Netflix has told the FCC not to approve the AT&T-DirecTV merger as it is currently constituted, saying the new company would have the incentive and ability to slow competing over-the-top video offerings and unbundled offerings.

In a letter to the FCC dated Monday (May 4), Netflix counsel Markham Erickson pointed in part to the collapse of the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal, saying that now made a potential AT&T-DirecTV the "largest multichannel video programming distributor" in the country, and possibly largest broadband provider given "projected" AT&T broadband investments.

"AT&T already has a demonstrated ability to harm OVDs by leveraging its control over interconnection to degrade its own customers' access to Netflix's service," Netflix told the FCC. "Comcast degraded Netflix's service in late 2013 and early 2014.  AT&T presumably could have used this episode to take customers from Comcast. Instead it engaged in a similar long-term degradation of its customers' access to Netflix," said the company. Comcast has disputed that characterization.

"AT&T also has shown an interest in using data caps and usage-based pricing methods, which it can apply discriminatorily to advantage its own services," Netflix said. "If AT&T is able to slow the development of the OVD industry, either by foreclosing access to broadband customers or imposing discriminatory data caps, AT&T would be able to preserve its market advantage by slowing or even reversing the shift toward competitive online video offering and away from bundled video/broadband offerings."

AT&T declined comment, but said in its own filing to the FCC last month:

"[I]t is clear that this transaction creates no economic incentive for the merged firm to harm OVDs. While Netflix mischaracterize[s] their commercial peering disputes as evidence of such an incentive, the record does not support those claims."

"As one network analyst has explained, 'Netflix chose to create, and use paths that [it] knew were congested, simply because they were cheaper than using paths that were less congested. This strategy apparently overwhelmed Netflix's chosen low price providers, causing congestion and impacting service quality for its customers," AT&T said.

Netflix has already told the FCC what conditions the deal would need to make it approvable, notably allowing it to charge for interconnection and excepting any AT&T service from fixed or mobile data caps.

After more than a year of anticipation, the long-awaited consolidation frenzy expected to envelop the cable market may have to wait yet again.

With Comcast’s decision to abandon its $67 billion purchase of Time Warner Cable, all eyes are now focused on Charter Communications, the Stamford, Conn.-based cable operator that started this whole thing nearly two years ago when it initiated a full-bore pursuit of the second largest cable operator in the country.

Most analysts expect Charter to make another run at TWC — company CEO Tom Rutledge has said that he would pursue Time Warner Cable in the event the Comcast deal was not approved — but when and for how much is largely undetermined.

Instead of such a merger accelerating more deal volume, it could have the opposite effect in the industry. Other smaller operators that have been waiting on the sidelines for the Comcast-TWC deal to clear now may have to wait even longer, as Charter mulls its offer for TWC.

In a research note, Needham & Co. analyst Laura Martin said she expected Charter to make a bid for TWC within the next three months. Late Friday, sources confirmed reports that Charter had already started early stage talks with TWC.

Telsey Advisory Group media analyst Tom Eagan said he believes there will still be deals, but that they will be smaller than previously anticipated.

TWC EYEING BRIGHT HOUSE?

The first one he expects to see daylight is a Time Warner Cable purchase of Bright House Networks. Bright House had agreed to be bought by Charter for $10.4 billion last month, but only on the condition that the Comcast-TWC deal was consummated. TWC already has a relationship with Bright House — TWC has the right of first offer to any bid for Bright House, which also has access to TWC’s programming discounts — and buying it could be a defensive move against a potential Charter bid.

“That’s why they have to move quickly,” Eagan said of a possible Bright House deal.

Time Warner Cable says it’s ready to take on the challenge as an independent company, and is leaving the deal speculation to others. In an interview, chairman and CEO Rob Marcus said New York-based Time Warner Cable was not blindsided by the decision to cancel the merger.

“From the day we announced the merger, we continued to execute our operating plan, initially with the intent to deliver a great company to Comcast, but also for the possibility it wouldn’t go through the regulatory process,” Marcus said. “Because we planned accordingly, we come out of this thing very well-positioned for the future.”

