Observational Comedy is one of the most popular forms of comedy today. The underlying concept is rooted in converting a normal observation into an opportunity for laughter. The comedian asks the audience to consider a common occurrence, but provides analysis or discussion that offers a humorous perspective on the matter. Often times, this will begin with a leading question such as “Have you ever wondered ....” with the observation following. The humor is borne out of the balance of two seemingly opposing concepts of relatability and obscurity. Comedians Richard Herring and Jo Caulfield described this balance by saying if the joke is “too obvious an observation it won't be funny ...and if it's too oblique then it won't hit home.” (Herring and Caulfield 2008) Therein lies an integral truth about the nature of such comedy: Comedy cannot be understood outside of its social context, and this is especially true for observational comedy. Each observational joke or act is built upon the world around the audience and comedian. Therefore, in a sense observational comedy has its own self-updating mechanism. An observational joke made in the 2015, would not necessarily be an observational joke during the time of the genre’s birth.
The 1890s offer an interesting
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His unique style was a clean and catchy form of observational humor. Most of his humor eschewed any charged political commentary or swear words, which broadened his audience. Seinfeld’s jokes often were prefaced with the phrase “what’s the deal with ___?” or “Have you ever ...?” These phrases defined the Seinfeld brand of comedy, and were also were easy for audience members to imitate on their own. By the end of the 80s, Seinfeld’s had grown, and he wanted to move his act onto television. Little did he know that this new business venture would change observational comedy
Frances Gasparino of Rochester Institute of Technology suggests “the generative methodology offers the capability for the jokes and segments… to be analyzed against Burkean theory of comedic enlightenment. By looking to show that a means-end joke is an appropriate way in which to convey a message it would be seen that the message… would not be eclipsed by… the underlying message, to question the media and not take what is said for fact [got] across to the audience.” This tool of comedic critique can be dually entertaining as well as enlightening. The seemingly realistic script coupled with the serious expressions and tone of the actors creates the perfect milieu to reach the intellectual viewer as well as the average, blue-collar viewer; thus, increasing their total
The famous episode from Seinfeld, “The Soup Nazi”, is loved and viewed by many. In this episode, both George Costanza (Jay Scott Greenspan) and Jerry Seinfeld (Jerry Seinfeld) go to a restaurant that supposedly has the “best soup in the city”, according to the locals. However, everyone calls the owner of the soup restaurant “The Soup Nazi” because of his hard, cold personality and his ability to refuse service to anyone who annoys him. The episode comically portrays the fear which “The Soup Nazi” induces on his customers and the willingness of his customers to come back just because his soup is so delicious (http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/07/04/the-top-10-seinfeld-episodes?page=2). This episode represents only a small sample of the countless comical and satirical works written by Larry David, the writer of the television series, Seinfeld. Larry David is a comedian as well as a satirist. He is in many Saturday Night Live (SNL) skits as Bernie Sanders, and was the co-creator of the television series, Curb Your Enthusiasm. A common theme throughout his works is his ability to take everyday problems and blow them out of proportion. Larry David practices many techniques in his satirical pieces that explore ideas of race and gender in order to bring across a message to society and entertainment to viewers.
“I’m not trying to be funny… I just want to play with their heads” (Kaufman). Beyond this confession and a few others, Andy Kaufman rarely talked about what he did on stage. In betraying artistic convention, rarely telling jokes at all, and chiding the audience itself when they failed to play along with his performances, Kaufman surprisingly succeeded in failing to avoid notoriety during his career. As exposed as his fame made him, Kaufman rarely showed himself as himself. His public image was a prodigious collage of identities, characters, and personas, all bizarre and all successful in their portrayal of eccentric, dopish morons: failures in the traditional sense. Kaufman’s career consisted of a sporadic array of localized failures whose manifestations, oddly, are remembered as successes. He presented his ironically bad humor in a manner that joyously resounded with the crowd. As often as he did admittedly “play with their heads”, his audience rarely failed to play along.
When looking at the legal term of the doctrine of transferred intent, it is important not to let it intimidate you it can be very confusing. When a person attempts to commit a criminal action to a person but inadvertently commits the act on another person leads to the transferred intent (Brody and Aker, 2010). There are different ways that this can take place and the easiest way for me to understand it was to think of the comedy show The Three Stooges. In this show they are always hitting each other in the face with cream filled pies and they are always missing their intended target pie in the face victim.
