humor

in the humor unit we created a humor piece based on 2 pices of humor of our choicing.

Notes on the performances:

  •  Bo burnum ( make happy)
    • Starts off with black humor about how laughing and having fun is not allowed, and then to how privileged the audience is and how the world is not funny
    • Calls attention to how the behind the scenes works
    •  Talks about how everything is for profit
    •  Audience participation, to lighten the mood
    • Brings in political banter
    • Blunder to end segment
    • Changes to a different song
    • Uses masic to tell anecdotes
    • Irony to switch to talking
    • Irony to talk about how “straight white people” are so disadvantage because they have so few issues” (song called straight white man) and how everyone else wants rights that come naturally due to the system
    • Calls attention to how the song was completely ironic
    • “No way the american education system has a racial bias”
    • Makes jokes at the audiences expence
    • All the irony
    • Jokes about murder 
    • Repartee
    • Calls out sound effects and production
    • Calls attention to the state of music by parodying hip hop
    • Anecdotes about the price of the equipment
    • Goes to make fun of country music with an amazing parody (sang name: pandering)
    • “That is a scarecrow”
    • Calls attention to how entertainment is a lie
    • Brings up the idea of art is dead
    • Accendotes about fame
    • Blunder
    • Diffusing anxiety with a blunder
    • Moves to a different song (expectations)
    • Calls attention to the verse change
    • Dark joke about how the perfect people don’t exist
    • Defuses anxiety to move to the next topic
    • Calls attention to politics 
    • Makes joke about preconceived notions of states
    • Skips to the next skit
    • Makes a joke about advertising
    • Calls more attention to how entertainers expect their audiences to stay with
    • Moves to next song (kill yourself) making fun of how harmful modivational songs are
    • Comments about toxic masculinity
    • Defuses tension
    • Makes fun of how minor his problems
    • Caricature about how life is
    • Leads into the final song (are you happy)
  • Bdg (the perfect pokerap) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cT6ULpScZA
    •  Exaggeration by styling the whole show to be styled as a collage lecture about how he made the perfect song based on the pokerap from pokemon
    •  Joke about how “important the song is”
    • Joke about self worth
    •  Incongruity: making the whole show about how he will die if he doesn’t make the song and the audience cant participate but forces them to participate
    • Repartee: repeating no audience participation
    • Anecdotes about his childhood playing pokemon
    • Terry the tangela
    • Situational humor: everyone in the audience has presumably played pokemon and had to make an unfair decision
    • Dark humor “wanted me to give up something i loved”
    • Satire about how kevin punt is either a real estate agent or in jail
    • Frudian slip about the audience being too young to remember the original pokerap
    • Irony about how he’s a mid 2000s suburban mother 
    • Banter about english majors 
    • Caricature about the pokemon mr mime being terrifying
    • Banter how “ the original pokerap is no gesamtkunstwerk” without explaining
    • Keeps bringing back the recurring theme of kevin punt and going to jail
    • Blunder about leading the audience to believe he’s talking about feet as in the body part rather than the metrical
    • Makes jokes about collage to make the audience react
    • Pun about metrical feet
    • Irony about how he’s untrained in theater followed by all the plays he’s been in
    • Absurd humor, hyping up the song for 20 min and then the end is the actual song, the lead up is all making a 4 hour performance only to be a 9 min song
    • Recurring joke about the contract of death
    • Dark humor, bringing up the opiate problem in the US

Analyisis

Make Happy by Bo Burnam and the Perfect Poke-rap by BDG of Polygon are shows done in front of a live audience where the performer uses music and participation to keep the viewers invested. 

The main similarities I noticed were the use of behind-the-scenes knowledge, and the use of anecdotes from their childhoods.

First, I will discuss the use of behind-the-scenes knowledge. Both shows are heavily based around showing the audience what happens off stage, with make happy even going as far as to start and end with Bo at home. BDG shows how he made the Perfect Poke-rap as the entire show. Using behind the scenes elements helps bring the audience into the show and makes them feel like contributors to the show rather than just passive viewers. In Make Happy, Bo talks about the superficiality of the stage and how the amount of money spent on the equipment for one stunt could have been better spent feeding and housing homeless people. 

Second, they both used anecdotes from their childhoods. This is mostly used by BDG to create a joke that is brought up multiple times. The running joke of having to trade Terry the Tangela for Kevin Punt’s arcanine is used to show both what a dactyl is and keep the show from feeling too much like a lecture, While in Make Happy the anecdote is used to talk about how stories are saying what you know.

While there are similarities in the two shows, there are also a lot of differences. The major differences are the use of music, the sense of humor, and the message.