The decision to scuttle the deal came down quickly. Reports first surfaced on April 17 that the Department of Justice was leaning toward opposing the merger and, a week later, the termination was announced. At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission was ready to move the merger before an administrative law judge, a signal that it did not believe the deal was in the public interest.

TOO BIG IN BROADBAND

With roughly 60% of the broadband market (speeds of 25 Mbps or higher), a combined Comcast-TWC would just be too big. “We thought we could get the deal approved, we thought we could make a good case,” Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in an interview with CNBC. “I think our team did. But in the end, we have to move on.”

But unlike past megadeals that were squashed because of video subscriber dominance, broadband and online video influence is the new lay of the land.

“Today, an online video market is emerging that offers new business models and greater consumer choice,” FCC chairman Tom Wheeler said in a statement. “The proposed merger would have posed an unacceptable risk to competition and innovation, including to the ability of online video providers to reach and serve consumers.”

Whether the FCC’s current stance will have any bearing on future Comcast deals — is the company too big to do anything? — remains to be seen, but Eagan believes Comcast could turn its sites to wireless assets or beef up its programming holdings by acquiring content production companies.

“I think the issue here was broadband,” Eagan said. Meanwhile, at Charter, Rutledge said that in the wake of the termination, the MSO’s business prospects to create new customers remain unchanged. “We will continue to drive growth through innovation in our current footprint and we will continue to evaluate investment opportunities that arise through scale,” Rutledge said in a statement.

And Time Warner Cable is prepared to move forward on its own. It unveiled its three-year turnaround plan in January 2014 — with targets of adding 500,000 broadband customers in 18 months and doubling business services revenue to $5 billion by 2018 — and it has already shown some strong results. Fourth-quarter revenue was up 3.8%, cash flow grew 5.6%, and the operator lost about 38,000 basic video customers for its best fourth-quarter subscriber showing in seven years.

“We are, without a doubt, stronger than we’ve been in many years,” Marcus said. “The business services operation has been hot for many years, it really has been a huge driver of growth for us — I continue to be confident in our ability to hit that $5 billion annual revenue bogey that we’ve talked about. Most significantly, we’ve seen a marked improvement in the health of our residential business. 2013 was admittedly a tough year for us, but during that year we were investing in foundational elements of the business that we knew would put us in good stead down the road. In 2014, those seeds started to bear fruit.”

Marcus added that with first-quarter results scheduled to be released on April 30, he couldn’t be too specific on, but, “Suffice it to say we’ve got good operating momentum,” Marcus said. “We are much stronger than we were as we sat here a year ago.”

Eagan agreed.

“The fundamentals have been dramatically better than they were a year and a half ago,” Eagan said. “And they kept the capex spending. Everyone thought, ‘Why spend the money?’ But he was right to spend the money. Now their plant is better positioned than it was before.”

Eagan said he believes Marcus wants the opportunity to prove he can take Time Warner Cable to the next level. “It was a rough start when he became CEO after Glenn,” Eagan said, referring to TWC’s late chairman and CEO Glenn Britt. “I think he wants to prove himself, and he’s had a year to reflect on that.”

Marcus didn’t rule out Time Warner Cable being involved in M&A, but stressed that the company remains focused on the business at hand.

“We’ve talked a lot about the potential value of scale, but those benefits in a vacuum don’t necessarily carry the day,” Marcus said. “What I’ve talked about repeatedly is our duty is to maximize shareholder value. From our perspective that could be either as an acquirer, it could be as a seller. We’re focused on the things we can control, which is running our business.”

For employees who had been readying themselves for a transition after the deal was completed — several have retired or moved to other companies, with others referring to the past 14 months as “senior year” — Marcus said the focus always has been on running the business.

“I don’t want to trivialize the challenge that has been presented on the people front, but our team has risen to the occasion,” Marcus said. “They have performed more than admirably, beyond our wildest expectations.”

Marcus added that prior to the February 2014 announcement of the Comcast deal, Time Warner Cable had revamped its management team, adding cable veteran Dinni Jain as chief operating officer, former AOL chief financial officer Artie Minson as CFO and former Cox Business executive Phil Meeks to head up its business services unit.

