Personally, I’m a huge movie buff, but I don’t watch or know that much about TV. I have never seen the office but what I have heard is it is quite enjoyable and funny. The little I have seen is some of the interviews. The interviews are rather funny but not unique. They follow a similar style as reality show. It’s not a good way to do this, it stops the flow of the show and is just like cutaway gags with more set up. Now Borat on the other hand, is really funny. That movie is over the top, ridiculous and rather shocking. I’m usually not a fan of shock humor because it is cheap and goes for an easy laugh but in Borat it works perfectly. The realism is what make it work. The real reaction makes everything genuine giving the audience both a permission to laugh and a sense of incongruity.
Personally, I am not a fan of the family guy style of comedy because it is very repetitive. The death of comedy is repetitiveness. Most comedies that use repetition follow the rule of three but Family Guy doesn’t. This could be a bold move to make their own mark but in reality, it is a way to pad the run time. I believe that Family Guy tries to use Stockholm Syndrome to make their jokes funny. Also, they are way to heavy-handed with their message for my taste. The cut away gags can be funny but they don’t add to the plot or develop the characters. It’s just there as a means to fill the time frame. I might laugh at the gag but it’s similar to vine humor, short and pointless.
Using cutaway gags are just ways to distract the audience from the failing in the comedy. It is like an amped version of the Fight Club movie theater gag. In that scene, Tyler Durden splices pictures of dicks into children cartoons. This is what I think of every time I see these gags because it’s funny but is vastly inappropriate and doesn’t actual do anything important.
A hack is a person or persons that produce poor quality products just to make money, usually in the film industry. Some notable hacks are Adam Sandler, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James.
Laugh tracks are used whenever a comedy show is not funny and the writers, producers, and actors are too big of hacks to fix it. As you said the laugh track is only there to bring a not funny scene to kind of funny but there is a less obvious reason they do this. It all comes down to economics. It is easier and cheaper to write something that is either only slightly or not at all funny than what is actually funny. Since they can force humor that will make them the same amount of money as ligament humor, there are no incentives for these hacks to invest time and money into good writing. They are scamming the world in a legal scam, which people are willingly buying into because they don’t realize that they are being focused to laugh. Laugh track are used by a talentless hack.
I have never been a fan of any form of in comedy expression that tries to tell me when to laugh, it cheapens the comedy. Live audience is better than laugh track because it forces the show to be funny but still it seems that if a show is funny enough for a live audience to laugh than it is redundant to have them. The silent movies are great examples how of comedy does not need sound to make people laugh. A good comedy relies on the humor and clever jokes.
The first
two scenarios follow and the opening paragraph defines the deadpan form of the straight
man. The straight man is most common form since it
is just a small part of a larger joke.
The straight man is a character or entity that acts in a calm rational
way while people and things going on around him are acting incongruous. They both have different sets up but follow
the same flow. Something illegal and inappropriate
is mentioned and only one character realizes the problem with it. Everyone else thinks it perfectly okay so it
escalates. The straight man acts
rationally and tries to deal with the issue.
The third video works under its own logic. The logic seems incongruous to us because it
is a different logic than our own. It is
basically plain incongruity humor, funny, nothing special. The scenes are very formulaic but the third
video show that they can modify their formula slightly to appeal to
people.
I had
never heard of this group before and I was pleasantly surprised at the videos,
since the qualifier for the channel was middle school. The last paragraph being white was very
fitting for a blog on The Whitest Kids U’Know.
If I were you I would have ran with the last paragraph and not admit it
was accidental. Also black letters on
brown background was a terrible choice.
I have
always been a fan of sketch comedy, with its simplistic approach to making
everything confusing. My favorite
artists of sketch comedy are Abbott and Costello. They have a large repertoire of sketches with
different types of jokes in each but they all follow a formula. First, Abbot and Costello are put in a
situation that they must get out of or explain something. They start by confusing the target whether
this is the audience or a in sketch person.
Then they give a small sense of relief by making something clear. They follow that up by confusing everyone
once again. Finally, they sum the whole
joke up and deliver a punch line.
The
famous who’s on first sketch uses strange names and simple misunderstanding to
make the joke. This follows incongruity
theory because the people have names that are usually used as question. The people are baseball players that are
supposed to have names that people will cheer.
This makes their question name seem even more out of place. The strange names have a very formulaic
sound throughout the sketch. The set-up
Costello is a new player who wants to know the players’ names on the team. Who is generally the first question that
would be asked about someone by a stranger.