Although both shows are based around music, how the music is used is very different. In Make Happy, Bo uses music to tell the meaning, with songs like Pandering (a country-style song) and the hip-hop rhyme being total parodies of the genres that they are based on. The commentary in Pandering is how country music is written by a bunch of wealthy millionaires who have learned a few stereotype phrases and themes and just keep repeating them to keep actual working class farmers loyal. In the hip hop rhyme the commentary is about how you can put I’m a little teapot and ba ba black sheep over a beat and it would pass as quality hip hop. Meanwhile BDG uses the Perfect Poke-rap as the climax to the show, showing its construction and the techniques used. He then breaks the song up into different segments that reflect different aspects of the song, having the triplet rap, the educational rap (with an actual anti drug segment), the name list, and then the dream ballet. 

Next is the sense of humor. The sense of humor in the two shows is very different, Make Happy consists of a lot of dark humor and scattered anecdotes, while the Perfect Pokey-rap revolves mostly around puns and one continuous anecdote. The humor in both shows is carried by the personality of the host. Bo Burnam is more irony and sarcasm based, while BDG is framed as an emotional character who uses over-exaggeration. The use of inconsistent vs consistent jokes helps lead this. Bo changes the topic after every song, allowing for a new topic to be brought up: making fun of celebrity lip syncing, societal norms and music. Alternatively, BDG keeps 2 main jokes going through the show, the first being the contract he signed to get the panel stating if he fails to name all 800 pokemon in the Poke-rap he will be killed and having to deal with Kevin Punt (another of the characters in the comedy skit.).

The overall message is also worth discussing. While both shows have a strong message, the message they tell is very different. Make Happy’s messages are all about how the world hurts but there’s still good to be found, while the Perfect Poke-rap is about how it is better to keep what you love than to give it up for some superficial goal (ie trading terry the Tangela out to finish a Pokedex). How both shows end especially brings this point out. Make Happy ends with Bo walking off stage into a studio and out of the studio and into his house after making fun of a then-recent Kanye West show where a large portion of the show was spent just ranting about nothing. On the other hand BDG’s show ends stating the message that you should keep the ones you care about around because it’s hard to keep going without them.

Reflection:

After watching Make Happy and The Perfect Poke-rap I decided I want to make my own humor project based on multiple pieces all building up to a grand idea. I thought that the lead-up to the song from the Perfect Poke-rap and the multiple different stories in Make Happy were the highlights of each. I also think that using multiple themes that tie together will help keep the humor fresher especially with a shorter time frame. I also want to keep recurring themes in my humor, like how in the perfect pokerap the repeat of terry the tangela is brought up. When describing what a dactyl is, BDG explains it: “here’s one example of a pokemon that’s a dactyl, its TAN-gl-a, another one would be ARE-cay-nine. TAN-gle-a, ARE-cay-nine, TAN-gle-a ARE-caynine KAVIN PUNT MADE ME TRADE TERRY FOR ARCANINE AND I WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM.” by slipping the recurring joke in it allows small things like explaining what a dactyl is into a joke. While I want to be able to keep recurring jokes I also want to use multiple anecdotes to keep the narrative fresh. 

As for the themes I want to include, I want it to be more upbeat and hopeful. I personally enjoy listening and watching hopeful shows. I think one of the things that both shows have in some capacity is hope. While in the perfect pokerap almost the entire show is about being happy, in Make Happy it has occasional themes. I think having something with lighter themes would also be more appropriate especially with the shelter in place where everything is very stressful and grim. In my opinion comedy is a great tool for escapism. I want to keep the humor to mostly simple jokes and maybe a pun or two. Making too many puns would make the comedy feel cheap. 

Another inspiration for how I want my comedy to be is from the podcast unit. I was really happy with the cohesive narrative I managed to achieve and want to build on what I learned there into something new. By doing a podcast I can also put all my energy into making the comedy its best without worrying about how visually interesting everything is. That will allow a lot more effort to go into trying to make it a lot more funny. I really liked having the free range to edit clips together and remove bits without a lot of worry about everything matching up to a video perfectly. It also gave me a lot of freedom to splice multiple recordings together to maximize the impact of the story. Especially with doing an anecdote based podcast I think that’s very important. I think that by doing a podcast I can be a lot more experimental with my narration to make it more entertaining. 

While I am not musically talented enough to make music to use as storytelling like either of the shows, I could put more effort into sound effects to keep the podcast having a sense of immersion, especially with the lack of visuals. Possibly making background music that goes with whatever the theme of the comedy is could also add to the flavor of it.