“On one level, all of these guys, and frankly our entire senior management team, have been champing at the bit to show what we could do if we were left to our own devices,” Marcus said. “In a sense there is a lot of excitement about the opportunity before us.” Marcus said personally, he is as pumped as he has ever been

“Who wouldn’t be gung ho about being CEO of TWC?” Marcus said. “As I sit here today, I’m as gung ho as I’ve ever been.”

The Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal withdrawal will take its place alongside other mega-meltdowns in the communications space.

Back when the AT&T-T-Mobile deal cratered in 2011, Thomson Reuters compiled a list of the largest withdrawn merger proposals, and Comcast already claimed two of the spots. At $45 billion, the TWC deal withdrawal would put it at number five on the list.

Here are the top failed deals in the communications space over the past quarter century, according to that list, with the addition of the latest undone deal.

About 14 months ago, in announcing his plan to merge his cable company with Time Warner Cable, Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts said in the event the process became too onerous, or the deal looked less attractive, he could always walk away. On Friday, he did just that.

“Today, we move on,” Roberts said in a statement. “Of course, we would have liked to bring our great products to new cities, but we structured this deal so that if the government didn’t agree, we could walk away. Comcast NBCUniversal is a unique company with strong momentum.  Throughout this entire process, our employees have kept their eye on the ball and we have had fantastic operating results.  I want to thank them and the employees of Time Warner Cable for their tireless efforts. I couldn’t be more proud of this company and I am truly excited for what’s next.”

Just what that will be is anyone’s guess. In a statement, Time Warner Cable chairman and CEO Rob Marcus also expressed hope for the future.

“We have always believed that Time Warner Cable is a one-of-a-kind asset,” Marcus said in a statement.  “We are strong and getting stronger. Throughout this process, we’ve been laser focused on executing our operating plan and investing in our plant, products and people to deliver great experiences to our customers. Through our strong operational execution and smart capital allocation, we are confident we will continue to create significant value for shareholders... I’m extremely proud of the professionalism, dedication and resiliency our 55,000 employees have shown over the past year and thank them for their continued commitment to Time Warner Cable.”

The decision to abandon the $67 billion merger ends weeks of speculation and cheered opponents of the deal who had complained that the union would create a company with unprecedented power and influence over the nation’s broadband infrastructure. Depending on how you define broadband – and the Federal Communications Commission has changed that definition several times over the years – a combined Comcast and Time Warner Cable would control about 60% of the high-speed data connections over 25 Megabits per second in the country. In the end, that level of dominance was too much for the FCC to overlook.

The Department of Justice was taking credit for putting the kibosh on the Comcast deal, announcing Friday that Comcast had dropped its Time Warner Cable bid "after the Department of Justice informed the companies that it had significant concerns that the merger would make Comcast an unavoidable gatekeeper for Internet-based services that rely on a broadband connection to reach consumers."

“The companies' decision to abandon this deal is the best outcome for American consumers,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in a statement. “The Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice has demonstrated, time and again, that it can and will defend the interests of the American consumer no matter the complexity of the issue or the size of the opponent.  This is a victory not only for the Department of Justice, but also for providers of content and streaming services who work to bring innovative products to consumers across America and around the world.  I commend the Antitrust attorneys and investigators whose outstanding work led to this outcome, and I know that the Department of Justice will continue to fight for fair access and free competition in every industry and every market.”

Holder did give the FCC some credit for their "close and productive cooperation throughout this investigation."

For his part, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler suggested that the country was better off with Comcast and Time Warner Cable not together.

"Comcast and Time Warner Cable’s decision to end Comcast’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable is in the best interests of consumers," he said. "The proposed transaction would have created a company with the most broadband and the video subscribers (SIC) in the nation alongside the ownership of significant programming interests."

"Today, an online video market is emerging that offers new business models and greater consumer choice. The proposed merger would have posed an unacceptable risk to competition and innovation, including to the ability of online video providers to reach and serve consumers."

Speculation that the deal was in grave danger heated up on April 17 after reports that the Department of Justice was leaning toward not approving the transaction, That speculation reached a fever pitch on Wednesday night, when reports surfaced that the FCC, after meetings with Comcast earlier that day, would recommend that the matter be heard by an administrative law judge. That would have meant a massive delay in the process and is typically a clear signal that the FCC did not believe the merger was in the public interest. Within hours, Comcast had decided that pursuing the merger would be fruitless.

