Does comedy have to be coupled with another genre to be good?

Someone wrote a blog entry last week that in part had to do with Knocked Up. She classified it as humor primarily, unless I missed something. I wonder though, was it primarily humor? It struck me as a dramedy, or half comedy, half drama. There's a love story in there so that's romance (a subgenre in many people's books for drama). That love story is an integral part of the movie and its plot. Is there a movie that is pure comedy that people really look at critically and say "I loved that movie"? I think it might be a requirement that comedy is coupled with another genre to create anything of substance. Some pure comedy genre movies that I'm thinking of include Monty Python, Blades of Glory, and Scary Movie type stuff. Some people might love this stuff, but it's pretty much a cult following or an "I have to be in the right mood" type of love. When was the last time a comedy or something primarily humorous was nominated for an award of substance like an Emmy or Golden Globe?
It makes humor seem meaningless unless attached to something else. Grawe talks about this same problem or presupposition. He talks about how Aristotle and other rhetoricians just wisked right by humor and comedy, not treating it seriously, denying it any enduring worth. He extends the argument saying basically, no wonder no great writers more than dabbled in it.
I guess this is a weird observation coming from Knocked Up. I mean it doesn't have all that much substance, maybe. Romance and comedy tend to have less serious consideration in the public eye in genre. Maybe the real message is just lost or the audience doesn't want to acknowledge it, make fun of it by saying that the message is become a baby daddy and then marry the mommy, yeah that's the way. How about people find love in really weird ways, but it's real. Too corny for a modern audience? Probably. Ridiculous? Maybe. But maybe not.
So back to the question: Does comedy have to be coupled with something to be at its best? I think probably, if it has a message.

The Rhetoric Part

It's been a long time since we've focused on rhetoric in this class. We hear a lot about humor, what's funny, what isn't and so on. Sometimes we talk about what works to make someone's point and what does and that is rhetoric talk. We don't say it though, the word rhetoric. The two words to some people might seem very different in terms of content and purpose at first glance. Rhetoric is very serious. Humor is light. Humor is "just for laughs" and Rhetoric is for a distinct purpose. These ideas however are just stereotypes, not fully shaped. The two, Rhetoric and Humor, fit quite well together. It seems that it is more and more important for even the speakers on the most serious topics to lighten the mood with some humor. How many of you think it would be inappropriate for a speaker on cancer or heart attacks to crack a joke before he talked about his prize winning research? Probably no one, although I remember when I was very young that my grandma used to talk about this: "When did it become o.k. for people to joke at things like this?" was what she was saying; she was a cancer survivor herself and thought it was profane, now though she's loosened a bit up, adjusted to the times.
So when did humor and rhetoric start fitting together so well? Probably always to some extent. I mean we've read A Modest Proposal, a work which was written a couple hundred years ago; this is a perfect example of humor and rhetoric. We talked extensively about if this worked however. Did his backwards argument really convince us or if it did that, was it enough to convince us to do something about it? I guess the one thing that I mentioned above about speeches needing humor is quite different from this. The humor is just a sidebar. It serves a different purpose. It's entertainment in the midst of serious stuff; it's not integral material to the speech itself. It is not to convince. I think these differences are also the differences between today and then. We still have Modest Proposal-esque arguments, but the sidebar stuff is sort of new. I'm sure that in earlier years when people gave speeches, it was straight up; it was serious throughout.

Bill Bur and Standards

One person in our class wrote a blog entry on Bill Burr and the gender standards that our society enforces. For instance, men cannot hit women, but women can hit men. Apparently we can get away with property destruction too. The gap is even larger with foreign students I think. It's really nice in a way, but it's also really funny. I don't care if any of the "traditions" stick and hence I mean to make fun of them, but I don't want any one to think I'm making fun of what are just viewed as nice things guys do for girls. If intentions are in the right place, it's cool. No harm, no foul. It doesn't mean that some of the situations aren't funny though because the motions are becoming archaic in our society.
For instance, I think I could hold open a door all day for one of my European or Asian male friends and they would stand outside all day long if I didn't go in first. And vice versa: they won't go in when they're holding the door until I do. As a matter of fact I've had an entire mob of European guys just halt behind me like I was an army captain or something when I stopped to get some gum from my pocket before I went in the door to the gym.
I also mentioned playing soccer in my comments to the previous person who wrote on this subject. You would swear they killed your dog by how profusely they apologize after they barely graze your leg trying to get the ball in a game.
Then there are somethings that are downright annoying, not nice yet archaic traditions like, "Wow, she's good for a girl." Do we really need the prepositional phrase on the end?

p.s. Wear gym shorts constantly and call them dude on occassion. It'll freak them out. Then go find a nice phonebooth (like the one in Brown's poetry this week) and laugh.

