YouTube link: Beyond a Joke, Beyond a Genre | Sketch #1
This week, our focus in class was surprise and incongruity. The goal was to generate a comic event within a sketch through these elements. Audissino (2023:6) states that, in incongruous comedy, “Humour emerges from the introduction in some situation of elements that create a deviation from norms, conventions, anticipations, predictions, common logic; the clash between such odd elements and normality triggers an impression of incongruity”. By which, they suggest that the humour founded in incongruent comedy is created through the element of surprise, and divergence of expectations. Fabricating this divergence was my goal for the first sketch.
My sketch essentially relied on the surprise being comedic. My initial thoughts were to create something in the format of a TikTok, namely utilising the built-in green screen effect. This would involve going back and forth between two or three or more characters. I went through a few ideas, and tried imagining them in terms of camera angles, shots, and performance, but all lacked the element of surprise, relying instead on characterisation. Another problem was figuring out the length as some ideas would’ve turned out to be 90 seconds, the others, 10. I then came to an idea similar to that in Tim Burton’s 1988 film, Beetlejuice, wherein Barbara and Adam are at one point enter a waiting room in hell. I liked this idea and focused on creating the element of surprise. That surprise would be encountering Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs in this ‘waiting room’ of sorts. Much like the “Car Robbery” sketch we saw in class this week from ABC, the scene would build up to the surprise, suspense and incongruity working hand in hand to enhance the comedy. While not fully thought-out, choppily edited (due to unforeseen time issues), and with a quite frankly bad production value, I think all of these things actually aided in creating surprise and incongruity: “the clash between such odd elements and normality triggers an impression of incongruity” (Audissino 2023:6).
Ultimately, I thought, considering some minor setbacks due to real life time schedules, this first sketch came out pretty good. It’s build up and suspense followed by the actual surprise feels funny (subjectively).
Audissino, E. (2023), “From Dionysia to Hollywood: An Introduction to Comedy’s Long (and Bumpy) Road” in Audissino, E. & Wennekes, E. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema, London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3–23.