TV Shows That Taught Gen X Everything We Know About Being Funny

Before there were algorithms feeding us funny videos, there was late-night cable and the most formative television ever.

Was there anything better as a kid than popping yourself some microwave popcorn and settling in to your favorite show? Your parents were asleep, the volume was turned down just low enough. And on the screen, something that no one had given official permission for you to watch—something weird, something sharp, something hilarious.

We didn’t have a word for it then. We weren’t thinking about ‘screen time‘ or ‘content.’ We were just watching TV, which is what you did when the house got quiet and the night got long. But what we were also doing was learning what was funny.

The shows that shaped Gen X and elder Millennial humor weren’t necessarily the ones that were supposed to. ‘The Cosby Show’ was appointment television, yes, and ‘Family Ties’ was reliably wholesome. But the shows that actually rewired something—the ones that crept into the jokes we still make, the references we still swap with people our own age like some kind of generational handshake—those were weirder, sharper, and often running at a time when we were technically supposed to be asleep.

Married… with Children

‘Married… with Children’ premiered in 1987, and it landed like a small bomb in a landscape of aspirational family sitcoms. Al Bundy was not a lovable buffoon who learned something by the last commercial break. He was aggrieved and defeated and funny about it in a way that felt almost transgressive. Children of a certain age watched that show and understood, possibly for the first time, that comedy could be mean-spirited without being cruel; that laughing at something broken didn’t mean you were endorsing the brokenness. It was a distinction that would serve them well later, when the world turned out to be considerably more complicated than ‘Full House’ had suggested.

The Simpsons

Speaking of which: the early ‘Simpsons’ years. Let’s just pause here and acknowledge what that show did to a generation’s brain chemistry. The first several seasons of ‘The Simpsons’—say, 1989 through about 1994, depending on who’s arguing—were operating on a frequency that children absorbed and adults occasionally understood. The jokes were layered. The references went three levels deep. Homer was the id made flesh; Lisa was the earnest part of yourself you were still figuring out how to live with. A woman who came of age watching that show probably still hears ‘was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?’ and feels something in her chest. She can’t fully explain it. She doesn’t need to.

In Living Color

Then there was ‘In Living Color,’ which debuted in 1990 and brought a sensibility that network television had been carefully avoiding. It was faster, louder, more diverse and funnier than anything in the same time slot. The Fly Girls were a revelation (and introduced us to J. Lo and Rosie Perez!). The Wayans brothers bent us over in laughter. Everyone knew what “two snaps and a twist” was. Jim Carrey doing Fire Marshal Bill was genuinely disturbing in the best possible way. And a generation of kids sitting in living rooms learned that comedy could also hold critique—that you could make someone laugh and challenge them at the same time, and that the challenge was actually the point.

Roseanne

Let’s talk about ‘Roseanne.’ The original run, the one where Roseanne Barr was still doing something genuinely radical before she took her racist turn— that show put a working-class household on television and refused to make it charming. The kitchen was cluttered. People interrupted each other. The money problems were real money problems, not sitcom money problems where everything resolves without consequence. And Roseanne herself, loud, unapologetic, smarter than the room gave her credit for, modeled something for the girls watching her that they didn’t have language for yet but recognized immediately. She wasn’t performing femininity for anyone’s comfort. She was just there, fully there, taking up the space she’d decided she was entitled to.

The Late Show with David Letterman

There was also, for the nocturnally inclined, a particular kind of late-night access to comedy that felt like contraband. David Letterman in his NBC years was making television that clearly did not care if you understood the joke or not. The anti-joke was the joke, the sincerity was the joke, the absurdist tangent was always the point. Kids who grew up watching Letterman developed a tolerance for discomfort as comedy, for the pause held one beat too long, for deadpan delivered so flat it doubles back around to warm. This is probably why so many of them laughed at things in their twenties that their peers found baffling.

What all of these shows had in common—the through-line running from Al Bundy’s couch to Springfield’s nuclear plant to the Conner family’s kitchen table—was that they assumed the audience could handle complexity. Not the complexity of a think-piece. The complexity of a joke that was also sad. A character who was pathetic and sympathetic at the same time. A punchline that made you laugh and then made you feel a little strange about the fact that you laughed. That’s not a small thing to have absorbed at eleven or thirteen or fifteen. It’s actually a pretty significant thing.

And here’s what nobody planned, what nobody could have predicted sitting in those carpeted living rooms with the volume turned down: those shows made us good at reading rooms. Good at finding the second layer. Good at being funny in the way that means you’re also being honest, which is a kind of funny that holds up. Not a bad thing to have learned by accident, in the dark, after we were supposed to be asleep.

---

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness. And if you’ve liked what you’ve read and want to help us keep bringing stories your way, please consider a small donation.