Tig Notaro Tells A Deeply Personal Story About Taylor Dayne

After discussing Tig Notaro’s infamous “I have cancer” routine in class, I started researching some of her other material. I came across a set she did on a late night Conan O’Brien special where she tells an interesting story about a series of encounters she’s had with a mediocre pop star named Taylor Dayne. The set consists of her telling the story in her classic monotone and nonchalant manner.

The ultimate joke relies on Notaro’s ability to repeat the story again and again in an effort to make the audience accustomed—if not numb—to the identical outcome of each encounter with Taylor Dayne. However midway through her fifteen minute set Notaro pauses and admits, “I’m completely blanking on what happens next in a story that I’ve told a few times…this is hilarious.” The audience responds with laughter and she says, “You guys are thinking this is a joke but it’s not.” The audience continues to laugh—even louder as Notaro stalls saying, “This is me taping something and realizing I’m forgetting my story then you guys are like oh my gosh this is horrifying.” With this the audience’s laughter grows even louder and more intense.

I love this clip because it goes against the idea that we laugh at the familiar. Notaro eventually recovers but her closing joke doesn’t warrant the same kind of intense laughter that her midway slip-up received. I think there are two possible explanations for the audience’s response to her slip-up.

1. Maybe the audience laughed harder at her momentary mistake because they were in fact horrified at Notaro’s inability to remember her jokes. Baudelaire’s claim, “The wise man laughs only with fear and trembling” supports this theory because it suggests that the audience felt uncomfortable with the fact that a professional performer would forget her material onstage (Baudelaire, 141).
2. Maybe the audience laughed harder at her momentary mistake because they were excited by the authenticity of her blunder. Stand-up routines are polished and premeditated so the unexpected mistake took the audience by surprise.

Either way Notaro’s honesty and candidness adds a fresh and intimate quality to her routine.

what makes a “funny person”?

Something I have always struggled to pinpoint is what makes a particular comedic individual a funny person, as opposed to a person who says funny things. There seems to be a craft that serves to join the person and the content in order to make for an extremely funny presence. Some might call this acting, but I think it is something else. I think it requires the individual to fully submit his or her body and mind to the humor. Once the person or character has done this, the rest seems like a kind of improvisation. Take this scene from Parks and Recreation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5EWk3DnSSE

Of course Amy Poehler’s lines are written, and her directions are given, but she is the one moving around and saying things in such a tone that causes us to laugh. It often comes out in the intonations of her voice and the accuracy of her facial expressions. Her expression while repeating “not even close,” blends drunkenness and defiance perfectly. Her body language when knocking the phones of their receivers looks just like that of an angry child. The way she holds up the small baby figurine has the curiosity of a weirdo scientist and the confusion of a paranoid person. She has to draw on real-life scenarios and displace them all perfectly into one scene to make it funny. Poehler has clearly had practice with this, but it is rewarding to study every time.

Another example:

Amy Poheler on Parks and Rec (and SNL, for that matter), Kristen Wiig, and Tina Fey, for example, are literally standing in front of an audience, but they engaging with people who are watching them long after they have left the stage. They seem to be inviting listeners into the worlds of their characters. They have chosen to combine a series of small and recurring funny topes, in order to make a relentlessly funny situation.

Harriot and Karina? Probably not.

An interesting point was raised in our last class. Why doesn’t the Harold and Kumar franchise have any sort of female counterpart? Why is the buddy film genre mysteriously devoid of female versions? And why are the few budd-ette movies that do exist dismissed as shallow and prime examples of fluffy/poor cinema? I pondered over these questions, and inevitably, Google led the way. I came across the blog post of a member of a movement called Feministe, which is a blog forum for feminists. This post and the accompanying forum section attached underneath helped spark even more ideas about these questions. 

 Someone in class raised a point that basically stated that the reason for this bias and sexist tendency within the genre is that buddy movies is that male buddy movies focus on camaraderie, where as female movies are on social climbing and backbiting. The implication is that the difference in the stereotypical male buddy relationship and the female buddy relationship is that the male one is healthy and constructive, whereas the female one is toxic. While I believe that this is a contributing factor, I also believe that there are other factors in play. 