The naming of the first baseman Who would make for maximum confusion and
set up What as the second baseman to further the confusion. What is a common way to start a question and
it eliminates easy ways to clear up the name confusion. The third baseman is just a way to provide
sanity in the sketch because Costello figures that one out quickly giving some
relief. The sketch goes back into
confusion with the introduction of Tomorrow and Today as the pitcher and
catcher. This is furthered by Why and
Because as left field and center field.
The joke is then summed up by Costello saying a play with the players’
names. The punchline is Costello saying,
“I don’t give a damn” and then getting told that that is the shortstop
name.
The 7
times 13 equal 28 sketch uses deception to make a simple math seem complex. The
incongruity comes from the basic math that is being manipulated in way that
seems to work but does not actually. It
follows the formula perfectly, the difference between this sketch and Who’s on
First sketch is that confusion stimulates from math rather than names. The sketch starts with Costello having to
prove that he only owes $28 to the landlord.
The confusion starts with Costello saying that 7 multiplied by 13 equals
28. He uses division to completely confuse
the landlord and make him doubt what he knows is true. He then uses multiplication to further
confuse the landlord. When the landlord
seems to have figured out how to fix his predicament it gives a sense of
relief. The landlord then tries to use addition
to get out of the predicament. Costello
turns this around on the landlord to confuse and trick him. The punchline in this case is Costello taking
the money and walking away with it.
This formulaic
tendency is present in all comedy. It isn’t
always the same formula but there is an always a formula. The formula is usually much more evident in
sketch comedy than other comedy because they have one main joke that it is
focused on and working towards the punchline.
While other types of comedy may have a multitube of jokes that act as
red herrings to the formula. Does this
mean that comedy is just a different form of science, where everything can be quantified? Is the only thing we are missing to
completely understand and perfectly execute comedy the units? This may sound ridiculous but remember we are
currently taking a class all about examining comedy by deconstructing it, similarly
to what most people do in science or math classes.
That clip
was completely the lowest type of humor, poop jokes. The only real redeeming quality of the scene
is that it is very up front about itself.
It does not try to hid the lowbrow nature of the joke. This is both a good and bad thing. It is a good thing because there is no
deception going on but it does not help the joke. The lack of cover means that creator of the
scene, director and writers, didn’t care enough to even try to make the joke
seem better.
The setting
of the joke does make incongruity a possible reason for the comedy, such as it
is. A better reason is superiority
because its nicely dressed people being brought down to something everyone
does. This doesn’t improve the joke but
it does more accurately represent the reasoning behind the joke.
The difference
between Bridesmaid poop humor and South Parks talking poop, other than comedy,
is that South Park was using it to make fun of people who fight against Christmas. South Park’s Mr. Hankey is an over the top of
all the shit people spew out of their mouths when talking about the holidays
and end all for holiday symbols. This is
due to him being a piece of poop that everyone, no matter the ethnicity or
religion, will hate as a holiday symbol.
Mr. Hankey is a satire while the Bridesmaid scene is not even
funny.
Full disclosure I don’t remember
anything at 9/11 2001, but that is just a flashbulb memory because of a tragic
event. Also everyone in our class would
have been 3-4 so it is unlikely they remember or comprehend the events of that
day. Other than the backlash from 9/11
that everyone felt I was relatively unaffected by 9/11 on a personal level.
There is no exact time frame for a
to be too soon. It is all dependent on
the person and how the event has directly influenced them. Even if it is right after a tragic event, the
joke can still be funny. If its clever
then the joke no matter how political incorrect it is still funny. The main problem with 9/11 jokes is they are
very stupid and go for the low hanging fruit.
They aren’t clever or funny if they were than I would have no problem
with them. Also comedy is a necessary
step in getting over tragedy so the sooner it starts the faster the tragedy
will be got over.
Now to the informative section of
the blog. When I was in high school I work
a forge with my friends to make various metal objects. We heat the metal on hot coals and then used
a mixture of hammers and wedges to shape the heated malleable metal. The “jet steel can’t melt steel beams”
reasoning is completely wrong. Just to
start with a plane crashing into a building would compromise it structure integrity. The beams holding up the building did not
need to melt they just need to be heated up to a point where starts going
through allotropy. This is where the
energy from the heat displaces atoms in the metal. Once it start going through allotropy the
structure of the beam would be sufficiently compromised for the weight of a
skyscraper to bend it.
