And, Of Course, Satire

I Add Something to My Thoughts about Comedy and Laughter

Slim Pickens as Major "King" Kong riding a nuclear bomb to oblivion in Dr. Strangelove. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Theater of the Absurd. I borrowed this from one of those online essays you can buy, which act is a kind of comedy, isn't it?

Martin Esslin in his book the “Theatre of Absurd” (says) that absurdist theatre has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being- in terms of concrete stage images”. He indicated too, the influence of Camus’ Existentialism behind the absurd, with the idea that men are trapped in a hostile universe that (is) totally subjective, describing the nightmare that could follow when solitude and silence were taken to the ultimate degree. 
Humour within absurdist plays is often found as black humour in which disturbing or sinister subjects like death, disease, or warfare, are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner calculated to offend and shock.

And here's an excerpt from an essay called "How Absurd Do You Like Your Art?"

Then there are examples of very absurd, senseless works of art that enjoy enduring popularity. This is captured in the category, “Absurdism,” in which the work of art doesn’t give solutions to the incongruity, and the audience is never expected to be able to resolve it. Only with Herculean efforts are people able to come up with their own, idiosyncratic interpretations, but often without any confidence that their own interpretation was the only right one. In the literature genre of Absurdism, the fact that it can’t be figured out is the whole point—communicating a message of meaninglessness in life.

Occasionally, feature-length Absurdist films are released, such as Matthew Barney’s The Cremaster Cycle, but more often the more absurd pieces are short—people just don’t have the attention span to watch hours of incomprehensible content. I remember when I was running a theater company in Atlanta, most plays would be sensible stories, featuring goal-driven protagonists, conflicts, climaxes, and resolutions. But when a show would feature a series of 11-minute plays, all the crazy stuff came out. We can see this on a larger scale with music video. With such a short time scale, directors are free to create something a bit wilder.

This spectrum of meaning in art has a corresponding spectrum of neural processing. It turns out that the kinds of things we like to experience are in a sweet spot between having recognizable patterns and incongruity. Too much of either one is boring. Too much pattern and we feel we have nothing more to get from it, and too much nuttiness and we lose any hope of finding an underlying pattern.

Two famous comic performers in a scene from an absurd play.

Related articles

• A is for absurdism | Michael Billington's A-Z of modern drama

The Sitcom Formula

Maggie Simpson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An American in Croatia is asked to write a sitcom. He never has. He pursues the formula.

The Sitcom Code breaks down what needs to happen in each episode, by the minute. As Dan Richter of Demand Media notes, “Sitcoms, minus commercials, are typically 22 minutes long [with] a script of 25-40 pages. Every sitcom episode has a main plot (story A), as well as one or two subplots (stories B and C).”  There are three main acts, divided by two commercial breaks (in most American TV), with 3-5 scenes per act. One of the distinguishing characteristics of sitcoms, as opposed to other forms of television, is that the main protagonist(s) barely change from one episode to the next, let alone from season to season (Maggie Simpson has been sucking on a pacifier for nearly thirty years). Therefore whatever happens in the episode, the situation must end largely where it began. The Wise Sloth points out that 22 minutes is “not even really time enough to tell a full story.  The whole story has to be on fast-forward,” so simplification is key.


Poet Philip Larkin described all plots as “a beginning, a muddle, and an end,” which is as good a description as any. Each episode begins with the protagonist stating a goal or problem that must be solved, and which we understand will be solved by the end of the episode. If the problem is solved too quickly, then the episode won’t stretch out to 22 minutes, so the first attempt at reaching the goal or solving the problem must fail (“the muddle”), requiring a new approach, before the episode ends and the protagonist either does, or does not, achieve what they set out to do.  The goal might be Homer trying to make a fortune by selling recycled grease in The Simpsons, or Job Bluth setting out to sabotage the family’s banana stand in Arrested Development, or the Seinfeld crew looking for where they parked in a vast lot.  Another hallmark of sitcoms is that the protagonists frequently fail, and we often want them to, because we do not want our favorite characters to change too much.  If Leslie Knope ever left Pawnee for a career as a DC politician, we would be distraught.  If Kramer got married and moved to the suburbs—whoa, now!

My Sitcom Bullet Points

Laughter (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

* I watch sitcoms as escapism. If I want to be a critic of the show or the genre, I need to start thinking.

* Okay, occasionally I'll watch a sitcom to see "what the young people are thinking." Does Master of None tell me what you're thinking?