Society has conditioned us to believe that females have a very rigid existence in terms of “crazy” experiences they are allowed to have. Imagine a Harriot and Karina, if you will, who have the same experiences that Harold and Kumar have in the movie. The social reaction would probably be one of outrage and bewilderment rather than awe inspired happiness and companionship. To my mind, it is this double standard that is the main hindrance for female buddy movies. Food for thought. 

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/04/10/best-films-about-female-friendship/

Is Punning Dead?

Recently, we’ve been discussing a phenomenon known as syntactical ambiguity, in a  linguistics course I am taking this semester. Syntactical ambiguity occurs when a sentence could have two or more different meanings, depending upon the overarching situation. Usually this ambiguity is the result of one ambiguous word, with the entire meaning of the sentence turning on the definition of that word. In this unit, we tended to focus mainly on Groucho Marx quotes, because he was very very good at creating sentences with various types of syntactic ambiguities. In the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers, Groucho states “one morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”

When addressing only the initial sentence, “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas,” one would usually assume that Groucho had been wearing pajamas while firing the shots at the elephant. The second sentence serves to clear up the ambiguity, but also serves to confuse the reader more (because COME ON, an elephant in pajamas?!).

Now, the reason I’m bringing all of this linguistics in is because, while rewatching Duck Soup, I realized that Groucho Marx was basically the king of syntactical jokes. In Duck Soup, he mostly used punning for quick laughs in between larger goofs. Most of the puns had nothing to do with the plot, and were just humorous exchanges in which Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) meant something that the other characters don’t catch initially.

Now, just to explain a little bit about how in love I am with puns. According to the Encyclopedia of 20^th-century American Humor,  the word pun, which originally comes from the Italian word puntiglio, meaning “fine point, is usually defined as the “humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound” (238). While some people have always disliked puns, I think they are enchanting. Not all puns are good, and when used for evil they can be downright annoying. However, a well thought out, well placed pun is usually witty and humorous. Duck Soup is overrun with them, and most of the time, that kind of joking makes me laugh.

At one point in the film, Groucho states “maybe you can suggest something. As a matter of fact, you do suggest something. To me you suggest a baboon.” When reading only the first two sentences, one would assume that Groucho was asking Ambassador Trentino to suggest a plan. However, after the final sentence is uttered, the viewer understands that Groucho is simply making fun, using ambiguous words to his advantage.

Another example is when Groucho states “I danced before Napoleon. No, Napoleon danced before me. As a matter of fact, he danced 200 years before me.” In this sentence, before is the ambiguous word that is capable of having two meanings.

Now, the reason that I bring up punning is that I am a little concerned for its welfare. As corny as they are, they are also an integral part of comedy, and promote the quick-witted use ambiguous words that used to leave viewers howling. Now a days, puns are “dad jokes,” and I’m usually left rolling my eyes.

Most Marx Brothers movies are extremely funny to me, and although a lot of the Marx Brothers’ physical comedy bothers me, their puns always get a giggle out of me. However, when I showed some of the clips to my friends, they groaned, expressing their displeasure with punny humor. They said the jokes were “overused” and “old.”

 All this leaves me wondering- is the pun on its way out? 

 

knowwhatimean? saynomoresaynomore.

In my research for my genre project, I was exposed to a great deal of sketch comedy from the TV show ‘A Bit of Fry and Laurie’. I came across this one sketch entitled ‘The Understanding Barman’. As soon as it began, my mind darted to the Monty Python ‘Nudge Nudge’ sketch we watched in class, where one man keeps making sexual references and insinuations about the other’s wife, never explicitly stating what he’s talking about until the very end. The other party is completely oblivious to what he is pointing and hinting at, taking his questions quite literally. In the Fry and Laurie sketch too, this misunderstanding occurs, where in an uncanny manner, the Barman keeps interjecting the patron’s monologue about his unhappy marriage with offerings of refreshments which coincidentally also have great sexual connotations. I’m not proud of the word I’m about to use, but I’ve heard this sketch be described as ‘punny’. I think that the comedy in these sketches lies in the understatement, and the constant avoidance of explicit sexual referencing. While these ideas bubble just under the surface, they retain their comic potency, and are incredibly funny. However, as soon as they are released, their comic potential is exhausted. It is this controlled suppression that causes us to laugh. What do you think?

