The Board Meeting | Silent Comedy/Benign Violation Sketch

This week’s sketch and classes were focused on benign violation and silent comedy. At first, I really struggled to understand benign violation but as the week went on I would come across it in my day-to-day life and it would make me laugh and then I would just think about the theory of it and how I am no better than a theory written in 2010. My sketch this week was inspired by my own life events that happened as well as the works of other great silent comic makers. The Mr. Bean short  Mr. Bean Takes an Exam (1991) is one that I was especially inspired by. I found it funny the way that it uses benign violation and then adds a twist to it (creating a different violation), so I chose to incorporate this into my own work.

The idea of the sketch itself came from after I opened a similar packet of chips on the train and then exploded going all over me. I held this idea and then workshopped how I could create it into a sketch with benign violation. This was then executed by having a can of soft drink being shaken throughout the entire sketch just to be casually opened without any issues and followed by a bag of chips that suddenly explodes.

I found it hard to keep the audience engaged in something that is silent at first so I used some visual gags such as; a tight suit blazer, a misspelt can of soft drink as well as some obscene overdramatic acting to make the piece a little bit sillier. The way that the chip packet exploded made me laugh because I was not expecting it to go everywhere but I think that is what made it funny in the end right after the underwhelming fizz from the soft drink can.

Overall I am happy with the sketch I created and believe that it is somewhat funny and since it is hard to do comedy solo I got the opinions of some people who said they agreed with me. It taught me how important the practices in silent comedy are even when your work isn’t silent because visual comedy can be so creative and really amplifies a joke making it feel complete.