* I think the Superiority Theory of comedy is useful in thinking about sitcoms. Laughter is judgment. I am better than you, sitcom character! But is this an individual superiority or a categorical superiority? Who or what is being judged? Am I rejecting a category of behavior  - let's say vanity - and thus being educated or improved. Or am I being encouraged to use laughter to exclude and demean - a gender, an ethnicity, a sexual preference? Laughter restores order. In emphasizes norms. It is a social corrective. Thus, sometimes laughter inevitably shades into bigotry, which happens most often when sitcoms lack diversity of all kinds, where there is structural exclusion in that a foolish "purple" character is not counterbalanced by a normal "purple" character. Here's a block quote from English professor James Kincaid:

     We must deal with "the degree to which laughter expresses (if it does at all) hostility, aggression, the vestiges of the jungle whoop of triumph after murder, and other unpleasant impulses. The corollary to this issue is the debate over whether laughter is incompatible with sympathy, geniality, or indeed with any emotion.... Nearly all the important writers on the subject have, for hundreds of years, noted "a component of malice, of debasement of the other fellow, and of aggressive-defensive self-assertion . . . in laughter -- a tendency diametrically opposed to sympathy, helpfulness, and identification of the self with others" I find this argument ... conclusive.

* An alternative theory to humor as contempt exists! That's the "genial laughter theory," that laughter sometimes is simply a matter of acknowledging the general foolishness and absurdity of human life, that laughter does not cause us to exclude but to accept others, to see us in them. It is certainly true that many sitcoms have what I call "soft landings"  for characters. The character we are invited to laugh at then does something "unfoolish." Or another character accepts and forgives the foolish character, modeling how we should behave. In other words, not all sitcoms are funny all the time, and we have to be attentive to how the serious moments soften the comic ones. Even if we are invited to feel contempt, we may be discouraged from feeling it all the time.

* Of course, some of the most interesting sitcoms are those where it seems we are never ask to sympathize with a character or characters. They are "dark." This may fit with the idea that a sitcom is a mirror not only reflecting society as a whole but us, the individual viewer. If "dark" comedy is designed to make us experience both laughter and discomfort at the same time, what does that tell us about us?  Here's a list of "wonderfully dark sitcoms."   Also, there is the category of black comedy, or gallows humor, which some would define as having the courage to laugh in the face of disaster to keep up our spirits. "Black humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world." - Columbia Encyclopedia "And if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'tis that I may not weep." - George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron

* A simple way of looking at sitcom: Incongruity as the source of humor. That works no matter what your umbrella theory of the uses and effects of humor are. Absurdity, exaggeration, hyperbole, abrupt change. Often humor really does seem to be a simple matter of reversed expectations.

* The power of the unconscious. Laughter seems automatic. If you decide to **think** while watching, probably taking advantage of the ability to rewind and rewatch, not just episodes but single moments, such self scrutiny can be uncomfortable. Freud says - I oversimplify here - that in the service of living in civilization we mash down certain cruel and/or sexual and/or antisocial feelings into our unconscious. Laughter can be a way of releasing some of the tension such repression creates. Think about how taboo - sexual references, certain obscenities vigorously said - can produce laughter. It is as if humor suddenly gives us permission, particularly as a member of a crowd, to express that which we otherwise keep hidden.

* One final point from Kincaid because I like his examples. Comedy can leave us vulnerable. Have you ever stumbled across some obscure movie on Netflix - possibly foreign with subtitles! - that you watch with unease because context does not make clear what the genre is. Kincaid:

     Having released the energies ordinarily used to guard our hostilities, inhibitions, or fears, we are      especially unprotected if the promised safety which allowed us to laugh proves to be illusory.             Imagine the fat old man who slipped on the banana peel being suddenly identified as our brother,       now seriously hurt; the custard pie containing sulphuric acid; the train really hitting the funny car     and killing the Keystone Cops.

* All that said, it's possible some sitcoms make us better people. Effects research is always tricky.

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What I Think about When I Think about Film vs. TV. Though It Probably Isn't Really about the Medium at All

Reminder to self: See see see. Don't just listen.

Monty Python and Varieties of Comedy

Youtube Video on Writing Comedy

Comedy as sympathy with the human condition

Role of the Sitcom? Popular Culture and the Acceptance of Gay Marriage

English: Family Tree of the TV-Show "Modern Family" Deutsch: Stammbaum aus "Modern Family" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

from the Atlantic

A 2012 Hollywood Reporter poll found that 27 percent of likely voters said that depictions of gay characters on TV made them more pro-gay marriage, and there are news accounts of people crediting their newfound sympathy toward gay people to Modern Family.

from Wired.com a chart