Comedy and expectations

Cancer isn’t funny. Neither is a mastectomy, or an MRI, or any of the otherwise heart-wrenching details that Tig Nataro chooses to share during her routine. In another environment, the same words, in the same tone, delivered with the same inflections would evoke a completely different reaction from the audience. The idea that such themes would cause raucous laughter is beyond the comprehension of some. So then why do we laugh? Why do members of the audience on the track come dangerously close to wetting themselves? 

 

I think there is something inherently funny about someone subverting our expectations. When one  buys a ticket to see a standup comic perform, one expects to hear a variety of different funny jokes. Once that preconceived notion is set in, the comic has the ability to fulfil his/her comedic purpose by (paradoxically) avoiding it. Tig Nataro could have told us about what she ate for breakfast that morning in an identical monotone voice, and we would still have laughed. The material is irrelevant, the big joke is that the person who is supposed to be making jokes, isn’t.

 

I saw this phenomenon mirrored in a comic strip on explosm.net, which caused me to laugh for a good deal of time. The strip is part of collection of comic strips called ‘Cyanide and Happiness’, which is famous for making morbid and inappropriate jokes. The archetype of what a Cyanide and Happiness strip should have has been established. As we saw (or heard rather) with Tig Nataro, the characters in the strip fail to fulfil their purpose, and hence are funny. 

http://www.explosm.net/comics/571/

“Epic Fail”: Is pain less funny when it’s fake?

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8ad_1377269970

One of the cruelest types of comedy (and possibly one of the most universally loved in American culture) is the “epic fail” video. This type of video is incredibly simple. It begins with someone trying to achieve a goal in earnest, and it ends with them making some kind of mistake that leaves them looking foolish, and possibly in incredible pain. While this terminology may have fallen out of style and the obsession with the “fail” video has weaned significantly in recent years, once and a while a good “fail” video will surface and  receive a fair amount of mainstream attention.

Why do we laugh at pain as a result of an earnest mistake? There are many possible answers to this. Some might say we’re in part laughing at the sheer horror of the mistake. Maybe it’s at the unexpectedness, or the novelty of seeing something innocent go horribly wrong caught on video? In many ways our laughter at these sort of videos is very similar to the human inclination to laugh at death.

But that’s not the question I’m interested in right now. Instead, I’m wondering if this laughter at an “epic fail” is lessened with the knowledge that the video was staged. This is a particularly hard question to answer, because with any “epic fail” video, the humor lessens with repeated viewing. (Unless, I suppose, you’re an especially cruel person) A better question to ask then, would be, does the viewer lose respect for the integrity of the video knowing that it was staged?

This might be a subjective answer. But I’m going to argue that no, the viewer ought not to lose respect for the video with the retrospective knowledge that it was staged. Take for example the video above. I found his naïveté and subsequent electrocution hilarious. Once I found out that the video was a fake, I’ll admit I did find it to be slightly less funny. Perhaps this is due to my knowledge that the innocence the man displays in the beginning of the video is less than genuine. This somehow lessens the hilarity in his pain. (Perhaps because I now know he was expecting it). That said, I did gain a new respect for the makers of the video, and their ability to trick millions of viewers into laughing at something so horrible. Somehow, knowing that the video was created as a work of fiction makes laughing at it seem questionable. Am I being made fun of for my innate sense of cruelty? Or does knowing that the man was not really hurt make it okay for me to laugh at him?

Another great example of this is Jimmy Kimmel’s “Worst Twerk Fail Ever”. In this instance the humor extends out of the video, making the viewers who believed in the sincerity of the “fail” the new bud of the joke. 

