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I hadn’t realized my taste in comedy was so elitist until I watched some of the new multi-camera sitcoms and observed what I had assumed was an already long-dead form of comedy. When I say “new,” I’m referring to multi-camera shows that have persisted after the advent/rise of the single-camera sitcom. If, like me, you’ve spent recent years watching “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development,” “Louie” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it’s a completely different experience to tune into talked-about shows like “Whitney,” “2 Broke Girls” and “Are You There, Chelsea?”

Broadly speaking, there are two ways to shoot a sitcom. There’s the traditional multi-camera style of “I Love Lucy,” “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld” — as seen currently on hits like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Two and a Half Men.” On the other hand, “30 Rock,” “Arrested Development” and “The Office” use a more cinematic single-camera shooting style. Multi-camera shows usually have a live audience or laugh track; single-camera shows dispense with the stage metaphor and have no laugh track. For you gamers, it’s somewhat analogous to the difference between a side-scrolling video game like Mario Brothers and a first-person shooter, like Halo.

A testament to my solipsism, I hadn’t seen any of the new multi-camera shows (all of which are more highly rated than those I regularly watch) until recently, when the matter was brought to a glaring point. The deeper we get into our Internet-powered, on-demand culture bubbles that let us watch only the things we care about, the more jarring it is to see things that have mainstream, popular appeal. For the past several years, I’ve been experiencing comedy in a completely cinematic form as opposed to the more vaudevillian stylings of its television roots. These single-camera shows — even in faux-documentary style, like “The Office” — are more polished, with music, editing, shooting styles, lenses and lighting that all aid in the creation of each show’s particular timing, realism and comedic atmosphere.

Comparatively, shows like “Are You There, Chelsea?” or “2 Broke Girls“ feel simultaneously contrived — the seams of construction are so obvious — but also more honest in their presentation. The actors remain actors and rarely disappear into their characters. They are in makeup and hair and costume, underneath a harsh light, standing on their mark, trying to deliver jokes on cue, pausing for laughter. There’s a certain grit and intensity in relating to the actors as well as the characters they perform.

If you’re accustomed to single-camera comedy, watching a multi-camera show is a startling change. Most films and shows eliminate all signs of performance, thereby boosting realism, by inserting multiple distancing layers (editing, music, specific camera lenses, etc.) between the viewer and the actor. Consider this scene from ”30 Rock”:

The hand-held camera, quick edits and natural lighting all aid in our acceptance of the performance and set as real, thereby helping the jokes hit their mark. If this same scene occurred on a multi-camera set, with typical TV lighting, a stationary camera and even slightly slower editing, we would suddenly be aware of Alec Baldwin instead of Jack Donaghy, and Tracy Morgan instead of Tracy Jordan.

In comparison, the actors on multi-camera shows barrel forward with fascinating vulnerability. Each actor has jokey jokes to pound out and laughs to wait for. An actor’s reliance on his partner’s performance in a scene is perhaps nowhere as clear as on a multi-cam show. All this without the helpful and flattering gauze of expensive cameras and location shooting. This might make the multiple-camera sitcom the perfect place for comic writers and actors to prove their ability, and simultaneously, since it is so exposing, the riskiest place for the untalented. You can’t hide in a multi-camera show, and unfortunately, most of these show are less than stellar. As the more sophisticated comedies have gone single-camera, we’ve been left without a ”Seinfeld,” “Cosby Show,” “Dick Van Dyke” or even “Laverne and Shirley” to showcase great comic ”stage” acting.

But though the writing on ”Arrested Development,” for example, is smarter and funnier, the simplicity of multi-camera shows is refreshing. The writing is often horrendously bad and the jokes consist mainly of characters insulting each other, but for all their sexual idiocy and reliance on racist caricatures, these shows have worth despite themselves.

When we watch these shows, we are part of an audience in a way that we aren’t in the more intimate viewing experiences that single-camera shows offer us. The theater-like form of the multi-camera show requires us to embrace artifice in an era where performance and deliberate creation are hidden.

