Watching People Laugh - It's Funny

I have a new observation about comedy.  People love to watch other people laugh.

There's little that causes genuine laughter like genuine laughter.  

You've seen it. When SNL actors start to laugh in the middle of a scene.  It's a mistake but it's supremely enjoyable.  We imagine the fun it must be to do what they are doing and we watch them enjoying entertaining us.  It's always funny. 

I'm currently directing The 39 Steps, a very funny parody of the spy-thriller.  And it's never funnier than when I notice the actors struggling to keep from laughing.  I don't encourage it. It can hurt the narrative to some degree. But when one actor does something hilarious and it takes the other off guard, it's hard not to enjoy the stifled giggles and covered smiles. 

I've experienced this quite a bit myself.  I have done a lot of improv shows and specifically, I have often hosted those shows.  And as a host I find that the audience is often watching me watch the scenes.  I don't think it's because I'm ridiculously good looking, I think it's because I'm their proxy on stage.  I am the first audience member and I am often cueing them about how to react to scenes.  When I laugh, they laugh, both at the players, and at me laughing at the players.  After shows, audience members often want to talk to me about moments they saw me laughing the hardest.  I've even heard them say "I love watching your reactions to the scenes as much as the scenes themselves."

I think there's an honesty to laughter.  Fake laughter is immediately recognizable and, I daresay, truly off-putting.  But someone caught up in a moment of hilarity is true, honest, vulnerable, and very human.  And, as I always tell my actors, there's nothing more compelling onstage than someone being fully human.  Laughter breaks through the barriers of self-consciousness, especially spontaneous laughter like in the clip above.  

Perhaps it's why we spend so much of our time trying to make each other laugh.  We are trying to spur an involuntary joy response.  Because we know it's real. 

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Tropic Thunder's REAL Crime

There's been some silly uproar about Ben Stiller's film Tropic Thunder. Apparently, people are taking offense to the fact Downey's in blackface, which is ridiculous. He is playing an idiot character who thinks a surgical version of blackface is a good idea. Condemning Downey or the film for this, would be like convicting Anthony Hopkins of multiple homicides for his role in Silence of the Lambs.

Secondly, the film is taking heat for making fun of the mentally handicapped. And this too, is obsurd. The film is a satire. It's poking fun at people who believe and act like these characters. It makes me think of the silliness over the New Yorker cover that was making fun of the enormous number of people who are convinced that Barak is a secret muslim.

In the end, Tropic Thunder, although I have yet to see it, is probably guiltier of something else...

PLAGIARISM! Ben Stiller stole his gag about Hollywood exploiting the mentally handicapped to reap Oscars from Ricky Gervais's brilliant TV show Extras (a show we know he was familiar with, because he was on it!). See below -

Getting Serious about Comedy

I'm fascinated by the funny. I always have been. Recently, I have had the opportunity to write about comedy in two different papers. The first, which I think is probably the best blog-type material is in a short reflection on postmodern humor, specifically, the anti-joke. Here's the anti-joke example I like the most:

A man meets his friend for lunch one day, only to discover that his friend has a huge, orange round head. He asks about it and the friend tells him the following story. "I was cleaning my attack the other day when I came across an antique bottle. When I opened it, a genie came out and told me he would grant me three wishes."
"That's amazing," his friend says.
"I know. So, I first wished for a million dollars. The genie closed his eyes for a moment, and then when he opened them, he told me to check my account. I pulled out my cell phone, called my bank and sure enough..."
"A million dollars?"
"That's right. So, then I asked for a beautiful woman to come into my life. And the next day, I met this gorgeous young woman at the coffee shop. Things have been going really well, and we're already talking about marriage."
"Wow! That's all so incredible. But I still don't understand about the..."
"Well, I'm getting to that. You see, when it came time for my third wish--and this is where I think I went wrong--I wished for a huge, orange round head."

Here is my reflection on why that and other anti-jokes (included in the reflection) are funny to the postmodern soul.

Clever Postmodern Title

Postmodern sensibility is particularly interested in self-reference. Value is given to any entity that is keenly aware of its own flaws or foibles and makes use of them to its benefit. For example, Scream, the horror movie, had characters ridiculing the formula common to the genre even as it participates in that formula. In recent literature, Dave Eggers’s A Heart-Breaking Work of Staggering Genius was not only self-referential in its title, but it opens with Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of This Book which warns “The first three or four chapters are all some of you might want to bother with...The book thereafter is kind of uneven." This may hearken to the postmodern appreciation of authenticity. In such works, there is no illusion that what’s occurring is perfect or original. That authenticity is essentially post-modern. This trend is also labeled with the prefix “meta”, which roughly means “about itself.”

I am specifically interested in how this idea applies to humor. There is a trend within postmodernism to create jokes about jokes, or to comment on humor as it is being performed. For example, stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard will often pantomime writing in a small notepad after a “bit” doesn’t receive a laugh and mutters to himself “Never use that joke again.” His commentary then receives an enormous laugh. His best jokes are the ones about his own jokes. The following joke also exemplifies this idea, “Three people of different nationalities walk into the bar. Two of them say something smart, and the third one makes a mockery of his fellow countrymen by acting dumb.” It bases its humor on the shared knowledge of a joke-telling device, thereby deconstructing that device. This particular example adds the additional humor of pointing out a common practice of jokes to stereotype ethnic groups. This generic version of a joke demonstrates how absurd the practice is, and makes us laugh at our own nature. In essence this joke is “We are all racist jerks even when we think we’re being funny. Isn’t that hysterical?”

Connected to the meta-joke is the anti-joke. The meta-joke directly references the device of which it is a part. The anti-joke bases its humorous effect on marked diversion from the established trends of humor, and in so doing, it draws attention to them. Here are a few examples:

• Yo Mama's so fat, that she was instructed by the doctor to go on a low carbohydrate, high protein diet to reduce the risk of heart disease or even a heart attack later in life.

• Two cows are in a field. Suddenly, from behind a bush, a rabbit leaps out and runs away. One cow looks round a bit, eats some grass and then wanders off.

• How many kangaroos does it take to fix a leaky water main? None, a kangaroo has neither the intelligence nor dexterity to do any kind of plumbing work. At best it could try to locate the source of the leek by jumping around, but even then it would be hard pushed to actually do anything about it.

• Two men are walking down the street...
  I forget the punch-line, but your mother's a whore.

Douglass Mann, professor of philosophy at the University of Windsor says, “Anything fast, image-centered (as opposed to using written text), without a linear narrative, anything that shocks or alienates the traditions in its field, can be seen as having a postmodernist flavour.” Clearly, anti-jokes are “alienating the tradition” of joke telling. They diverge from the expected course in a way that makes us look at the course we were expecting to take objectively.

The SECOND opportunity to write on comedy comes in the form of a big-ass paper on Commedia dell'arte, a masked Italian comedy style that involves improvisation. I entered the paper in a little contest of sorts here on campus, and it was selected to be read at a forum tonight. (And I get a $100 prize) . I think getting paid to read a paper makes me a professional geek. (Especially if the paper has the word cacophony in it).