“Funny is funny”–Bridesmaids isn’t meant to be a movie just for women

In Friday’s class we finally skimmed the surface of gender inequality—or widely accepted double standards for men and women—in popular culture. I found an article from the LA times that highlights some of the points that were raised about Bridesmaids being a female equivalent of The Hangover. The author features interview clips with members of the Bridesmaids cast and her questions concern the nature of the movie industry and its biases towards men. Almost everyone interviewed vehemently denies the idea that the movie’s primarily female cast was a calculated move to somehow stick it to the metaphorical male dominated movie industry. Kristen Wiig simply states, “Women can be raunchy” and Maya Rudolph adds, “I know for a fact this movie didn’t set out to do anything different but just what we all believed was the funniest thing to do. And if that means that we’re going to see more of it [women in leading comedic roles] then that’s great.”

I think a lot of people—including myself—are a little surprised by Wiig and Rudolph’s responses for a couple of reasons. First, I think I just assumed that these successful actress/comedians are only ever thinking about how they can strengthen and solidify the role of women in comedy and film. I’m not trying to say that they haven’t already done a great deal of paving the way for women in comedy. But I think the overwhelming take away from these interviews is that Wiig and Rudolph don’t set out to make movies that prove women are funny. Instead, they set out to make funny movies—period. They know women are just as funny as men (if not funnier) and they didn’t intend for Bridesmaids to be a stepping-stone for feminists to bridge any sort of gender gap within the movie industry. John Hamm bluntly states, “Funny is funny.” This mentality does a nice job of shifting the comedy conversation to focus on what’s funny rather than who is capable of being funny.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2011/04/bridesmaids-premiere-kristen-wiig-maya-rudolph-jon-hamm-video.html

 

 

Harold and Kumar and the buddy movie

I was interested in the way Harold and Kumar related to their desires. I thought the simplification of desire in the context of marijuana played a role in distinguishing the overall “pseudo-quest” desires from desires which might be called side-quest desires. The main quest is always the big problem pulling everyone away from the crazy circumstances that happen, as when Harold and Kumar are constantly forced to move from one scene to the next as they discover that the swingers aren’t what they expected or as the male nurse starts to creep on Kumar. Harold’s desire to be a doctor, their desire for sex and romance, etc., are all fantasies, but the fact that they are only fantasies is a pleasure in the film, because there is no risk of them getting in the way of the friendship between the two main characters and no pressure to actually pursue them. They are only trifle on the way to something larger.

I was reminded of this segment by Katt Williams. It reflects a similar perspective on desire; we get off on the simplicity of Harold and Kumar’s desires which they gain when they give up the mundane and oppressive normal life. The final victory is small but redemptive:

 

Asian American Stereotypical Humor in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle

From the first time I watched “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” to when I watched the movie again for class, the blatant humor of Asian American stereotypes has never escaped me. As a Korean-American, I have experienced the eclectic range of harmless and sometimes offensive Asian-jokes. Though I cannot agree with everything claimed in this article, I do agree that the film addresses race in an eye-opening manner. The film itself is indeed an “unabashedly dumb stoner” movie with a very singular and narrow purpose: get to White Castle at all costs. They portray the stereotypical “hard working 2nd Generation Asian immigrant” that must succeed in order to prove their worth. The film plays on this stereotype while creating humor in the protagonists’ expansion from this narrow portrayal. The two, as lazy American stoners by night, pursue a very mindless journey that has nothing to do with their stereotypes, though Harold at first brings his laptop on their adventure so that he can get some work done. The fact of the matter is, the audience finds enjoyment and laughter in watching two Asian Americans both satisfy and deviate from their Asian stereotypes. At the end of the film, Kumar gives a sardonically heartfelt speech about the reasons his and Harold’s parents came to the country in the first place and why he has finally decided to pursue a career as a doctor. Though much of the rest of the movie is unrealistic and ridiculous, the humor of the film lies, in my opinion, in the underlying satisfaction of Asian American stereotypes. Both characters, by deviating from what is typically considered “Asian” and into the category of “stoners”, created a joyous ride. At the end of the film, they conquer their stereotypes by prevailing, especially when Harold shows up the white jerks at work. However, in all of this, the humor is in their conquering of the stereotypes that exist in the first place. If they did not exist, there would have been nothing to conquer. – Tammy Chung

http://www.salon.com/2005/01/11/harold_kumar/