As our society continues to create new ways to communicate while we remain in individual isolation, the multi-camera sitcom might be one of the last places many of us participate in a communal viewing experience (even if it’s a simulated one). Movies are increasingly viewed at home and hardly anyone can afford to go to live theater. As I struggled through “I Hate My Teenage Daughter,” I felt a tingle of that camaraderie that arises when we’re part of an audience.

The live studio audience, a set that is very obviously a set, or even a laugh track, as simple and stupid and taken for granted as it is, are subtle and powerful tools that shape our viewing experience. An agreement between the actors, the set and the audience is loud and clear: We’re putting on a show for your entertainment. For 21 minutes we experience, in the teeniest-tiniest way, the essence of comic theater. Let’s hope someone remembers what these shows can be and makes one that’s actually worth watching.

So, where is Chelsea, then? Roseanne starred in “Roseanne.” Jerry starred in “Seinfeld.” Louis C.K. stars in “Louie.” Even her caustic pal Whitney Cummings — who barely registered a blip outside of the comedy circuit until this past fall — stars in her eponymous sitcom. Handler appears in only seven of the 13 episodes, cast — by choice, she says — as the conservative Christian sister to her fictional twentysomething alter ego. (Handler claims she was too busy with her talk show to be the sitcom’s star or head writer.) Instead, Laura Prepon (Donna Pinciotti from “That ’70s Show”) plays young Chelsea Newman, ventriloquizing Handlerisms like a white kid reciting a Chris Rock monologue (if only she were savoring the jokes as breathlessly. If only the jokes were so worthy) while Handler’s presence in these early shows underline how flaccid her emasculating quips sound when intoned by anyone but her.

The pilot opens with Prepon’s voice-over, narrating as Chelsea Newman proudly “power-slurps the worm” out of a bottle of tequila to show up the guys at the sports bar where she waitresses. Cut to the county jail, where she spends the night with a bunch of lecherous lesbians from central casting — she’s gotten busted for a DUI. Just as one of the burliest broads starts in on her, she prays: “Are you there, vodka, it’s me, Chelsea.” The Lord Grain Alcohol answers her, apparently, because she’s bailed out by her hugely pregnant, judgmental sister, Sloane — Handler in a mousy brown wig, looking haggard, baiting Prepon with the line “Vodka is not the Lord.” That earns this meh quip: “Are you sure? They’re both invisible and have a hand in unexplained pregnancies.” Onto the sports bar, where we meet the rest of the crew: Chelsea’s best friend and gatekeeper, Olivia (Ali Wong), a petite Korean woman as shrill as a yipping Chihuahua; bartender and one-time-roll-in-the-sack Rick (Jake McDorman); bar back and resident little person (Handler would seem to have a fetish) Todd (Mark Povinelli). Don’t worry, they don’t make fun of his height — he’s color blind [insert sad-trumpet sound here]! Chelsea’s miserly, drunken father Melvin (Lenny Clarke) is, I suppose, Cliff-like in this “Cheers”-less bar, trolling for free drinks, except that Cliff would have been disturbed by his daughter offering her male friends “handies” in his presence.

All of these people are just set decoration for Chelsea’s posturing as a brazen, unapologetic bad-ass. She can drink not like a man, but “two men” — though we don’t witness her getting drunk so much as hear about it (they did take “vodka” out of the show title, after all) — and can trash-talk anyone under the table. Her sexploits in evidence are aborted missions  — in one, she wrestles to top a fellow-alpha sex partner; in another, she interrupts foreplay to attempt to trim the overgrown pubes of a red-headed conquest who repulses her. And, sure, she talks blue, but when more dynamic female characters go dirty, they do so with the searing wit of “30 Rock’s” Liz Lemon, and the cursing conviction of “Dexter’s” Deb Morgan. When she and Olivia boast about popping “lady wood” as they admire the décor of a prospective apartment, owned by a gawky virgin named Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus, who manages to bring in the only bit of funny in evidence), it’s not racy, or shocking, or even ewww-worthy. It’s writers trying too hard to lend an edge to aimless, underdeveloped characters. Which is why the only laughter you hear after all these clunkers comes from the accompanying laugh track. Just like “Whitney.”

