Humor

Introduction

The humor project. It’s a project that is fairly self-explanatory in concept, which focused on a short analysis of a couple of humorists, followed by our very own creation of a humor video of our own. We were given a couple of options, of which I opted to do an essay that was intended to be funny. It’s hard for me to exactly create something solely based around humor— I generally consider myself to be a funny guy, but I don’t really do too well with the idea of humor if I set out to do something with the purpose of being comedic. I’m better at using dry humor or irony in my writing naturally. It’s kind of the same reason I don’t watch stand-up comedians or humor skits, and why movies like Airplane or Spaceballs don’t stick with me quite as much as something driven by a plot that uses humor naturally within it.

Humorist Study & Proposal

As mentioned earlier, the first step in this project was to do a study of two humorists, followed by a proposal for our own project. And as also mentioned earlier, I don’t really watch or listen to any comedians, so I didn’t really have any specific idea where to begin with this.

The first section here analyzes two comedians, with the second reflecting upon our process of analyzing, as well as its influence over our decisions for this project. And the final section contained our actual decisions, outlining our project proposal.

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As you can see above, this study essentially solidified my decision to focus on dry humor and irony, as well as my strong suit in writing. I decided to go down an existential ramble given that I love existential stuff and some day might make for a good philosophy major (though I might not want to quit my day job). Granted it wasn’t exactly too much of an in-depth existential rambling, but it did scratch the surface of a question that’s been clawing at my mind for a few months now. That question, of course, being: What do humans do?

Script

The script delves into a self-aware (to an extent) existential analysis of our human lives and trying to wrap my mind around what it is— not what it means, but quite literally asking what human beings even do. So the essay is written through my point of view, and everything I say is true to me. Of course, it’s exaggerated and embellished, but it’s absolutely true to how I feel about this subject. And by the end I knew I wasn’t going to have a conclusion that was anything special or any more thoughtful than the standard existential video essay, so I decided to instead pull a Rian Johnson in the final line, or something like that. Anyway, here’s the script:

What do people do in life? I mean, what do human beings do? Okay, that’s a stupid question, because I can kind of answer it, but at the same time, I can’t, really. That also sounded like the start of a dumb video essay, but I won’t be putting sad piano music beneath this. I began struggling with this question while I was planning a graduation trip with my friends to Europe. I’ve never left North America before— and no, I don’t count Hawaii. It’s still the U.S., so it doesn’t count. I’ve also been to Catalina Island, which is off the coast, but would that count as leaving the continent? No. It doesn’t. It’s California.

Anyway, my friends and I had this idea for years and began planning in January. We disagreed over budget, trip length, and how many places we wanted to visit, and in February the trip ultimately fell through— which is pretty awesome, because that meant we didn’t need to get a bunch of refunds four weeks later.

The thing about planning it, though, was that I wanted to hit as many places as possible, while others wanted to spend multiple days in each place. I’d look up the city on Google Images and see if it looked cool, but I don’t know what I’d do there. Seriously, what do you do in a city? You go to a hotel, and then what? You sleep, you eat at a restaurant. Then you walk somewhere to do something and you’re done. And while it seems to be common sense, I can’t pin down what the hell that “something” is. People like to visit museums, but museums are boring. You can go outside and watch people walking from somewhere to somewhere else to do something. You don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know what you’re doing, and even worse, you don’t know what you’re doing either.

Suppose you walk into a gift shop and buy something. Consume products and help the economy, whatever that is. Here’s an “I heart NY” shirt that reminds me of all the things I did in New York that I can’t remember. I saw fifteen disturbing Elmo’s taking pictures with strangers and posed in front of a very tall building. And hey, there’s something else— what’s in that building?

Cubicles, usually. A whole lot of cubicles. Where people sit and do something, but I have no idea what they do or why they do it. They type code into a keyboard, but I’m not sure what that code is for, or if someone has already written it, or what its greater purpose is. An entire building full of people doing things that for the life of me, I cannot begin to figure out.

Hell, I can’t even figure out what I do. People ask me how I’m doing, I say “I don’t know.” People ask what I do with my free time, I say “I don’t know.” I have absolutely no idea. Which is just wonderful given that we’re at a time in life where we either have to figure out what to do with our lives, or take four more years to pretend we’ll figure it out. Which is what I’m doing. And of course no one knows what they want to do with their lives, but I don’t even know what the options are.

So… anyway, all in all, I can’t say that all that existential rambling actually made any of it clearer for me. It just fried my brain, really. This is the part where I’m supposed to answer the question for you and wrap it up, but to be honest, I was kind of hoping the answer would just be revealed while I tried to get there. At the end of the day, I’m going to eat something and fall asleep again without having figured out what I’m doing. Just like my cats. I often pity them for not knowing there’s more to do in life, but they seem to have a better idea of what to do with themselves than I do.

And hey, maybe that’s actually it. Maybe that’s what human beings do— they eat and sleep, just like every other animal. And sure, we do other things along the way, and no, I don’t know what they are, but who cares? There’s something rather liberating about knowing we’re never going to know. So, just like every existential quandary you’ve ever had to listen to, I am happy to report that it doesn’t really matter what you do. We’re all going to be killed by murder hornets anyway.

So there’s that. I was actually fairly satisfied with my script. I didn’t go quite as deep into the subject as I originally intended to; my original plan followed more of a narrative that would result in my brain exploding (figuratively) out of existentialism, but I also figured that might destroy the dry comedy aspect. Well, mostly I didn’t know how to write that. Regardless, I feel it’s satisfying in the way it is, and I think this is definitely my niche if it comes to plain comedy. I would actually enjoy doing something like this in the future.

Our final task was to record this and make a video out of it. However, I read the instructions over a few times and never found anything about whether or not we had to show our faces in the recording, so I just assumed we didn’t and twisted it to fit my self-consciousness. That does mean I had to find visuals to put over my voice recording, but that isn’t such a bad price to pay. Except I got too tired of coming up with non-literal imagery and left a lot of the video empty— some of that emptiness was intentional and specifically placed for purposes of better pacing. But a lot of it also wasn’t.

Overall, though I may enjoy acting and performing, I think I’ve found that my style of dry, sarcastic humor works best on paper. It also sounds pretty good in my head.

Here’s the final recording. Enjoy.