A Straight Female Stand-up Comic Please

I've been looking for a stand-up person to do for my analysis for far too long. I did finally decide on one, but the search was the interesting part. I don't exactly have the deepest of backgrounds in stand-up. I'm much more familiar with SNL style skits or feature length movies or farcical novels. I'm not the person who turns on their TV and channel 69, Comedy Central is on. That said I still love comedy of course. Stand-up isn't that mainstream however, unless you count Letterman or Leno or Conan or that Irish guy, but they're more talk show host than stand-up act. Occasionally they do have a stand-up on. Letterman for instance has Robin Williams on to do stand-up about a month ago. Typically however, I've heard people comment "Must be a slow night" if a stand-up is on.
Anyway, what I want to talk about is my search for a stand-up comic. It was difficult because all of the obvious ones were on our syllabus. We can do those people, but I was looking for someone different. When that turned up fruitless, I just made one requirement: I wanted to do a straight woman stand-up comedian. Why? Because as evidenced by our syllabus, there aren't many and because I suffered through the whole of Margaret Cho's Assassin hoping it would get better (there went an hour of my life I will never get back). I vaguely remembered her being funny somewhere else. Not so much. Many other female options were lesbians and I'm just not willing to sit through something like that again. I don't "get it". It's for a very specific audience I guess. Very literally, Cho's performance was not for everyone.
The main issue that just frustrated and confounded me however was this: (a) Why are there so few women comedians and (b) why does it seem like the majority of them are lesbians?
I mean there's Rosie, Cho, Ellen and so on. I have nothing against that choice, but it's a strange social conundrum of the proportions of the question: Why is the percentage of black in sports so much higher than their percentage in the normal population? Is it genetic? Is it a societal factor? No one can really be sure for the latter question.
I guess that having that particular attribute gives them another thing to play off of in their acts. It's easier to make fun of a group when you are part of it, as we have said in class. It gives you permission. It makes it ok. Still, I can't answer why there are so few other famous women comedians. I guess the patriarchy is alive and well. It's the same question colleges like MIT ask themselves when 95% of their entering class is guys and not women. Why do certain professions still lean toward male dominance? Why comedy? Ladies, this needs to be fixed.

The Full Monty? Funny Idea...Not So Funny Use

The movie The Full Monty was more like "The suggestion of a full monty". It was amazing when I watched this that a movie with the name "full monty" never really showed it. I guess our standards today are a little bit different. We can walk into a movie not expecting to see it as much as we do, for example, in the movie Forgetting Sarah Marshall. They showed the full monty so many times in that movie that even most guys I know with a very high nudity tolerance couldn't take it. It is common place to see it. That is why it surprised me that this movie did not show its title.
Other than that, I was also a little bit surprised that such a funny idea could be turned into something sort of serious and sad. It wasn't laugh out loud funny for me. I mean the plot is really sad. It's this out of work dad who can't pay child support any more and is about to lose custody. It's about a chubby guy who doesn't think his wife loves him any more because he can't find a job either. It's about an old man who can't find a job before his wife figures out that he has been lying about being employed and all their things are taken away. There is a kid seeing stuff he probably shouldn't be seeing.
If this was supposed to be a comedy, why is it so heavy? Is it just an older style? I mean this movie was made before I think any of us in this class were born. When we saw Idiocracy, you didn't stop to think or feel sad. In this movie on the other hand, it was sort of unavoidable. Some theorists believe that comedy has a short shelf life (10-20 years for Grawe for instance). This could account for the difference. I don't really want to take this as a set rule however. I like to think that at least some comedy is universally funny. Some social situations (for example gender jokes) never really change. The problem is however that I cannot think of a really old comedy that I laughed at. I guess if I had to use an example, I would use the play A Midsummer Night's Dream, not as a whole, but the part with Bottom and crew, but that was mostly only funny once I actually saw a performance and had some idea how this scene might have been acted out. Even then however, the scene is an interpretation by modern people of what it might have been like, which might qualify it as comedy made in the last 10-20 years.

