Funny and sad have always been two sides of the same cosmic coin. “Tragedy is when I cut my finger,” Mel Brooks famously quipped. “Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” But a new wave of television comedy is steamrolling that old coin beyond recognition.

Forget the belly laughs of I Love Lucy . Bid a nodding, appreciative adieu to Seinfeld’s irony (and the vaudevillian throwback yuks of Kramer’s pratfalls). From behind a cruel veil of faux reality TV naturalism, shows like The Office, The Newsroom and Curb Your Enthusiasm offer front-row views of characters running themselves through an endless, cringe-inducing gauntlet of embarrassment. Such self-inflicted horror is difficult to watch, yet impossible not to watch.

This neo-funny approach isn’t what we traditionally recognize as comedy; awkward silence is its laugh track. Remember in When Harry Met Sally…, when Meg Ryan uses all the skills in her physical comedy arsenal to loudly fake an orgasm in a crowded deli? That’s funny. But now, instead of ending with a pithy one-liner, imagine the scene concluding with security guards escorting a belligerent Ryan onto the sidewalk. Then imagine her, mistakenly believing there’s dignity left to salvage, loudly voicing her outrage to uninterested passersby. The camera lingers far too long. That’s neo-funny.

“Shows like Fernwood 2Nite and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman sort of did this thing in the 1970s,” says Ken Finkleman, the writer/director/star of The Newsroom (which was nominated for an International Emmy Award last year) and Canada’s top practitioner of neo-funny. “But it really started with The Larry Sanders Show in the early 1990s.”

In fact, Larry Sanders creator/star Garry Shandling laid the neo-funny groundwork with his underrated, late-1980s self-titled meta-sitcom. On It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, absurdly self-aware characters gleefully bulldozed the load-bearing fourth wall, that traditional boundary between audience and characters. As viewers, we’re always aware that the people on the sitcom screen are really actors playing characters; this time, the characters were also in on the ruse. Such transparency even extended to the theme song: “This is the theme to Garry’s show, the theme to Garry’s show/Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song.” It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was too arch and not quite quotidian enough to be neo-funny, but by turning a well-worn genre inside out, it paved the way for Shandling’s master stroke.

The Larry Sanders Show took an unflinching backstage look at a fictional late-night talk show, with Shandling as the titular host. Sure, Sanders had its share of traditional laughs – potty humour, sight gags, pratfalls. But it was even more notable for its pseudo-documentary portrayal of ego clashes, crippling insecurities and backstage bickering. The TV studio setting was essential to transitioning the innocent viewer between familiar comic territory and parts unknown: Here are the jokes you’ve heard before (Larry’s stand-up comedy monologues); and here are the “jokes” you haven’t heard before (Larry crassly confronts his sidekick about his ridiculously ill-advised marriage). Shandling clearly revelled in disorienting viewers. He hosted a parade of A-list Hollywood stars (Sharon Stone, Jon Stewart, assorted Baldwins…), all playing themselves. In his 1998 Esquire article “Larry/Garry,” Shandling fanned the flames of obfuscation. “To get the argument over with once and for all,” he wrote, “Larry has a larger ass.”