Does Charlie Kaufman Do Kids' Shows?

After a summer of seeing too much TV morphing our otherwise delightful child into a hyperactive head-spinning, glassy-eyed spazola, Nate and I decided on a new schedule for T. now that school is in session: he can watch TV, but only in the evening and only after he has cleaned up (this may not sound like much of a requirement, but in a single morning this kid can turn a perfectly tidy living room into that scene from Temple of Doom where Kate Capshaw wades through the room of bugs--just insert "Mom" in for Capshaw and "toys/food/food containers/clothes/wrappers/whatever/etc." in for the bugs).

So Thomas normally picks Noggin to watch, but one day, I switched the TV on for him and left the room (he knows how to switch the channels), only to come back a little while later to hysterical laughter. I mean, I know Dora can whip off a clever line or two in Espanol, but she's no Ellen Degeneres, so I had to wonder what he was watching. Turns out it was...wait for it....

America's Funniest Home Videos.

After recording Homicide: Life on the Street for me, the DVR had left it on WGN which apparently shows reruns of AFV after H:LS (who is their program director?). And Thomas--he must have felt he had inadvertantly stumbled onto the greatest comedic spectacle his young eyes had seen since his dad introduced to him the The Three Stooges (or "Stooches" as T. calls them).

I will admit, I am a TV and movie snob. With a few exceptions (I have a soft spot for old school sci-fi like ST:TNG) I like pretty much highbrow stuff and I'll turn off any show that dares even a single male groin injury, especially if perpetrated by balls and/or small children. So I've seen AFV maybe five times in my life and all at other people's houses. Thinking I'd somehow missed some hitherto unseen hilarity, I sat down and watched it with him for a minute.

Nope. Still the same cats falling off television sets and men getting hit in the groin by balls and/or small children. But Thomas was wiping tears of elation out of his eyes, when he could manage to pull himself back off the floor after a particularly gut-busting dog-chases-sock-runs-into-wall segment. 

A friend and I once joked about forbidding our kids from watching certain shows not because the content was too adult or something of that sort, but because they lacked sufficient artistic merit. "Thomas, turn that off! The characterization is embarrassingly shallow and the director is so self-conscious, the shots can't even maintain their sense of ironic detachment!" 

Har. But how much do you lax your standards for your kid's entertainment? For all the people who turn off Barney because of its cheerful brain-washing mindlessness, what exactly do they turn it to? Masterpiece Theatre? I liked Blue Clues when Steve Burns was on it, but once they replaced him with "Joe", the whole show fell out of its "day in a kid's life" motif to a bizarro mock-fantasy that defies its own inner logic. In other words, it sucks now. I still let Thomas watch it during his TV time if he wants to. Creative criticism seems particularly petty and silly when applied to kids' shows which aren't exactly trying to win over the Academy. 

But how low-brow is too low-brow? For a while, Thomas's favorite movie was The Master of Disguise, a Dana Carvey-vehicle that would be considered terrible even if we lived in an alternate universe where Pixar had never existed and the artistic pinnacle of children's entertainment had become Disney's straight-to-video bastardizations of its own franchises ("Snow White VII:Snow White Goes on Extreme Makeover"), but I let him watch it. In fact, I recorded it on our DVR and let him watch it more than once. He has most of it memorized. Ditto The 3 Ninjas.

Per T.'s request, I've started recording AFV so he can watch it during his TV time. In fact, he's watching it right now while I'm writing this and having what appear to be seizures, but are, yay, only full body laughter spasms. Meanwhile, Sethie is running around behind him, laughing whenever he laughs and scrutinizing the television, clearly trying to figure out, on a deeper level, why the paragon of wisdom, his older brother, finds this show so funny (just like how a seven-year-old me tried once to understand the apparently hidden aesthetic quality my older sister saw in Days of Our Lives. Sethie, my little mechanical observer, are you destined to grow up disillusioned?)

If this were a column in a newspaper, no doubt I'd be getting vilified in the comments section. There's a part of me that thinks I should be. But I just love the sound of T's uncontrollable giggling. If the source is harmless but, really, kinda stupid, does that mean I shouldn't let him watch it? 

I don't know. It's hard to concentrate over the sound of his happy hysteria.