A wise man once said, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." Ok, it was Mel Brooks, he had a point. Which was that we're all a bunch of selfish, miserable bastards. Too harsh? Perhaps, but consider our choice of television programming; The infection of reality television is still with us, years after everyone thought it would be dead and buried. Of course, it's always been with us in one form or another, all the way from Candid Camera to Fear Factor. The difference is that now, the participants are in on the joke. They're still the butt of it, but they are willing dupes. The folks on Candid Camera never woke up that morning wondering if they would be asked to eat horse rectum.

MTV had The Real World, which was popular, but failed to create the kind of revolution that we witnessed back in 2000. Along came Survivor, and with it a thousand copycat shows. Why did Survivor create a bandwagon, and not The Real World?

As is often the case, it was a confluence of trends. Reality shows had been around for awhile; so had game shows. It was only a matter of time before someone had the brains to combine the two. (Sadly, one production company went as far as combining a game show, a reality show, and a dating show, which is how our world came to be afflicted with Elimidate).

Never before had game shows and reality TV been combined in such a compelling manner. These programs created an unprecedented level of palpable, abject failure. They spend hours building up the contestants in our minds, until we begin to feel some basic level of empathy with them; and then they are crushed, each second of their downfall closely documented with an eerie intensity.

And we love it. We've never seen this level of documentary prowess used to capture the process of failure before. Not to say that failure hasn't always been a part of television, or entertainment in general. We all knew that the Castaways weren't going to be getting of Gilligan's Island anytime soon, but there was no avoiding the fact that it was fiction. It's not impossible to sympathize with fictional characters, but it can't ever reach the levels of pathos that come from real people (in, admittedly, contrived situations).

Tabloid programs came close. Printed tabloids rely on the failure of celebrates, and in the mid eighties, this aesthetic came to television. But, for all the stories and second hand accounts of addiction and disorder, we never saw the breakdowns themselves. It was re-told, re-enacted, ad nausem but we don't have the kind of access to celebrates that we have with regular folks who signed a waiver and allowed Joe Rogan to make fun of them.

What's so compelling about other people's pain? Whatever it is, its power is undeniable. We laughed at Al Bundy, knowing full well that he was and always would be a loser. But we also knew that Ed O'Neill went home at the end of the day to a loving wife and spent his off hours counting his money and reading fan mail. How satisfying it is for us to watch actors fight losing battles, leading inexorably to humiliation. Of course, the enjoyment we feel watching real people fight these same battles and failing, abjectly, is something far greater.

A good many of us have failed in our own lives. Our histories are littered with impossible dreams, broken promises, unhappy outcomes, and just plain bad luck. If you're not doing exactly what you want to be doing, right now, you yourself have failed in some small way (and if your reading this site while feeling this way, then I've failed too).

What a solace it is to us to watch real people dance like trained monkeys for our entertainment. A good many of our losses are private, or at least confined to a small group of individuals. And since we're not always on camera, the only way our failures can be transmitted is by word of mouth -- an altogether less demeaning medium than television. We extract joy from the pain of others, sadists that we are.

Simon Cowell can berate a teenage girl until she bursts into tears, and it's hilarious; but imagine if he shut the elevator doors on you, or took your cab -- you'd want to rip his testicles off. So, in the end, Mel Brooks was exactly right. There's a ruthlessness at the heart of comedy. So it is for its twin sister, drama. That's what we want, the heartless drama of real people losing in public.

The trappings and fancy set-ups are totally unnecessary: All that counts is the pain. Anybody who was once a child knows where to find that. Perhaps there should be a new reality show, without contrivances like deserted islands, singing contests, and pig anuses. All we have to do is film a third grade spelling bee. We're evil; we'd love every excruciating minute of it.

-B. C. Silvia