Video Exercise ^^
In Seth Simons’ Six Small Essays about Comedy (2023) he covers a range of theories relating to the practices of how comedy as a art is performed, and on the latter end, how it is received. In one of his anecdotes, he recites how his living in Idaho got him familiar with local history around Native American wars and US settlement policy, which awarded him the knowledge necessary for a 20-year-old Simpsons joke about that topic. I’m personally fascinated by this happenstance. How on one viewing you wouldn’t get a particular joke, yet a ways down the track, by some strange or absurd sequence of events, you do now. It’s just a shame I had to make a Fight Club reference, something everyone knows.
As part of Week One’s exploration of sketch comedy and the punchiness, absurdity and incongruity, I wanted to try my hand at a twist ending for an otherwise promising setup for a sketch. A scenario I for one am very familiar with, forgetting someone’s name when they certainly haven’t forgotten yours. My initial drafting was difficult, as the time constraints (both having to be one minute, and to be completed in 2 days) were limiting factors. It couldn’t be too wild. I am a big fan of referential comedy, so I wanted to do an incongruent twist around that. Playing into the shot-reverse-shot with the opening context of the sketch, they’re two guys played by the same actor. Use this toy with that idea into a surprise twist of that of Fight Club’s same-person reveal. I think that’s funny, but more on paper it turns out. I had cut the footage together into a 1:30 long sketch which needed trimming, but it was already pretty fattened with necessary buildups and cute lines for the build-up. The final cut I feel is a bit thin, but this sort of exercise pushes me to really consider the final product from now on.
Clayton (2020:15) gives a causal explanation for the dynamics of this sort of humour, “the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves […]”. This is what really engages me. Not seeing the joke coming until it’s already there, or in the case of Simons, after living in Idaho and rewatching Simpsons 20 years later. I aim to explore this further.
Citations:
Simons, S. (2023), “Six Small Essays about Comedy”, Humorism, <https://www.humorism.xyz/six-small-essays-about-comedy/> website. Accessed 7 March 2024, RMIT Library.
Clayton, A. (2020), “Funny How? Sketch Comedy and The Art of Humour”, Albany State University of New York Press, <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rmit/detail.action?docID=6308704/> website. Accessed 7 March 2024, RMIT Library.