Whitney Cummings is at least fully devoted to being “Whitney,” a caustic, often-unlikable woman with a supportive boyfriend and serious abandonment issues. I can even bear, in small doses, “adorkable” New Girl Jess (Zooey Deschanel), in all her sing-songy tweeness. She may not be grounded as an individual, but she is at least fully realized as a character. But Chelsea, that girl’s nowhere to be found. And unless the writers find a way to give us a sense of who she is, why seek her out?

Based on Chelsea Handler’s best-selling, liquor-fueled memoir, “Are You There?” features “That ’70s Show’s” Laura Prepon as a gleefully boozy, slutty party gal who prays to the higher power of vodka for the strength to get out of DUIs and awkward same-sex overtures. Chelsea, we are incessantly reminded, is a free spirit (i.e., a lovable skank), attempting to get down to earth with the assistance of her virginal roommate and dowdy sister — played, with dowdy brunetteness, by none other than Chelsea Handler herself.

The Chelsea character is meant to be a mess, but she’s also meant to be hotter than any other gal in the room, and way more fun than her “judgy super-Christian sister.” She’s a natural “Happy Hour” companion to Whitney, she of similar sexy-dork shtick and the wacky jokes about drinking water like it’s vodka. Hilarious bits involving drunk driving, little people and homophobia ensue!

Of course, there’s plenty of genuine comedy to be found in excess, regardless of which gender is falling down. That’s why “The Hangover” wasn’t called “That Time a Bunch of Guys Drank Mineral Water and Nothing Happened.” “Bridesmaids” might still have been a runaway smash without Kristin Wiig’s liquored-up airplane scene, but it was an undeniable showstopper nonetheless. And it’s notable that “Chelsea” debuts the same week that one of the all-time champs of inebriated comedy has staged a brief return. “Absolutely Fabulous” always was – and blessedly remains – based largely on the humor inherent from well-dressed ladies face-planting out of taxicabs.

Yet there’s something different in the whole Chelsea-Whitney NBC Happy Hour. It starts with its weird assumption that the notion of Girls Behaving Badly (actual title of another Chelsea Handler show) is somehow, in this day and age, groundbreaking. That’s pretty much all it takes, by the way, for Handler to earn L.A. Times critic Robert Lloyd’s breathless accolade of “real” twice in a single recent paragraph. But what really sets it apart is the whiff of voyeuristic creepiness about building a prime-time block around willowy females who dress up sexy and get their drink on. Is this really the same network that figured out how to give us the complicated, hilarious – and very different – characters of Reagan Brinkley, Leslie Knope and Liz Lemon?

Worse, though, Happy Hour reinforces the stereotype of ladies as inherently less funny than dudes. Chelsea’s humor, after all, hinges upon her being like a guy — someone who sleeps around and gets “lady wood” — but has conveniently appealing blond hair and boobs. It’s an interesting if depressing ploy, especially coming on the heels of Meghan Daum’s recent declaration that Christopher Hitchens was right about women not being funny because “they’re afraid of what they’ll have to give up in exchange, for instance the coy mysteriousness that men supposedly prize above all else.” I think Daum is dead wrong, but I can’t help noticing what a neat workaround alcohol provides for the kind of person who does indeed believe that vaginas render a human unamusing. Drinking gives the female permission to be messed up and aggressive — all the things that make for comedy — and then go back to being “coy” and cute.

But there’s got to be more to a woman, even a fictional one, than “Look at me, I’m so naughty.” Some depth of character, some occasional jokes. Because the girl at the bar slurring “I’m sooooo drunk” is just a punch line, not a promising premise upon which to hinge an entire series. And alcohol only makes people interesting when you’re the one doing the drinking.

