Brono is the star

Response to mockumentaries and why they are funny 

              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.  

Response to lead blog post Nov 11

The Dicks in Family Guy

                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.  

response to cue the fake laughter

Laugh track: a hacks tool  

                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. 

lead blog response Straight man

Straight man

                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.