. Oh. Oh, no. Every time a different family member takes up a catchphrase, we understand that they're not all that different. I've made a huge mistake. It reinforces the idea that these characters never change or learn. Your average American male is in a perpetual state of adolescence, you know, arrested development. Hey, that's the name of the show. But wait, if I said catchphrases are supposed to be unique to a character, how does Arrested continue to recycle them? Well, a lot of these running gags have double meanings based on wordplay, ranging from a popular restaurant for Sunday brunch named Skip Church, a lawyer named Bob Loblaw who has a Loblog, or almost anything Tobias says. Oh, Michael, you really are quite the Cupid, aren't you? I tell you, you can zing your arrow into my buttocks anytime. Even if it means me taking a chubby, I will suck it up. Oh, no, no, I'm not in the group yet. No, I'm afraid I just blew myself. Wordplay obviously isn't unique to Arrested Development. It's often played for one-off jokes in a lot of sitcoms. Just have to have patience. Remember Job. Cliffy's right, honey. You got a good Job here. But in Arrested Development, it opens up the possibility for misinterpretations by its characters, a staple of any sitcom. We as an audience see the bigger picture that the characters can't, so when they make a decision, we can see where it's going before they do. It's where we get the situation in situation comedy. In Arrested, these two ideas are consistently combined, hinging situations on wordplay. Think of the limited knowledge each character has as the setup of the Rube Goldberg machine, and then these wordplay jokes as the nudge that pushes the whole thing into motion. Take this example from the season two episode Good Grief. George Michael, while sulking over a recent breakup from his girlfriend Anne, discovers his grandfather, or Pop-Pop, George Sr. hiding in an underground bunker. Don't turn in Pop-Pop, help Pop-Pop. George Michael stows his grandfather away in the attic, but when Michael catches him bringing food up to said attic, he immediately thinks that George Michael has hidden Anne up in the attic. This idea alone is funny. I think George Michael's hiding Anne in the attic. From who, the Nazis? Eventually, George Michael decides to come clean. I have Pop-Pop in the attic. But Michael takes that to mean something else since he believes it's Anne that's in the attic. The mere fact that you call making love Pop-Pop tells me you're not ready. Because Arrested hinges these situations on unexpected wordplay, we often don't see the jokes coming either, and the show is even able to accomplish the same surprise with visual gags by having them pop up completely unexpectedly and using that new context to add to the joke. Early in season two, Tobias becomes obsessed with joining the Blue Man Group. After mistaking them for a depression support group. Are you blue? Only in color, Michael. But Arrested takes that gag and brings it in unexpectedly in the next episode, the one where they build a house. In Lindsay's scenes, we see Tobias in the background blending in with various blue objects until the idea is subverted and he ends up in an unexpected place, underneath Lucille and Oscar having sex. Then we get another subversion at the end of the episode where he isn't in blue camouflage, but instead using the diamond cream that Lindsay brought up periodically throughout the episode. Is that George Michael's diamond cream? Oh, yes, well, I ran out of blue and I couldn't find anything else. I think my nipples are bleeding. Every character has these eccentric gags built into them, which was the goal of creator Mitch Hurwitz from the very start. The advantage to this HD digital videotape was that you didn't have to over-light it. And it just occurred to me that you could use that, that new style, that grammar, to create a different kind of situation comedy that would be packed. But I wanted to use that savings in expense and time to shoot a lot of scenes and to try to get at family enmeshment, because coming from a sitcom, you know, you're dealing with stock characters because you don't have that much time. By sitting in on these characters' lives in such an intimate way, there's time to explore the family's many ridiculous details. The show only needs to write its eccentric characters into situations where their quirks are on full display. For example, take Buster's most prominent quirk, being an overgrown mama's boy. Stick him with his siblings making fun of her, and he doesn't quite get it. You gotta wedge yourself in the middle of us so that she can control everything. Yeah. Mom's awesome. Maybe we should call her. Stick him in a relationship, and it's with his mother's best friend, who shares the name Lucille. When his relationship with his mother hits a rough patch, he rebels by swimming into the ocean, something she never let him do, and then being attacked by a Lucille. Lucille! Watch out for Lucille! I don't care about Lucille! Stay locked up! And then a seal bites off his hand. If you haven't seen the show, it must sound like I'm speaking a foreign language. These jokes don't mean anything without having been established no matter how many times I or the show call back to them. Luckily, narrator Ron Howard is here to translate what's happening on screen and add a little extra humor. The narrator gets to be kind of the straight man for the show. What agency are you with? Frank said CIA, a government agency that was responsible for this catastrophe. But Tobias thought he said CAA, a talent agency that was responsible for this one. Frank's in the business, Michael. What this does is allow for a frenetic pace and pack in as many jokes as the rest of the development does. In mapping out the two episodes we talked about earlier, Good Grief and the one where they build a house, I found that scenes only last about a minute on average. So even if you forget what is being called back to, that's okay. The very next scene or even next line of dialogue will call back to something else. Arrested is using this language and its translator to program our minds to be ready for its callbacks and catchphrases. More importantly, this language of repetition and our tour guide Ron Howard allow this language to change and morph over time. Eventually, we all lose track of where these jokes came from, but we still enjoy them. That's because they gain new context every time they're used, creating a network of references and callbacks that can mean different things to different people. So when you think about a character trying to teach another character a lesson, your mind might jump to this moment. That's why you don't yell. Or it might jump to this one. We should teach them a lesson. Yeah. No, I don't think so. I should go to my mom tonight and be like, I met the cutest guy, and then she'll see you and me totally making out. Yeah. But not really, right? The point is that it doesn't matter because it's a constantly-involving joke, and its meaning changes slightly each time it's referenced. Arrested Development's distinct style isn't just for adding flair. The language of intro references and running gags leaves the audience primed and ready for the punchlines, despite the sheer amount of stuff that happens in every episode. It's all built on this unique language that serves as a foundation that truly is... Solid as a rock! Hey! Solid as a rock! Thank you so much for watching. Please like, subscribe, and share this video. A huge shout-out to my patrons over on Patreon for helping to make this video possible. And if you'd like to see more videos more frequently, head over there and become one today. You can also check out my blog for written articles about TV shows new and old, including my first watch-through of The Sopranos. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.