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.
Sunday, March 15, 2009
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.
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.
Friday, March 6, 2009
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.
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.
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.
Sunday, March 1, 2009
SNL, Chris Rock, Eddie Murphy, Stand-up v. skits
I missed SNL this week, and so I was thinking about it. I don't know if it was supposed to be old or new. I hope it was old. I could watch the show online, but everything is broken up into skits and that gets annoying to keep pressing play every five minutes. This is the thought process I went through and then I started thinking about the homework that we have for Monday: Watch Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy, both of which were on SNL. This is good enough for my replacement television watching I guess. But anyway, I got to thinking, they had to make a pretty big transition between stand-up comedy and doing skits. How do they do it? Were they doing stand-up and the skits simultaneously? Is stand-up something you cease to do once you are on a television show and then you cease to do the television show once you star in a few movies?
My main thought process however was in making the transition. I actually was in a school play rendition of some of the old really classic skits. We just picked and chose the ones that we liked. We did some Matt Foley skits, Barbara Wa-Wa, etc. I was type-cast as the sarcastic one. If that's what a skit called for, I did it. The slightly terrifying thing about being the default sarcastic character however is the fact that you have to do a lot of monologues. It's almost like stand-up. You don't have other characters to play off of sometimes. No one to pick up a line. Nothing. Like one skit I did, my "husband" was raking leaves in the "backyard" while I had the spotlight on me admonishing his great work ethic coupled with the brain of a pigeon which equated to me, in that fictional world, having to do all the work. On the whole however, most SNL skits are not like this. Most of them have multiple actors from the show in one skit.
I did some other skits like the Matt Foley skit and I was the daughter of the couple who were trying to shape up their kids with Foley's "I live in a van down-by-the-river speech". So, in sum, I know the difference between working alone and working with other people. The latter is far easier because there's someone staring at you as if to say "your turn". The lines are shorter and you know relatively well what to expect to come next. You know what they are going to say and if they are decent actors, how they are going to say it and how you need to react. On the other hand, when doing a monologue or stand-up, you are just praying for the audience to interact with you the way that you want. You want to make them laugh at the right points and so forth, but you never really know how the night will go. I did three nights of SNL for my school play, each night some skits stayed the same and some of my skits changed so that we would get more people to come. The skits that stayed the same however, always got slightly different reactions even though I acted it out relatively the same, giving the script the same interpretation as the night before.
The two forms are sort of similar, stand-up and skits. Stand-up I think is probably much harder to do. I think if I am not mistaken, that both Rock and Murphy did stand-up before SNL. I could imagine that would be great comedic preparation for SNL. It's probably tougher.
My main thought process however was in making the transition. I actually was in a school play rendition of some of the old really classic skits. We just picked and chose the ones that we liked. We did some Matt Foley skits, Barbara Wa-Wa, etc. I was type-cast as the sarcastic one. If that's what a skit called for, I did it. The slightly terrifying thing about being the default sarcastic character however is the fact that you have to do a lot of monologues. It's almost like stand-up. You don't have other characters to play off of sometimes. No one to pick up a line. Nothing. Like one skit I did, my "husband" was raking leaves in the "backyard" while I had the spotlight on me admonishing his great work ethic coupled with the brain of a pigeon which equated to me, in that fictional world, having to do all the work. On the whole however, most SNL skits are not like this. Most of them have multiple actors from the show in one skit.
I did some other skits like the Matt Foley skit and I was the daughter of the couple who were trying to shape up their kids with Foley's "I live in a van down-by-the-river speech". So, in sum, I know the difference between working alone and working with other people. The latter is far easier because there's someone staring at you as if to say "your turn". The lines are shorter and you know relatively well what to expect to come next. You know what they are going to say and if they are decent actors, how they are going to say it and how you need to react. On the other hand, when doing a monologue or stand-up, you are just praying for the audience to interact with you the way that you want. You want to make them laugh at the right points and so forth, but you never really know how the night will go. I did three nights of SNL for my school play, each night some skits stayed the same and some of my skits changed so that we would get more people to come. The skits that stayed the same however, always got slightly different reactions even though I acted it out relatively the same, giving the script the same interpretation as the night before.
The two forms are sort of similar, stand-up and skits. Stand-up I think is probably much harder to do. I think if I am not mistaken, that both Rock and Murphy did stand-up before SNL. I could imagine that would be great comedic preparation for SNL. It's probably tougher.
Idiocracy and Audience
Did anyone feel self-conscious watching Idiocracy? Why do we think this is funny? I think partially why we think it is funny has to do with our sense of superiority and our adherence to the underlying message. We think we are better than any of the idiots in the movie. As college students, our mission (or at least or mission should be) to "do something with our lives" as Luke Wilson says so many times in the movie. That's what we are being trained to do right now. That's what we are preparing for.
Now there are a couple of different people that most of us can identify with in the movie, and this determines where the superiority/inferiority factor comes into play. Although Luke Wilson is totally average, I could imagine some people identified with him thinking ,"I'm just an average Joe", although technically speaking we should all be above average at this level in school. The other segment of people that some of us probably identified with is the high IQ couple, either the woman or the man. Although they seem slightly neurotic to me, they are probably closer to us in intelligence than any of the other characters (you can be humble here and say no, not really, but I know there are at least a few who can identify with someone with a 141 or 138 IQ or yours is at least closer to that than 100, the average). The vast majority of people however are in the middle of the two, Luke Wilson and the married couple. It is an unidentified group in the movie, but it is there. We have no characters to portray "in the middle" of these two characters. I think "in the middle" is where the vast majority of us belong or at least we think that is where we belong.
It is a sort of plot that the movie makers have against us. We assume with our super-inflated egos that we are in the middle of Luke Wilson's character and the married couple. But take a step back. Does anyone think the movie seems incredibly cerebral? Not really. Why are we, 75th percentile people ("in the middle" as I have said above), watching this movie that probably anyone could understand, even someone with an IQ below average? We inadvertently become stupid by deigning to watch anything this dumbed-down. This movie was not made for geniuses. No movie that sells well is. And so the joke is on us courtesy of the movie makers. Your flattering superiority is blown to pieces.
Now there are a couple of different people that most of us can identify with in the movie, and this determines where the superiority/inferiority factor comes into play. Although Luke Wilson is totally average, I could imagine some people identified with him thinking ,"I'm just an average Joe", although technically speaking we should all be above average at this level in school. The other segment of people that some of us probably identified with is the high IQ couple, either the woman or the man. Although they seem slightly neurotic to me, they are probably closer to us in intelligence than any of the other characters (you can be humble here and say no, not really, but I know there are at least a few who can identify with someone with a 141 or 138 IQ or yours is at least closer to that than 100, the average). The vast majority of people however are in the middle of the two, Luke Wilson and the married couple. It is an unidentified group in the movie, but it is there. We have no characters to portray "in the middle" of these two characters. I think "in the middle" is where the vast majority of us belong or at least we think that is where we belong.
It is a sort of plot that the movie makers have against us. We assume with our super-inflated egos that we are in the middle of Luke Wilson's character and the married couple. But take a step back. Does anyone think the movie seems incredibly cerebral? Not really. Why are we, 75th percentile people ("in the middle" as I have said above), watching this movie that probably anyone could understand, even someone with an IQ below average? We inadvertently become stupid by deigning to watch anything this dumbed-down. This movie was not made for geniuses. No movie that sells well is. And so the joke is on us courtesy of the movie makers. Your flattering superiority is blown to pieces.
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