The Good Post: Ethics in Comedy

The comedy series The Good Place caught me by surprise when I first encountered its concept. Of course the general plot of “main character ends up somewhere, realizes it was a mistake, and commences a journey to right the wrong” has been done many times before. However, what sets this series above similar scenarios revolves around the concept of a comedic hell. Hell is generally seen as any religious person’s worst-case scenario: an eternity of inescapable suffering, often surpassing the realms human understanding itself. Yet in The Good Place, this does not seem to be the case. Hell is a concept that has been touched upon in works of nearly all genres; primarily in horrors, thrillers, or dramas, but now hell introduces itself to comedy. Sure, the setting in The Good Place is still, by all definitions, a hell, but not the traditional ‘fire and brimstone, demons prodding you in the kidneys with their pointy demon staffs’ hell, and as Barford states, the series often uses this to its advantage. In taking a concept like hell and creating something mundane out of it, it becomes comedic. It brings this inescapable realm of eternal torture to a more human level, allowing viewers to understand its concept while subverting our expectations of how it plays out. A perfect example is the kid’s meal scene that Barford references, in which a character complains that they died too young, but still too old to order off the kid’s menu. This sense of relatability and quirky humor is generally seen as funny, but seeing this in the context of a legitimate hell makes the concept that much funnier. The series plays this idea of subverting expectations fairly well, though another aspect that stands out to me is its sense of philosophy. The series often plays into tropes, references, and sometimes even clichés of more dramatic, philosophical works by channeling the ideas of ethics and morality into its fantasy-comedy groundwork.