Not willing to let any grass grow under its zeitgeisty, metaphoric feet, today the Times notices “Female Comedians, Breaking the Taste-Taboo Ceiling.” Have you heard of this Sarah Silverman person? Because apparently she is rather raunchy. And lest you find yourself wondering how you woke up in 1998, and if so, whether Dawson’s ever going to hook up with Joey, let me assure you, this story actually ran in the New York Times in November 2011. Coming next, a piece on how people are using emoticons. Oh, wait.

In the first four paragraphs of his piece on taboo-busting babes, Jason Zinoman opens with a 1979 quote from Johnny Carson, segues into a 2007 Vanity Fair piece by Christopher Hitchens, and lands with a flourish on a decade-old Sarah Silverman joke. As those saucy lady comics might say, this story is dustier than your grandmother’s vagina.

After bringing us up to speed on Silverman’s latest rape jokes, what do you think Zinoman covered next? That’s right, Whitney Cummings, “another coarse, sexually frank female stand-up comic.” Despite also doing rape jokes, Zinoman finds her “not particularly risky.”

Cummings, like Silverman, is both attractive and comfortable around the F-bomb — and a reliable marvel to the Times. Just two months ago, Andrew Goldman was asking her about being “objectively attractive,” what she wears to meetings, and whether she  slept her way to fame and is “too dumb to own a car.” It was hilarious.

You’d think the next place to go from here would be Chelsea Handler. Last spring, after all, the Times lovingly noted that “her body has the pre-silicone lushness of a ’60s Playmate” while cooing that she admits, “I try to make fun of everyone as often as possible, especially minorities.” But shockingly – shocking like a rape joke involving a black guy shocking – the Times veers to Amy Schumer. Schumer, who is not Chelsea Handler, is “blond and bubbly” with “wholesome, apple-cheeked cheer,” and an act that “spouts proudly prejudiced views, mean-girl put-downs and meticulously recounted sexual exploits.” See, it’s completely different.

I’m just a cotton-headed set of ovaries on two feet, but I can’t help noticing a recurring theme. Whether it’s coming from Katie Roiphe or a culture writer, there’s a weird mix of fascination and repugnance toward the gal with a seemingly manly swagger here. She’s so cool, she can even laugh off sexual assault. Why can’t more women be like her? And she gets to say that stuff about vaginas that other people can’t. You know, like Jay-Z can say the N-word and gay men can call each other queer. Imagine the freedom! She’s also hot. Who else feels a 1,200 word think piece coming on?

It’s not that certain female comics don’t perpetuate this attention-getting shtick — if I never hear Sarah Silverman deliver an abortion punch line in that baby-talk monotone again, it’ll be too soon. But the bangable-broad-with-a-potty-mouth story is approximately as relevant as the moms-sometimes-wear-nice-clothes-outside one. What’s amazing isn’t that a woman can cuss with her pretty little lipsticked mouth. It’s that this jive-ass story is still being written, 10 years after it was vaguely topical. It’s the astonishment that Johnny Carson’s 1979 opinions no longer hold quite so much sway, and that sometimes people who can grow babies in their tummies can curse and talk about their periods or your erections. Guess the cat’s out of the bag on that one. So congratulations to the Times on something truly original there. They’ve made the notion of breaking taboos utterly boring.

“We were taping a Chelsea special,” Mathews, 31, tells PEOPLE, “and she pointed at my tummy and said, ‘What’s going on here? I love you. Get it together.’”

And instead of telling her to shove her GOOP where the sun don’t shine, Ross took Gwyneth’s comments as a sign that he actually should lose weight! And he did, starting on his Jenny Craig regimen to win Gwyneth’s affection back. So did it work?

“I saw her when she was promoting her cookbook recently,” says Mathews. “She was so excited. She said, ‘You look good!’”

Well, thank God this story has a happy ending. Gwyneth Paltrow … weight-loss savior?