Comedy vs. Humor · 4:49pm Dec 11th, 2013
From a 2009 VoiceOverExperts podcast on voiceover acting:
Comedy is not king with regard to commercials. Humor is. There's a critical difference. The objective of comedy is to amuse. If you look back to the word roots of amuse, you'll get “to not think”. Advertisers want people to remember their product or service. How many times have you seen a commercial which is so funny you can't remember the product or service?
Now, the objective of humor is to emotionally connect the audience or listener with an experience. When a message is connected with emotion, the memory recall of the message goes way up. Humor is the glue between message and memory. Making a line or word in the commercial funnier can adversely affect the commercial.
That doesn't mean humor isn't funny, or that anything emotional is humor. That would be silly. It means Ren and Stimpy is comedy, and Woody Allen is humor. This may be a made-up use of the terms, but I like it. It explains one of the main reasons why I like My Little Pony. Many cartoons today (Family Guy, Adventure Time, even Gravity Falls) emphasize comedy; MLP and a few others (Bob's Burgers, Bojack Horseman) emphasize humor. Most of the MLP:FiM scenes that bug me are ones where they sacrifice character, continuity, & believability for comedy. Take “Daring Don’t”. There’s a scene where the Mane 6 sit outside the window and watch Daring Do fight 3 thugs while doing nothing. There are many scenes where Rainbow acts like an idiot. These are funny, but I find them painful to watch. In other episodes, ponies are often made to act out scenes that either violate their character ("You're going to LOVE MEEE!") or push their quirks completely over-the-top into psychoses (Rainbow beating up Fluttershy in the Equestrian Games) for comic effect. And Pinkie… let’s just not go there right now.
In most cartoons, comedy is king, and they take a very different approach to narrative. Outrageous coincidences, physical impossibilities, unbelievable stupidities, flat contradictions and discontinuities with previous shows are permissible if they're funny. I like funny, but you can’t make viewers care about the characters when you go to that level, because the viewers know the characters live in a world where nothing can harm them for long, and nothing that they see on the screen really happens. I remember how the light saber duel between Yoda and Count Dooku killed whatever interest was left in the Star Wars prequels for me. I don’t know if it was supposed to be funny, but the theater audience laughed all the way through it. After that point, it was no longer a universe I could take seriously.
Consider this scene in Gravity Falls: Dipper is concerned about his masculinity. He wanders out into the waters, and just happens to run into a manticore who will teach him how to be manly. That sets the entire story within a frame of "This wouldn't really happen." The outrageous coincidence isn't itself comical, but the writers allowed it only because they were already within a comic framework where it didn't matter. When a colony of gnomes wants to marry Mabel, you don't ask, "Are there any female gnomes? Do gnomes gnormally reproduce through interspecies breeding? What will their offspring look like?", because you know the writers didn't think about it and those answers don't even exist in the story world. I will never care deeply about characters in such a framework.
To argue symatics, I thought comedy was a very different thing.
I don't know. I'll admit that the words may have had strictly different meaning when originally formulated, but surely they are pretty much the same thing in contemporary English usage? I don't know anything about the formal study of humor/comedy, so I can't say if the dichotomy presented above represents something fundamental or ephemeral. It certainly doesn't convince me on the strength of its rhetoric.
> How many times have you seen a commercial which is so funny you can't remember the product or service?
[citation needed]
I don't know … it's a daring thought and I love it when you share things that make me think, but I'm trying to poke at it and it crumbles. I'm not sure what humor is if it's supposed to be empathetic but not funny. And having just looked it up, VoiceOverExperts got their etymology wrong. "Amuse" is descended from "to divert the attention"; i.e. grab them out of whatever they're thinking about and make them focus on the funny thing instead.
That makes a lot of sense. I've definitely found that in my writing. Generally I don't set out trying to write things that are funny, but if I think of humorous way to phrase things, or an amusing little twist in the way events occur, I can't but add it. I thought I might have crossed the line with A Muddy Hole (Applejack believing one of her trees was "posh" was certainly boarding on the ridiculous), but when I asked my readers, they said I hadn't and I ended up agreeing with them.
You know, the comedy aspect of the show really is quite light, but it is very funny. I think I was a bit worn out on pure, almost nihilistic attempts at comedy that could be found in shows like Family Guy by the time I got hooked on ponies. Perhaps that's part of the appeal.
1596601>>1596600>>1596590>>1596554 Major post expansion above.
1596554 1596590 That's a kitchen-sink comedy+humor+satire web page. It isn't trying to capture distinctions. I don't care much whether this distinction corresponds to common usage. I care whether it's useful for me.
1596600 The speaker worded that poorly. Humor is still supposed to be funny. But it's Sam Levinson funny, not Tom & Jerry funny.
1596690
Those expanded definitions help a lot. I think I'd somehow managed to pick up on what you meant because I've had thoughts along those lines, but I see many people were confused.
I was once told by a friend who was doing a philosophy degree that a large part of what they learned was definitions, because intelligent arguments cannot happen unless everyone is clear about what exactly is being argued about.
