Theories of humour: The Comic Frame / Comedy Mechanic

This week, we discussed how context, symbolism and structure work to establish a comic frame, in which the audience recognises the scenario/characters/setting as comedic and adjusts their consumption of the content accordingly.

In this experiment, I aimed to follow the steps detailed in the week 3 reading, “Story Sketches” (Toplyn 2014) in order to create my own story sketch.  My comic character, the leopard print lady, had a want. To successfully do very bizarre, unsexy roleplay with their date. The “straight man” aka cap guy continuously shuts down the weird requests, asking for another option and then, eventually, leaving the situation entirely. The weird date’s roleplay ideas get increasingly more obscure and unfitting resulting in the comic character not getting what they want. In the reading, “The Semiotics of Humour” a technique in bringing humour is “disappointments and defeated expectations, in which a person’s expectations (often of a sexual nature) are led on and then denied as a result of an accident, coincidence, misunderstanding” (Berger 2023). I adopted this as the overarching plot of the skit, with two people potentially about to have a night of passion, only for them to disappoint each other due to absurd suggestions and a severe lack of chemistry.

In regards to the feedback from my week 2 experiment, I received a positive response on my physical and facial performance and so I wanted to continue highlighting that in this sketch. I was also encouraged to provide more exposition and context for my jokes, to allow a more comedic result. I attempted to better set the joke up by having a corny title card saying “Date Night” and a romantic piano play in the background. Following this with the lighting of a candle to “set the mood” and hint at an intimate moment between two people.

Link to Clip: https://youtu.be/YNBwzZ2mczA

References 

Toplyn, J. (2014), “Story Sketches” in Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV, New York: Twenty Lane Media, pp. 221–238.

Berger, A.A. (2023), “The Semiotics of Humour: Universal Humour Techniques in Comedy Writing ” in Audissino, E. & Wennekes, E. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, Cham: Springer International, pp. 25–42.