So it's a Friday night. You and all of your friends are going out. It's the weekend. You want to have some fun. The main idea is that the weekend is a time to get away from the everyday rigors of the real world, therefore what you do on the weekend must fit that principle. Really our American ideal of the weekend is very escapist. I'm sure we've all heard, "What do you want to do this weekend?" "Anything is fine except work." Most people adopt a slightly higher standard for their Friday nights. It's not just about anything besides work; it's about something fun; and by something fun most people seem to imply something not serious. I've heard some people say, "I want to watch something with no redeeming value what-so-ever" as a sort of ironic although truthful request for their Friday nights or any free time for that matter.
The funny-odd thing about this however is that when people think "not serious", "fun", "no redeeming value what-so-ever", many of them think about comedy. "Let's go see a comedy," I hear my friends say every Friday. No one wants to see that deep, next generation "A Beautiful Mind", or at least not every one. The funny-odd part about this however is that comedy does not always meet the above mentioned criteria, many times it doesn't. Many times there is a deeper social-political message to what we watch (or read for that matter). For instance, Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times is slapstick, but it is put in the background of a very grave and serious social-political problem. I think it has been mentioned in class also that Charlie Chaplain thought that this was a necessity; the comedy must be infused with a deeper more serious message to be its best.
A couple of works we have read have also been humor, but also quite serious: Thomas Swift's A Modest Proposal and The Nasby Papers on race. Swift just names off the most absurd things you could think of, like eating babies and maybe other low-lifes and making gloves out of their skin. Nasby makes his character-speaker sound like an idiot and that is funny. Each of them has a very serious topic and message however: the former about poverty and the latter about race relations. Why is it that people think humor can be made without a deeper message? Can it? Why does anyone expect it?
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This is a really interesting point. Perhaps the reason people gravitate towards comedy (even if it's serious) connects back to Grawe's theory about survival of the human race in comedies. Ironically, people will often view mindless horror movies on Friday nights, too; those films contain plenty of gory images of human mortality. Yet, even then, aren't most horror movies achieving the same goal of human survival? We find ourselves rooting for the protagonist to either defeat the villain/zombie/antagonist or at least escape the situation...
ReplyDeleteI always guessed that people gravitate towards humor because it is easy, with little to no explanation required--people just know when something amuses them, and they don't really need to do a whole song-and-dance routine to figure out why. This is also probably why people assume that there isn't some deeper message in the comedy they encounter, but as everyone well knows, not everything is at it may appear.
ReplyDeleteDoes the "deeper message" still seep through, whether people looking to be entertained realize it or not? That's the real question; because, if it does, then comedy is working overtime in the subconscious, just like advertising, and we all know how persuasive that is.
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