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 Basically, what I'm trying to say is that these examples are outdated and we need new ones in order to understand Grawe's theory.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.
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Actually, they were fairly current when Grawe wrote this; well,not Shakespeare, but he is often cited for humorous material, either as comic relief to the tragedies or as classical comedy (Much Ado, etc.). The problem may be that now there is less of a "base" of material that "everyone" is familiar with--BTW I didn't ever think the Waltons were funny--the show was a drama, so even the old disagree on some things.
ReplyDeletePart of the problem with the "canon wars" in literature has been that we can't include everything, so we choose; and we choose differently in many cases. Hard to find any one thing that all my students have read--thus there's no common denominator. Not that I think we should all read only dead white men, but it would be nice to have some commonalities we could agree on. If we had that, there'd be more context for folks and writing humor would be easier.