Moreover, incongruity is not the only element that is needed for producing humor. When experience humor, incongruity is essential but not the sole purpose for producing amusement or laughter. Incongruity theory implies that amusement or humor is funniest when the joke is unknown, a joke that is a surprise, a shock. If the joke is predictable then it is not as funny. Another problem with incongruity theories is that studies have been done demonstrating the opposite of the incongruity hypothesis. Studies Have shown that people rated jokes that are known and not surprising as being more humorous than jokes that are predictable. Lastly, the incongruity theory is not explained well and
The title of the source I listened to was “The pilot episode for the comedy TV show ‘Seninfeld’ formerly known as ‘The Seinfeld Chronicles’”. I think this TV show could be divided into two parts. One is Jerry’s personal presentation and another is comedy. In my viewpoint, this listening is difficult(rated 8) for me to some extent because of not only the speed, but also the logic. As for the speed, I think they talked so fast that I can hardly understand what they said at the first time, but after I repeated, I found that it could be easier for me. So what was the most difficult for me is the logic. When I listened this at the first time, I was extremely confused that how the event developed. It was just like a comedy that some people talked
Comedian, Actor, and Newscaster Jon Stewart has been apart of Comedy Central's: The Daily Show since 1999 when the previous host, Craig Kilborn, left the show to pursue another chapter in his life. Since then the rates for The Daily Show has risen dramatically and the shows popularity has spiked to several peaks and has earned itself several honors and awards including an Emmy and an Oscar for his hilarious efforts to express recent political and headlines to the public while offering an hilarious insight.
Richard Pryor once said, “There’s a thin line between to laugh with and to laugh at” (A-Z Quotes). Leon Rappoport, a professor at Kansas State University, believed in the same thin line as Pryor. Rappoport received his BA and MS at New York University, and completed his PhD in 1963 at the University of Colorado(Kansas State University). He studied psychological sciences, and concentrated his studies in decision making and human judgment, even writing a book called Punchlines: The Case for Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Humor (Kansas State University). In another book, The Sword and Shield Metaphor and Other Perspectives, Rappoport claims that humor depends on how the audience receives humor. The audience can either be on the side of the audience that is getting laughed at, or they can be on the side of the audience that is laughing with other people.
Introduction Throughout comedy’s past, there has been a cultural stigma about women not being funny. In 2014, there was a documentary released called “Women Aren’t Funny”, which addresses the pernicious reality of people discerning women, as not being funny. In this reality, comedy is a realm highly male-dominated, which makes it hard for women to be seen as humorous. Despite the myth, there are tons of famous and successful female comedians, such as Ellen DeGeneres, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey.
The authors of this article conducted this experiment in order to discover how different racial audiences respond to ethnic stand-up comedy, as well as to better understand how it can help the long-standing issues of racial inequality in America. To perform this experiment, the authors decided to create several small focus groups. They chose to employ this method because it more closely replicates the setting where stand-up comedy is traditionally received, and it creates a much more natural environment for the participants. They selected eleven 19-26 year old college student (5 men and 6 women), all of whom were very racially aware. The authors then separated them into 3 groups: a black group with 4 black students and a black moderator, a
Over the past 70 years, there has been great change in comedy especially for African-Americans and other Non-American races. During the early days of comedy, many of these people were considered to be minorities during that era. This influenced many comedic stints of that time which over the years have evolved to catch up with the modern day society. Some of these include the humor, the topics discussed and also epithets. Over the years many comedians have emerged from ‘this’ group of minorities and have played a major factor in the evolution of comedy itself and how the different minorities have evolved from being quiet to playing a great part in show casing their lifestyle. Compared to the past, there has been a great change in comedy from the old times of Dick Gregory to the modern times of Aziz Ansari.
Being a comedian is considered one of the hardest jobs in the entertainment world. Comedy is a fickle business; you can be here one day and gone the next. Comedians are only as good as their last joke, and the people on this list are currently ruling the "world of funny." Check out the top comedians of 2015.
Sitcoms have made a huge commitment to our way of life's demeanor. It is a state of mind in view of the assumption, rehashed and again by these sitcoms, that this man is stupid, juvenile, flippant, lacking judgment skills, regularly baffled, and here and there irate. It legitimates his low pay and his work’s close supervision. Facilitate, it is a mentality of lack of regard for him wherever else in the general population domain.
It is a well-known fact that British humor has major differences from the comedy we find in North America. Comparing the styles of entertainers from here and across the pond, one will see that the two vary widely. The types of jokes you would find in a sketch on Saturday Night Live contrast with those in one on Monty Python’s Flying Circus. British humor is generally seen as more wry and absurdist when put next to its American counterpart. This is not at all a bad thing, as many audiences from outside the United Kingdom find this
When Friends first aired in 1994, five years into the original run of Seinfeld, it was criticized for being a “knock-off Seinfeld.” Although there were significant similarities between the two shows, there were also vast differences. Seinfeld and Friends were targeted to two very different audiences, and they represented the relatively new idea of “friendship comedies” in different ways. Despite their differences, both Friends and Seinfeld portrayed friendship and humanity in relatable ways, and molded “friendship comedies” of the future.