With the merger on the outs, the next question is what is in store for Time Warner Cable. Although the company has been working toward a merger for more than a year, it has hardly been sitting on its heels. The company began implementing its five-year business plan well before it agreed to the Comcast deal, and it has been paying off. TWC had its best fourth quarter in seven years in 2014 and the company no longer is the stumbling giant it was when Charter Communications made its first overtures to the company in 2013.

Charter is still expected to make a run for TWC, but it may be more costly — some analysts estimate it would have to pay at least $164 per share a 10% premium to TWC’s April 23 closing price. And with a few strong quarters under its belt, Time Warner Cable could make a case for going it alone — similar to the stance its former parent Time Warner Inc. made last year when it rejected an $80 billion unsolicited takeover bid from 21st Century Fox.

Also in flux is what will happen to the expected consolidation wave in the industry if Charter does decide to make another run at Time Warner Cable. Most industry analysts expected Charter to lead the way in consolidating the rest of the cable business, but that may be on hold if Charter’s attentions are focused on TWC.

Bernstein analyst Paul de Sa pointed out that, with the deal withdrawn, other players won't have a chance to see exactly how the FCC was approaching the mergr, and by extension would approach others in the space, though clearly broadband sub counts was a big issue.

"The framework against which future cable/cable and broadband/payTV deals will be assessed has not been made public," he said in a note to investors. "As such, it is unclear how other combinations/market swaps among Comcast, TWC, Charter, Brighthouse, Cablevision, etc. that may be proposed in the wake of the current deal might be regarded by regulators (e.g., how many broadband subscribers is "too many" with respect to the power to impede over-the-top (OTT) video competition?). Further, conditions on AT&T/DIRECTV, which increases AT&T's incentive and ability to harm fixed and mobile OTT players and also reduces payTV competition in many markets, may be more stringent than consensus expectations."

Since his first week on the job in July 2009, when he jumped into the confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) has hit the ground running. He is a prominent inquisitor on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he has taken the lead on big privacy issues as chairman of the privacy subcommittee.

A Harvard graduate, five-time Emmy Award winner and best-selling author, the 63-year-old former comedian has been a familiar TV face, and voice, to the Baby Boomer generation for decades as one of Saturday Night Live’s original writers and performers. As Stuart Smalley in the 1990s, Franken sought daily affirmation that could have served as a campaign slogan: “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and doggonit, people like me.”

He is currently seeking a second Senate term this November, which would take him through 2020. According to Public Policy Polling, Franken leads all his potential Republican opponents by double digits. That would be a big change from 2008, when he won in a recount by a razor-thin margin over incumbent Norm Coleman — Franken was not sworn in until July of 2009.

With the retirement of “prairie populist” Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) in 2010, Franken arguably inherited the mantle of the Senate’s biggest media-consolidation critic — Independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont is in the running as well — with a reputation for doing his homework and saying what he thinks.

Franken has said his opposition to the merger of Comcast, parent of NBCUniversal, with Time Warner Cable is nothing personal, even though he was an NBC employee when a writer and performer on SNL. Instead, his view is that the deal is too big to succeed, if success means a consumer-friendly programming platform receptive to independent content.

In a rare, wide-ranging interview, Franken talked to Multichannel News Washington bureau chief John Eggerton about those deals, network neutrality, privacy and why the former funnyman became a serious legislator.

MCN: How has your experience of being part of the media business, particularly working for NBC, informed and shaped how you view big media companies?

Al Franken: I want to emphasize that I really loved my time at Saturday Night Live. Even though I opposed Comcast buying NBC, I kind of recognized that, in a way, it was better for NBC to be owned by a media company rather than a company that sells toasters [General Electric]. But what I have been taught is that, sometimes, what these media companies say in hearings is not what happens.

I think you wrote about it when I talked about fin-syn in the Comcast-NBCU deal. The lesson from that was that [when the fin-syn rules, which prevented networks from owning a financial interest in the domestic syndication of shows on their air, were removed] they swore up and down that they wouldn’t favor their own content. (Chuckles.) And I’m laughing, because you know what happened. They said: “Why would we do that? We just want the best shows that get the best ratings. We just want the best content.” And then as soon as fin-syn went away, they started favoring their own content. We have seen what happened to independent production on television: It plummeted. My experience was that the networks basically said, “Now that we can, we will own as much of our content as we can.”

