Maeve Higgins: ‘South Side’ laughs help quell my fury with comedy shows

The rage I feel when comedy writers decide against going for laughs and reach for the the weighted blanket that is ‘dramedy’ has been somewhat lifted by the big-hearted, knee-slapping, belly laugh of a sitcom set in the southside of Chicago

Vanessa De Luca, Bashir Salahuddin, Chandra Russell and Diallo Riddle at the ‘South Side’ season two screening. Picture: Randy Shropshire/Getty

Watching comedy shows on television should not make a person furious, but that is precisely what happens to me. Not always, but often.

You see, I fill with rage when comedy writers don’t try to be funny. I don’t get angry if they’re funny in a way that I don’t enjoy or if they mess up and push it too far. I appreciate any effort to make me laugh, truly — even failed attempts please me no end.

I see red when comedy writers decide against going for laughs and reach instead for… what exactly? A slight diversion from reality, a soporific eyewash before bed, a gentle way to pass the time before death inevitably collects us from this slumber party? 

I watch, incensed but helpless, as the weighted blanket that is ‘dramedy’ quietly suffocates comedy fans, muffling our cries for help and, most importantly, our laughs.

Someone heard those muffled cries, though, a trio of heroes who came through in the clutch: Bashir Salahuddin, Sultan Salahuddin, and Diallo Riddle, the comedy writers who created South Side, easily the funniest comedy show streaming today.

“We’ve made a choice to try and be as funny as possible and that we set ourselves up to say that is, hopefully, the space that our show has a chance to operate in, that not a ton of other shows do,” Bashir Salahuddin told me when he and Riddle joined me on a Zoom call from the South Side writers' room last week.

They’ve just started working on season three of the show, a big-hearted, knee-slapping, belly laugh of a sitcom set in the southside of Chicago. The show centres on Kareme and Simon, a couple of friends played by Kareme Young and Sultan Salahuddin. Both are stuck working at Rent-T-Own, a predatory rent-to-own shop, despite their ambition and constant hustling.

The pair are joined by a vast cast of characters and find themselves in a host of brilliantly plotted scenarios, all in service of laughs.

Despite the comedy landscape being dominated by the mediocre dramedies I find so maddening, Bashir Salahuddin explained that these laughs are the writers’ priority.

We were very persistent, saying: no, we want this to be a show where you put it on and you laugh so hard that by the time it’s over you’re like, ‘Shit, it’s over already?’ That is something that we love. 

"We love The Simpsons. We love movies like Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. We love those movies and comedies that operate where they’re just trying to be as funny as humanly possible, to keep it going at 100 miles per hour with the comedy all the way through.”

A surprising and quite gorgeous aspect of South Side is that every actor, in supporting or even one-line roles, gets to make us laugh. Rashawn Nadine Scott plays Kitty Goodnight, Officer Goodnight’s wife (and mother to their adopted white child). She is an excellent straight man until suddenly she’s the funny one. In one scene, Kitty gets stressed out by her husband’s idiocy and one way she reacts to stress is that, hilariously, her voice changes to a low, rasping growl.

Of course, a middle-class woman in a sensible twinset doing a funny voice is ridiculous and fun. The scene is more at home in a cartoon than in a live-action sitcom but in the world of South Side that makes sense.

The situations and characters are often outsized, and it has the madcap energy of the best animated series around right now. This is intentional.

I already quoted Bashir Salahuddin citing The Simpsons as inspiration for the world he co-created in South Side. He also holds up Family Guy and The Ren & Stimpy Show as shows he appreciates.

South Side has been lauded universally by critics, retaining a 100% score on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.

In a thorough and insightful piece, New Yorker writer Doreen St Félix wrote: “Although Riddle-Salahuddin productions are entertaining to viewers of any race, make no mistake — the fun and the farce are pitched to please Black American audiences. You either get the references — to primping culture, to funeral culture — or you don’t.”

There is truth in that, but I suspect it is that very specificity that would make South Side a massive hit around the world should it be marketed and supported by the network as such.

As the saying goes, the more personal, the more universal. I’m a white Irish immigrant living in New York City and some references do indeed sail over my head. However, I laughed right through the funeral episode in season two and did not need to have experienced something like that to get many of the jokes.

Comedy translates best when a writer dives deep into their most granular experiences and comes back up to the surface with the essence of what made that experience funny.

Lisa Magee did that with her adolescence in a tiny Irish city and created Derry Girls — a show beloved and understood worldwide.

Riddle knows that too, stating: “Even though we’re two black guys, one from the southside of Chicago, one from Atlanta, we try to do jokes that make us laugh. And by extension, I do think that there’s a broad audience for the kind of comedy that we do.”

There certainly is and, with American cultural exports dominating screens worldwide, I’m surprised to see the brilliant South Side remaining relatively unknown outside the US.

Bashir Salahuddin is not surprised.

“We are always, always in our discussions with the network, strongly pushing them to continue to increase our presence overseas because whenever I’m overseas… I’m just always like, I know they would love this show.

Unfortunately, sometimes with American black TV shows, there’s just less of a risk-taking to make it more international. But in our case, that’s something we’re always pushing for. Let us take our shots at some of these other countries, some of these other comedy communities.”

I see this as an insipid form of racism that ultimately punishes everyone, creators and consumers alike. White supremacy has a foothold in almost every aspect of American life, not only on top-line items such as voter suppression or maternal healthcare, but also in sneakier ways like this — stultifying and homogenising the comedy exported from the US.

On the bright side, there is South Side, with all its joyful humanity, intelligent silliness, and total irreverence. Riddle and Salahuddin will keep going — they tell me there is plenty more where South Side came from. They have their own production company and a proven track record of finding and nurturing actors who have been overlooked and under-represented.

Bashir Salahuddin tells me he takes great pride in that fact and looks forward to doing that for comedy writers and show runners too: “We can be like, hey, this is the person right here. This is who you need to give a show to because they’re going to expand what you think comedy is.”

I hope so, and look forward to the day my fury subsides because comedy is funny again.