The League is an American sitcom that aired on both FX and FXX from 2009-2015. The show was successful in its own right and had a very dedicated fanbase, and was a hilarious meeting-of-the-minds for a wide range of talents – indie film icons Mark Duplass and Katie Aselton starred, comedy legends Nick Kroll and Paul Scheer accompanied them, and YouTube star Jon Lajoie appears. The show, set in Chicago, was about the members of a fantasy football league and their day-to-day lives. The League was uniquely centered on sports, something rarely prominent in the comedy world, and featured an ever-rotating list of epic cameos from the sports world. However, the show is also ricidulously hilarious, especially with the large cast of comedians who starred in it.
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The League utilizes its varied cast perfectly and allows them to work their magic on camera. The show was semi-improvisational and thus the cast could crack jokes that weren’t pre-written and instead build on each other’s natural talents. The cast was able to partially improvise almost every scene and bring new jokes to every different take, something which attracted a wide range of celebrities in the sports world. This perfect combination of comedy and sports is truly what made The League great. If you didn’t watch The League when it aired, now is the perfect time to binge all seven seasons of the sports comedy on Hulu.
How Does The League Perfectly Utilize Sports?
20th Television
Considering the show is about a fantasy football league, sports play a large part in the show, and football is often a topic of conversation and an underlying theme in the episodes. Sports fans will definitely connect with a lot of the conversation, and will be delighted by the vast array of hilarious cameos made from legends in the NFL - Marshawn Lynch, Terry Bradshaw, Antonio Gates, Robert Griffin III, J.J. Watt, Jay Cutler, Gerald McCoy, Mike Evans, Deion Sanders, Matt Forte, and literally dozens of others (including notable football analysts and commentators like Jay Glazer and Rich Eisen) make very funny appearances.
The show does not use sports in every part of every episode though, and it’s actually possible to enjoy it and even laugh out loud throughout the series without knowing much of anything about the NFL. The show is truly about the lives of the members of the fantasy football league; what connects them all is the league, but it is not their whole lives. Since the league itself is what connects this rag-tag group of people, though, it seeps into every element of their relationships. They could be in the hospital and someone would somehow bring up the league. That is part of what makes the show funny, but it is also part of what makes it work. The constant in all of these characters’ lives is sports, but while it is always an element of The League, it’s not a deal-breaker for people with no sports knowledge.
How Does The League Perfectly Utilize Comedy?
The League is a semi-improvised comedy show; the actors are given a basic outline of the episode/scene they are doing, and then the actors can work off each other and improvise the jokes in the scene as well. Sometimes the actors are given a full script but can still improvise once they are in front of the camera. This gives the performers a lot more creative freedom than they usually have on the average sitcom, and The League benefits greatly from this collaborative effort and their repartee, as the series features a cast of very talented comedians.
Nick Kroll is perhaps best known for Kroll Show, one of the funniest Comedy Central original series. Paul Scheer is always a reliably hilarious supporting character, whether he pops up in shows like The Good Place or Black Monday, headlines his own series NTSF:SD:SUV, or hosts his great podcast How Did This Get Made? Mark Duplass has a rich history of directing very funny but brilliant indie mumblecore movies like The Puffy Chair, Cyrus, and Jeff Who Lives At Home, but is a talented comedic actor in his own right, alongside wife Katie Aselton. Jon Lajoie has amassed millions of views on YouTube for his parody songs, and Stephen Rannazzisi has been a reliable comedic actor on television for years.
Additionally, the show taps into the comedic timing of a huge amount of non-NFL guest stars, like Jeff Goldblum, Matt Walsh, Thomas Lennon, Alia Shawkat, Timothy Olyphant, Lake Bell, Eliza Dushki, Dan Castellaneta, Aziz Ansari, Mark Cuban, Lizzy Caplan, Kevin Nealon, Ray Liotta, Sarah Silverman, Snoop Dogg, Larry David, and even the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. By allowing these actors to work their magic with the perfect main cast of the show, The League is able to elevate its comedy beyond your average sitcom.
How Does The League Combine the Two?
Obviously as previously stated, The League uses both sports and comedy perfectly, but how do the two work together? Not shockingly, the show combines sports and comedy seamlessly. There is something inherently funny about the obsessiveness of sports fans and the petty, small intensity of a fantasy football league; it’s just kind of funny that billions of people are so apoplectically obsessed with watching men and women throw or kick balls around. Thus, The League mines the humor of this innate ridiculousness, while the actors are able to add in-jokes about football and their fantasy league.
Then again, while football is the glue which holds this series together, The League is able to be hilarious the same way that Seinfeld or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is hilarious, simply finding comedy in its characters and various ridiculous situations. It’s pretty clear that, whether you’re a football fan or not, The League is a must-watch for anyone who likes a good laugh.