And when an independent producer would do a pilot, say, there would be kind of an implicit understanding that if the independent owner gave some ownership to NBC it was more likely to get on the network and into a good timeslot. So, they leveraged their position, and this has given me an insight into how this leverage not only can be used, but is used.

MCN: Is that why you have had issues with companies adhering to conditions put on deals?

AF: Even [with] how they are able to be enforced, because of the FCC’s resources versus the resources of these companies. You know, a Tennis Channel that is competing with Comcast/NBC, if they feel like Comcast is favoring its own channel, enforcing these conditions sometimes has to be through private right of action, and boy it is really hard to do that against a behemoth. And even when the FCC wants to take action, that large company can drag it out and task the resources of the FCC.

MCN: You have been a big critic of the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger. What is your biggest concern?

AF: That it will hurt consumers, that it will be anti-competitive, so we will have less innovation and worse service to consumers in Minnesota and elsewhere, and less choice. It’s just too big. It is the No. 1 cable provider buying the No. 2 cable-TV provider. It’s the No. 1 Internet-broadband provider buying the No. 3 provider, and Comcast has about 12% or 13% of all television content and they can leverage all of that in a way that poses a lot of difficulties that I have with competition and it makes them a kind of gatekeeper in content. It gives them too big a position in the market and they will leverage that position with their Wall Street investors on their phone calls.

MCN: Are there any conditions the government could put on the deal that would make it acceptable? Say, extending the network-neutrality conditions beyond 2018?

AF: I am not talking about conditions at this point, because I think the FCC and [Justice Department] should block the deal.

MCN: Do you have a similar “bigness” issue with AT&T-DirecTV?

AF: I am continuing to evaluate that deal. It is a different thing, but I have the same kind of problems. One of them is size and what that does to competition. They say they will make broadband access available to millions of new customers and that the deal will create jobs, but this will just give AT&T a lot of power across the telecommunications industry, and that can be bad for consumers.

MCN: But you don’t oppose it?

AF: I have not come to a conclusion on that. I’m still analyzing the deal. I wrote a letter to the FCC and the DOJ explaining my concerns, and I pressed AT&T about some of the questions I had in the hearings on municipal broadband and on net neutrality. I am very concerned about network neutrality, as you know.

MCN: Comcast and others argue that they need this size and scale to compete with each other and to have the wherewithal to invest in all this higher-speed, more available broadband the government is pushing them to deploy. Don’t they have a point?

AF: When AT&T is saying it needs its size to compete with Comcast if it buys Time Warner Cable, I think that speaks to the importance of not allowing Comcast to buy Time Warner Cable, because you see that more concentration of media begets more concentration of media.

I believe that media consolidation is a huge problem for American consumers and a real threat to our democracy. We need more competition, not less, because as these big corporations get bigger, consumers get stuck with higher prices, fewer choices and worse service. And these companies aren’t selling widgets; they control the means by which we communicate with each other and share ideas, so media consolidation threatens the diversity of views on which our democracy relies.

MCN: Moving to network neutrality, you are pushing the Federal Communications Commission to use its Title II authority to restore the rules …

AF: Yes, just label [broadband service as] a telecommunications industry. The court has said they could do that, and I think they should probably take the court’s advice. I think that would go a long way toward protecting net neutrality and I think it would go a long way toward making this sphere more competitive.

MCN: You described FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposed new Open Internet order as possibly the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it. Why did you say that?

AF: The chairman had brought up the idea of fast lanes, essentially. And I find that completely, diametrically opposed to net neutrality. I mean, the whole point of net neutrality is that all content is treated neutrally, or the same and travels at the same speed, and that has been the architecture of the Internet from the beginning. I want people to understand that. We’ve had members of Congress saying, “Well, we’ve had all this innovation of the Internet without net neutrality,” and they don’t understand that. I don’t want any of your readers to misunderstand that because we have had net neutrality from the beginning and the Internet has grown and exploded not just while we have had net neutrality, but because of it. The innovation that has come along has allowed startups and new companies to compete with very large companies and beat them because their content gets to travel at the same speed.