Grawe's Theory and the Need for New Examples

I started thinking about Grawe a little big more today, the theorist who says that comedy is anything that tells us that humans will survive. His theory is old and many of his references seem incredibly odd to a reader today. When asked to name some comedies, no one shouts off Shakespeare, Star Wars and Mr. Magoo. Also, unless we were all taking this class, I wonder how many of us would have understood the Charlie Chaplin examples. I doubt too many people in the class know who the Waltons are enough to have understood why Grawe was using that show as an example. There seems to be a problem with his examples. It's not just that they seem to be too broad, which I have addressed in another blog; it's that they are not current. I mean Charlie Chaplin is referred to as "new comedy" and that doesn't exactly resonate with a society that finds it increasingly hard to find World War II veterans to speak in history classes and the like because they are dying off. In other words, many of Grawe's examples are a lifetime away. Very few people living can say, "Oh, yeah I remember movies without audio" like Chaplins. In fact Letterman made fun of this fact when he was mocking John McCain not too long ago. He was speaking as if he was John McCain, "I don't like those new-fangled noisies" a.k.a movies with sound, actors speaking and such. It was meant to show how ancient John McCain was. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that these examples are outdated and we need new ones in order to understand Grawe's theory.
It is ironic that Grawe says that comedy only has a 10 to 20 year shelf-life. Someone did say, "Do comedy theories have shelf life too?". I don't think all of them do. The more metaphysical and less example laden ones can stand the test of time intact to some extent. Grawe's theory has a shelf life in so much that his theory is heavily based upon examples. If we culled just the outright theory from the entire piece, we might have a theory that stands the test of time, and I think this is probably possible.
Here is one idea of a good example: Legally Blonde. This movie, although goofy and ridiculous, asserts that life will go on. Elle loses her boyfriend who thinks she is too dumb for him. Then she joins law school and people think she won't survive. She does survive; she even thrives and she's perfectly pink while she does it. I'd like to hear other people's ideas for more updated examples to supplement the pure theory of Grawe if anyone has ideas.

Laughter v. Happiness?

Watching Burr's performance, "Why Do I Do This?", on Wednesday, one thing still sticks out to me. It was obvious that on one point, he has his jokes locked and ready to go. Then he tested the audience and the audience wasn't responding the way that he wanted them to, and he had to regroup a bit. This probably happens with other stand-ups, no doubt it does to all of them at sometime, but this is the first of it that we have really seen in the videos we have watched. The particular issue that he has to skip over because the audience wasn't responding was unhappy families. In their rejection of his jokes, he replies, "You must all have happy families, huh?". Typically, from what I have seen previously, the audience responds to a joke like this a little bit. His audience was rather cold however and it was more of a time wasting sentence while he regrouped and transitioned or locked and loaded his next set of jokes.
This led me to the question: If everyone were happy, would we laugh less on the aggregate? It seems like a paradoxical idea, but much of the comedy that we have seen has been a response to evils and wrongs in the world, some more light hearted than others. For example, in George Carlin's newer stand-up (the one with the grave stones) his main concern is consumerism. If people were happy with the way things were, no one would be laughing. If there wasn't a problem, namely consumerism, what would Carlin joke about? All of Carlin's stuff is about some sort of problem. His most famous stand-up act is about the problem of language and "The Seven Words You Can't Say". Problems make people unhappy, but comedians offer relief from that unhappiness with laughter. Idiocracy functions on the same "making a problem funny" model.
This particular type of comedy seems in line with Freud's idea that we laugh in order to deflect pain, to not really deal with overwhelming problems, and thus we don't develop anxiety disorders and such. If we don't have these problems however, if we don't have at least small anxieties, if everyone is happy then, how does Freud's theory work? Would there be no laughter in a totally happy world? Laughter and happiness seem to go hand in hand and it is odd to think that one could oppose the other.