Silent Comedy

This week in class, we focused of silent/visual comedy, and how the contents of the frame and physical movement can illicit humour. This form of comedy was paired with the theory of ‘Benign Violation’, which is the idea that humour forms from a serious violation (e.g. opposing social norms, physical violence, moral/cultural conflict) being appraised as benign (Warren, McGraw, 2015). This theory initially confused me as I couldn’t see how the two could be linked when analysing comedy  – however after seeing a few examples, the idea became very applicable to the comedy I experience and consume every day. An example of benign violation would be watching somebody slip on a banana peel – although the bananas victim is physically impacted by the event (violation), from our perspective, we and the people we care for are not impacted or physically injured by the event (benign).

In our second tutorial, we were shown a The High Sign (1921), a film by Buster Keaton, a pioneer in silent comedy film making. Despite Keatons work practising benign violation, I was extremely impressed with how he was able to  visually communicate key points of the narrative as well as set up the films main gags. Motifs such as the gang sign for the ‘Blinking Buzzards’ is able to communicate to the audience who is in the gang, allow the protagonist to escape danger, as well as act as a recurring joke, eliminating the need for a text slate. All of the films being centred around visual comedy also meant that the framing and movement was extremely efficient and purposeful. The only time text or audio was used on both the Keaton, and Mr. Bean clips, was when it was absolutely necessary to progress the plot (e.g. in Keatons film, the ‘I want to hear the bell ring when you make a shot’ text sets up an entire bit).

I found coming up with an idea for my sketch extremely difficult this week. Mainly because I think I was focusing too much on the silent aspect of the task, rather than an actual joke which I could have altered to fit the criteria. I do believe my skit is a perfect example of benign violation – with the character getting physically beaten and injured (violation) however being purely fiction and hypothetical, with nobody actually getting hurt (benign).