MCN: You were talking earlier about municipal broadband. You signed on to a letter about pre-empting municipal broadband regulations. Why should the FCC step in?

AF: I think the incumbents in Internet broadband have worked to stop municipal broadband, which can serve their residents and citizens very well. [Incumbents] have funded campaigns in state legislatures to stop municipalities from doing their own broadband, and I think that’s wrong.

That is why I asked [AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson] whether they had done that [at a June 24 hearing on the AT&T-DirecTV merger], and I guess he didn’t know.

MCN: Ultimately, though, it is the legislatures that vote on those laws. So, are they ostensibly representing their constituents?

AF: There has just been a big lobbying effort in state legislatures that has kind of been one-sided, and I think that they may not be voting in the interests in these municipalities and the citizens of these municipalities. So, it is sometimes when these very big, deep-pocketed corporations exercise those resources you get results that don’t necessarily serve the people.

MCN: Protecting privacy online is one of your signature issues. What is the latest on that front?

AF: I have been looking at location privacy. Smartphones have exploded over the last several years and these phones have apps, and sometimes the phones themselves, that can record where you are. And I feel that this location information is sensitive. It is where you live and work and take your children to school and go to church and where and when you go to the doctor. So, I think people should have the right to control that information; to give their approval if you want to take that information and share it.

Obviously, a lot of great things come out of there being this location data. If you want to go to the nearest Pizza Hut or bowling alley or whatever, you need to do that, and you are going to say, “Yes, take my location.” But there also have been abuses, and one of the worst abuses was from one of the first pieces of testimony that I got when I first did hearings, which was from the Minnesota Coalition for Battered Women. It was about a woman in Northern Minnesota in an abusive relationship who went to a county building where there was a domestic-violence center. The counselors there took her to a county courthouse to file a restraining order against the guy. Within a few minutes, he texted her and asked why she was in the courthouse.

This cyber-stalking has being going on for a long time, but the last statistics DOJ had on this were, I believe, from 2006, and it was 25,000 cases. Think of what the explosion has been since then in the use of smartphones. We have had hearings with law-enforcement and domestic-violence groups and this is very, very prevalent. Part of what I am trying to do with my location bill is making the marketing and selling of these [stalking apps] illegal.

MCN: What made you decide to get into politics and do you see it as a natural progression from your taking aim at the right wing, both on Air America and through your books, to actually being able to do something about it through the process?

AF: Well, yeah. I had been very conscious of public policy throughout my entire life. Ever since I was 11 or 12 years old, during the civil rights movement, I got kind of involved and interested in public policy. My dad was a Republican, but during the civil-rights debate he became a Democrat because of the 1964 Civil Rights Bill. Sen. [Barry] Goldwater [then the Republican candidate for president] had voted against it, and my dad said, “That’s it.”

That was very informative to me. This is something I have always been interested in. When I started doing comedy in high school with Tom Davis, I started doing political satire. When we got to Saturday Night Live, we were doing a lot of the political satire with Jim Downey, who is conservative, but a very, very thoughtful conservative. We felt the job of the show was to be insightful in our satire, but not to be liberal or conservative.

I think we did a really good job of that, and I am very proud of the work I did with a lot of my other writers there. But when I left the show in 1995 finally, I saw what the Gingrich revolution was, and I wrote the book about Rush Limbaugh [Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations]. That was my sort of saying, “OK, now I’m not writing for a bunch of other people, I’m writing for me.” I think your take is exactly right that it was a natural progression [to politics].

The tragedy of Paul and Sheila and Martha and others all dying in that plane crash was also part of the road there. [Paul Wellstone, former Democratic senator from Minnesota, was killed in a plane crash in 2002 along with his wife, Sheila, and daughter, Martha.]

MCN: Do you consciously downplay your funny side so you will be taken more seriously, or are you just a Harvard government major who got sidetracked by comedy?

AF: People have written a lot about this and I think it is overplayed. I think my staff will say I’m funny around the office and my colleagues will say I’m funny. But I’m also very serious, and I think you can be funny and serious at the same time.