What with so much going on these days in Media World, it would be easy not to notice. But something of seismic significance has happened on prime-time television, something that has nothing whatsoever to do with game shows — cause enough for celebration.
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The Big Deal is this: The funniest character on television is no longer a spike-haired boy whose name is an anagram for “brat.” That crowning distinction now belongs to a hiply snipped boy whose name is an off-color verb and a slang expression meaning “nothing.”
It’s the end of one era and the beginning of another. Out with old and in with the new. King Bart is dead; long live King Jack.
TV’s former funniest is, of course, Bart Simpson of “The Simpsons.” TV’s fresh funniest is Jack McFarland of “Will & Grace.” He hasn’t yet achieved young Bart’s brand-name recognition, but he will.
Jack and Bart have a lot in common. Bart is a mischievous anarchist; so is Jack.
Bart is adored by the people he most annoys; so is Jack. Bart is a boy trapped in a cartoon body. Jack is a boy trapped in a man’s body — 29-year-old actor Sean Hayes’, to be precise.
Jack and Bart also have another Very Important Thing in common. They are both on shows that are smartly written and breathlessly funny, which at this point in his career is just a fancy way of saying shows produced by James Burrows.
Midway through its second season, “Will & Grace” just keeps getting smarter and funnier, with gay King Jack leading the way. What’s that? Gay, you say?
Yep, he’s gay. But since the show is officially hot enough to be on the cover of TV Guide, you probably knew that. So is Jack’s friend, you know, the guy in the title. But you probably knew that, too. Want to know what may be the best thing about “Will & Grace” — besides Jack, that is? By the simple trick of sophisticated writing and great acting, the show creates an idealized reality within which sexual identity is no more or less interesting than a person’s natural hair color. It’s something that can be fun to talk about, but, really, what difference does it make?
In stark contrast to the last sitcom that featured a gay character in its title, “Will & Grace” doesn’t make a big deal about who’s gay and who’s not, except when it’s really funny to do so. (As it was in the episode where Will thinks the handsome new neighbor is gay, Grace thinks he’s straight and zen-master Jack, with his all-powerful “gay-dar,” shakes the hunk’s hand and mouths the words “I know” as he leaves.)
Instead, “Will & Grace” takes a tack “Ellen” never tried — it just focuses on being funny. The results prove just how far funny can carry what might otherwise be outrageous or, even worse, tiresome — in a word, “Ellen”-some.
After all, Jack isn’t just gay, he’s super gay, a busy bee who at any given moment may have five serious relationships going on — “That’s a lot of balls to keep in the air,” quipped Will. And as Grace observes of Jack’s super-gay status, Jack is “someone who has a gay porn collection that requires its own storage facility.”
In a jab at “Ellen”-esque topicality, one recent episode centered on network television’s first gay-men’s kiss. (“One giant leap for man-on-mankind” is one of the program’s impeccable quips.) With such a subject, the show was, naturally, filled with Jack-o-riffic moments, especially when Jack shares a microphone with “Today” weatherman-on-the-street, Al Roker. In another flourish of the show’s signature brand of cleverness, the episode played off a real-world episode involving a recent “Today” program.
Hard as it may be to believe after the aftershocks of `Ellen,” Jack isn’t a source of public spectacle or acrimonious debate or anything but deep and frequent laughs. There are a couple of reasons for that, and Hayes is quick to insist that neither one of them is him.
“First off, the writing on this show is so good, so it really is like a marriage between the actors and the writers. So I’ll put my spin on something about Jack and then they’ll come back with something. It’s like we discovered Jack together.
“The other thing is that Jack is just such an innocent child. I mean, he just says and does all the things I thought were funny in junior high — `I know you are but what am I,’ that sort of silly stuff.”
Still, no matter how funny he is, inquiring minds can’t help but wonder: Where does Jack leave off and Hayes take over?
“I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I love the work and the people I’m working with, but I didn’t become an actor to play Jack the rest of my life. That’s why I really like the commercials. They play against that.”
Now that commercials have become not just an accepted but laudable part of an actor’s portfolio, Hayes uses his advertising spots the way hip-novelist David Foster Wallace uses footnotes — to flash different views of the same subject. So in commercials such as his current Bud Light spot, Hayes is a carousing heterosexual.