TV TAKES THE FUN OUT OF FUNNY

TV is getting scarier and scarier.

It’s bad enough that the lead stories on the late news are usually about death and destruction, famine and pestilence, fires and car crashes, child abuse, sex crimes, war and every other calamity known to man--and even some new ones. It’s bad enough that much of prime-time drama is a blood bath where people are always getting shot, mashed, run over, beaten up or otherwise victimized by man or disease.

Now comedies are jumping on the scare bandwagon.

It’s all done in the name of social relevance, mind you, with the stated intent of evoking the kind of humor, as one Hollywood press agent put it, “that so often stems from a desperate situation.”

Oh, that kind of humor.

But . . . isn’t anyone on TV having fun anymore?

A veteran comedy writer with roots in “I Love Lucy,” “Maude” and “All in the Family” noted recently: “The trouble with TV comedy today is that it’s not funny.” That’s like saying the trouble with green is that it’s purple.

In fact, everything on TV is topsy-turvy. The most intentionally amusing series on TV (NBC’s “Remington Steele”) is essentially a drama. Many of the weekly dramas (“Dynasty,” “Hotel,” “Knots Landing,” “Dallas,” “Falcon Crest,” “The Love Boat,” “Finder of Lost Loves”--find me a funnier show anywhere than “Finder of Lost Loves”)--are often unintentionally hilarious.

And many of the comedies are depressing.

Thank goodness “The Dukes of Hazzard” was canceled before it gave us an episode on starving Ethiopians. It could have happened.

Consider:

On a recent episode of ABC’s “Webster,” little Webster was so traumatized when a classmate was fondled by a teacher that he refused to return to school, fearing that he would be the teacher’s next victim. Another episode dealt with abortion.

Just the other night on NBC’s “The Facts of Life,” Blair discovered that her boyfriend was using cocaine (“I do coke to stay on top of things”). The episode ended grimly with the boyfriend waiting to make a drug connection.

And the subject of last Saturday’s “Diff’rent Strokes” on NBC was teen alcoholism.

That was frothy in contrast to a two-part “E/R” on CBS in which nurse Joan Thor learned that she had potentially fatal cancer. At least it was Hodgkin’s disease, which has a high cure rate through radiation and chemotherapy if detected early.

Some comedy, though.

There’s more. On Sunday, NBC’s “Silver Spoons” tackles dyslexia, a learning disability that usually affects the ability to read, write and spell.

But first comes tonight’s episode of ABC’s “Benson” (8 p.m. on Channels 3, 7, 10 and 42), a comedy about the weekly “uproarious activities” in the household of a governor. And what is the uproarious topic of this episode? Forget about sex crime, drugs, abortion and cancer--no small change here. “Benson” is going for the biggie.

Nuclear war.

The half-hour takes place in the widowed Gov. Gatling’s air-raid bunker, where he and his daughter and staff carry out a test alert that leads them to the brink of simulated nuclear holocaust.

Heh heh heh.

Unlike most TV comedies, “Benson” has the advantage of a strong cast, led by Robert Guillaume as Benson the household head-turned-lieutenant governor, Rene Auberjonois as the governor’s assistant, Inga Swenson as the present household head and James Noble as the governor. Yet “Benson,” in only half an hour, does what “Special Bulletin,” “The Day After,” “Testament” and “Threads” were unable to do.

It makes nuclear holocaust boring.

You could argue that every arena--even a TV sitcom--should be appropriated for a subject so critical: the survival of humanity in a world ever threatened by nuclear destruction. And to their credit, “Benson” executive producers Paul Junger Witt and Tony Thomas and everyone else on this show do not seek big yucks, only a few small ones. Their intent is obviously serious.

Unfortunately, though, half an hour, minus commercials, is not enough to accommodate much more than the simplistic when the subject is potential world destruction. You might as well try to fit the Goodyear blimp on the head of a pin.

So this “Benson” is not only unfunny, it is also so compressed, preachy and heavy-handed that it seems almost to trivialize the very danger it tries to stress.

“Benson” precedes “Webster” in the ABC lineup, meaning that kids who watch that early prime-time comedy block may come away fearing that if the nukes don’t get them, their teachers will. That’s almost a metaphor for all of TV.

Life is not always swell, to be sure. And TV can play an important role in spotlighting some of the hazards. Viewed broadly, however, TV is one heck of a scare, feeding what researchers at the University of Pennsylvania call the “mean-world syndrome.”

Taken as a whole--newscasts, prime time, the works--TV depicts a world that threatens us, short of nuclear extinction, far out of proportion to the actual peril. As a result, the researchers say, we start believing that the world outside our door is always hostile and out to get us. And finally, we no longer open our door.

That could be the ultimate horror bequeathed by a medium where even the comedies make you wince.