TV comedies know it’s about more than laughs

In Fox’s fall comedy “Raising Hope,” a young man named Jimmy (Lucas Neff) impregnates a multiple murderer after a one-night stand. He opts to raise the child on his own, taking her to the mother’s execution, and it’s clear he’s not cut out for fatherhood.

Yet, at the episode’s conclusion, Jimmy’s parents, Virginia ( Martha Plimpton) and Burt ( Garret Dillahunt), who advised Jimmy to dump the baby at the local fire department (though not, they took care to mention, in the dumpster), enter his room when she’s sobbing uncontrollably and soothe her with a plaintive version of “Hush, Little Baby.”

FOR THE RECORD:
“Raising Hope”: An Oct. 12 Calendar article about a crop of TV comedies that combine snarkiness and heart said that at the conclusion of the first episode of the Fox show “Raising Hope,” a couple soothe a crying baby by singing “Hush, Little Baby.” The song was “Danny’s Song.” —

Greg Garcia, creator of “Raising Hope” (and, before that, “My Name Is Earl”), says, “I don’t want to do a show that’s just outrageous and funny things and shocking things and at the end of the day, it’s like, ‘OK, that was funny, but do I want to watch that again?’ It’s important to me to have some heart and emotion to it.”

New and sophomore shows boast a number of comedies whose snarky comic sensibility would seem to mock their more heartfelt moments — the Emmy-winning “Modern Family,” NBC’s “Community” and Fox’s “Running Wilde” and upcoming “Mixed Signals.”

Fox’s pop-culture phenomenon “Glee” also veers from cynicism to sentimentality, but it features a clear dividing line: Emmy-winner Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester, whose withering one-liners seem like they’re heckling the rest of the show from the sidelines.

The shows often manage to interweave their disparate sensibilities fairly deftly, and within the challenging framework of 22-minute episodes. This is especially true of “Modern Family,” which, in its first season’s finale, featured an exquisitely silly scene that had Cam ( Eric Stonestreet) singing “Ave Maria” at a wedding intercut with footage of his partner Mitchell ( Jesse Tyler Ferguson) trashing their home trying to kill a pigeon. The episode ends with a photo-shoot/mud fight of a quirkily affectionate family.

Likewise, “Community’s” second-season premiere features its Snark Laureate, Jeff ( Joel McHale), delivering a heartfelt speech about why mutual respect is necessary for the continued survival of mankind — just before he receives a beat-down from Betty White. “Running Wilde” features a narcissist ( Will Arnett) cynically attempting to seduce a past love ( Keri Russell) but becoming unexpectedly attached to her daughter (Stefania Owen). And the midseason comedy “Mixed Signals” features the usual group of pals exchanging insults and sex jokes — until they unite at the end of the episode to pay tribute to a deceased friend.

How do these shows manage to cover such an emotional range without giving their viewers tonal whiplash?

“It’s tricky,” says Ed O’Neill, who plays “Modern Family’s” patriarch Jay. “You don’t want to be schmaltzy. You want to earn those moments. You don’t, in the first four minutes of the show, say, ‘I’ll always love you’; that’s not going to work. Usually, we’ll have a zany moment, then a heartfelt moment, and a zany moment right behind it. It sort of takes the sentiment and evens it out a bit, and reminds you it’s a comedy, after all.”

“It’s not a cute family show,” adds O’Neill’s costar Ty Burrell, who portrays Phil. “It is a bit of a hairpin turn, and what I like about it is it feels very realistic to me, to be in a family situation and to get into bickering and sarcastic exchanges, but to be at the end of the day attempting a sincere connection. Comedies are generally afraid to do it.”

Chris Lloyd, who created the series with Steven Levitan, admits it’s a little more difficult than it looks. “We’re a little bit damned if we do, damned if we don’t,” he says. “We started out trying to have a level of emotion and real heart in the show, knowing that we were running the risk of having people say, ‘Oh, this is sappy.’ We tried to find ways to undercut it, but not undercut it completely.”

Over on the “Community” set, cast members seem a bit divided as to the sincerity of the heartfelt moments.

Alison Brie, who plays Annie, says, “One of the things that’s great about the show is we really have an eye on ourselves. Even while we’re doing something, we have another eye that’s watching it, going, ‘We know how this appears.’ There’s a self-consciousness to it that gives it its charm.”

McHale, who stars as the almost perpetually cynical Jeff, says, “It can be tender and heartfelt, and in the second layer, there’s a very snarky reference. But in my life, that’s kind of how I operate.”

Yvette Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley, says that’s just the way creator Dan Harmon is. “He’s kind of snarky, but he’s also a teddy bear. So he wants you to feel, but doesn’t want you to feel like you’re getting hit over the head with a lesson. He’s a softy, but he’s also really edgy. At the center is a gooey, soft, sentimental center, but all of the characters are crazy, so we can’t stay there too long or it becomes an after-school special.”

Harmon himself cops to Brown’s insight into his personality. “I am sappy, but I’m not a super-great hugger. I believe human beings are underestimated as a species, that we’re capable of being unexpectedly kind to one another. That’s why I can watch a snarky, smart thing like [E!’s] “The Soup,” which looks at the world with its head cocked, resistant to its charms, and yet enjoy John Hughes’ movies. I’m a genuinely jaded person, yet I think it’s awesome to make people happy.”

In the case of “Raising Hope,” the cast and creator credit each other with making the whipsaw emotional moments work.

“I think that’s [show runner] Greg Garcia,” says Plimpton, who plays Jimmy’s world-weary mother. “He loves the honestly funny moments in regular daily life. And that’s the difference between ‘Earl’ and this show. With ‘Earl,’ you’re dealing with these crazy criminals and their outlandish situations, and here, we’re dealing with something that could actually occur, a young, unprepared family with a baby.”

Garcia responds, “You go from someone throwing up on a baby to sitting there singing, and it’s really sweet. A lot of that has to do with the actors; they have to play it in a way that you believe it. When they’re earning it, it’s OK to have a couple of fringe moments.”

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