Throughout twelve very quick weeks as a class and our own research, we have discussed comedy in all aspects. Through navigating genre, mode and then experimenting with these theories and now creating a media artefact, we are now hopefully called comedic geniuses. The ‘Trip Up’ follows the team of Angus, K, Saskia, Ben and myself as we dissect the comedy genre to bring something that we think is original, hilarious and cinematic in 15 minutes.

I believe that our artefact engages with the audience and comes back to what we learnt in the studio throughout this semester in many ways. We wanted to plant incongruity all over our piece and i believe we did. Incongruity is when “humour is unpredictable and which involves the juxtaposition of opposing ideas, thoughts or actions will then generate mirth.” (Martin, pg 61, 2022)meaning that we wanted to create laughter by shocking our audience. I believe we achieved this through the character of Kevin, hes a confident, unlikable and weird character at the start and then becomes the sort of relief of an arc that changes his whole personality to try become friends with the boys whilst ending up in the ocean alone. Continuing on with incongruity, we thought it was powerful because when we use it its humorous because it is “an intellectual reaction to something that is unexpected,  illogical or inappropriate in some other way” (Clayton, 2020), we can see this through the green screen scenes, the boys are travelling through random occurrences in the world through this drug, its funny because we are doing random things each time, sharpening each time the comedy.

Looking back from the start of the semester, we have come a long way. Personally, i believe that i have learnt so many new things this semester about one of the most important genres and even beyond the genre in comedy. A very important thing that stuck with me throughout the semester was taken back from Joe Toplyn’s reading about writing comedy for late night tv. He gave us nine steps to creating a story sketch with characters and ways to flow it. My group took these steps to enhance our artefact with especially step one that has stuck with me. “think of a comic character with two or three exaggerated traits” (Toplyn, 2014). We used this with Kevin, physically and through speech, his costume proposes him as a sort of douche, he thinks hes better than everyone, fakes experience, lies and is flat out weird with his random theories he just boats out. His real personality is flowed through the drug he pretends hes taken before but has obviously never done drugs before.

Let’s say if we got to keep working on this artefact, it would be more experimental with more nonsense going on in a good way of course. I think in the short amount of time we had we accomplished what we wanted to do and i was very happy about it. I think i myself wanted to do various things including using the ocean, a tunnel, willy Wonka’s song in the tunnel and random other things and we got to do them in a way i was satisfied. I think as a group, we wanted to experiment with the camera itself a little more. We wanted to make the camera move in a way that is hypnotising. Id also like to refine our colouring a little more, i enjoy ‘giallo’ type backgrounds and I’m glad the tunnel was coloured and we can take advantage of that which was very cool to colour grade with. I think if we had a little more time it would be a sharper piece. On the last day of filming we had to rush back to the city to bring the equipment to the shop as our booking was ending, this stopped our flow and kind of stressed us out with time which was not our aim. Although time was a problem, we overcame this and was still very excited and happy with what we got.

Speaking now on collaboration, my team was like no other. Over the whole semester, i worked with various people with different comedic receptions and it was fun to experiment and learn new abilities with everyone. I would say my final group with K, Angus, Saskia and Ben was my most powerful. Each one of us brought something to the table and when we were together writing, it would keep us going and bounce off one another to make a new joke. As Simons states when people laugh, they laugh because they “hear something surprising, something familiar, …because they’re uncomfortable…frightened…because they felt very alone for a long time and now they don’t” (Simons,  2023) i think that we saw this and we implemented it in our script. We wanted to make something stand out familiar with our audience, we wanted to bring our experiences with people we knew and what people go through and work on it to create characters. A big example of this was the urination monologue at the end of the film. Going back to the group, whether it was having our own equipment, eager to edit, eager to use their house, eager to experiment, eager to test the boundaries and improvisation, my group followed through and helped each other create a masterpiece in my eyes and i am forever thankful i chose to be with these people in this studio. There are many other things that i have definitely forgotten but still grateful to be involved in this team and class.

References:

-Martin, G.N. (2022) The psychology of comedy. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

-Simons, S. (2023) 6 Small Essays About Comedy, Humorism. Available at: https://www.humorism.xyz/six-small-essays-about-comedy/ (Accessed: May 2024).

-Toplyn, J. (2014) ‘Story Sketches’, in Comedy writing for late-night tv : how to write monologue jokes, desk pieces, sketches, parodies, audience pieces, remotes, and other short-form comedy . Rye, New York, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 221–238.

-Clayton, A. (2020) Funny how?: Sketch comedy and the art of humor. State University of New York Press.