1596690
Thank you. Your thoughts make a lot more sense than theirs.
1596690 Awaiting post expansion. It seems like you're trying to separate the difference between comedy and humor from the concept of funny.
But if I'm getting this right: Comedy refers to things that make us laugh but don't really connect emotionally. Family Guy tells a lot of jokes in 22 minutes, so we're bound to laugh at something, but in the end we don't really care about the Griffith family.
Now, does humor make us laugh and have an emotional connection, or does humor make us laugh because of an emotional connection?
And where does satire (which makes us laugh at ourselves) fall into this? And could
a great writerMel Brooks do all three in one script?I think the problem with this is the idea that this actually is true in the first place. Being extremely funny makes something more memorable, not less. The problem that most commercials have is not that they are too funny, but that they just have nothing to do with the product in question.
One of the most memorable commercials for me is a commercial from the 1996 Olympics for Kodak Gold film. Why do I remember it? Because it was funny, sure, but also because it tied into the product. This guy takes a picture of his dad, but when he develops the film, there's an ugly blotch in the sky behind his dad. The film was defective. But wait, the film can't be defective, it is Kodak Gold! So he does what anyone would do - he blows it up. And it is... a UFO!
"No, that's not a UFO. That's just a biplane flying at 30,000 feet," says a government agent in a suit, who the camera quickly pans up to. The man in black, naturally, confiscates the film, and then later our protagonist goes home and keeps thinking about it. Government agents come up to his front door and ring his doorbell, when suddenly the aliens descend from the sky and beam up the government agents, flying away just in time for the protagonist to open his door and see... nothing.
"All I did was take a picture of my dad, and blow it up."
The commercial was humorous, but the thing is, I remember the exact product that it was advertising SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER because the product was integral to the commercial.
I think the key is not whether or not something can be "too funny" so much as if it is "too dissonant" - that is to say, if the humor is contributing towards whatever else it is you're trying to do, or if you are just throwing random jokes out there. Just throwing random jokes out there tends to be less funny because it is too obvious that you are trying to be funny - it is the old "tryhard" thing. You can have rapidfire comedy, and it works just fine, but if your rapidfire comedy is obviously there just to be funny rather than because it makes sense in context, it draws the audience out of whatever it is that you're doing, and not only can it make it less funny because of the dissonance, but it can also make the rest of the work worse because you've damaged their suspension of disbelief.
This is why Pinkie Pie drooling over frosting and losing the conversation in the S4 premier is much more lame than Pinkie Pie emphasizing how awesome CHOCOLATE RAIN is in the S2 premier - in the Discord episode, it made perfect sense in context, and Pinkie had been guzzling it down earlier in the episode, AND it is funny. Her drooling over frosting for no real good reason is just... dumb and dissonant, and doesn't integrate with the episode at all. "Look at this funny thing" is always less funny than "this funny thing just happened", all other things being equal, meaning that something which is in theory less funny can be much more funny when delivered properly. Pinkie Pie's "Oatmeal, are you crazy?" and "And that's how Equestria was made" were both wonderful things because of their context.
Gravity Falls has a very different tone and structure to it than My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The emphasis on that show is living in the insanity that is Gravity Falls; the first episode really sets this up when the big bad turns out to be a bunch of gnomes standing on each others' shoulders; that moment really tells you what kind of show it is, and the show is mostly that. The show IS ridiculous, but there's a certain type of humor that fits into it.
I do agree that I care less about the characters of Gravity Falls than I do about the characters in MLP, and it is true that is because of the type of show that it is, but I don't think that the characters of Gravity Falls actually act out of character all that often, or that Gravity Falls pulls me out of the narrative via its ridiculousness any more than MLP does - indeed, I think that they probably act more consistently in-character than the characters in MLP do. It is that the show isn't actually as focused on the characters as MLP is - MLP is about bonding with the characters as they grow, while Gravity Falls is about the ridiculousness of that town. So while it is true that the comedy plays a factor in that, and that Gravity Falls type comedy doesn't work in MLP because it is tonally dissonant with what the show is, the humor being used is part of the tone of the show and it is part of what the show is "about" - MLP isn't about random cuts to Pinkie Pie doing something stupid, and honestly, neither is Gravity Falls, but having a monster revealed to be a bunch of gnomes standing on each others' backs in MLP would be ridiculous, whereas in Gravity Falls, it is ridiculous but it is also very funny.
The window scene didn't bug me because I could totally empathize with what was happening and sympathize too. They were witnessing fantasy made reality and it was badass. If you went over to Jackie Chan's house to borrow some ginseng and he was brawling with 3 dudes you would gawk too. Of course it was played up for kids' "beat you over the head" type humor, but the foundation of the joke was definitely humor since it was an emotional reaction rather than a concrete one.
And Dash's fuck-ups also struck me as totally realistic and endearing as well. She is known to have anxiety issues and poor judgement in high stress emotional situations. This of course can occur with both positive and negative emotions.
I'm not sure I buy into the fundamental semantic difference you're trying to make between comedy and humor. There are certainly etymological and historical differences between the two terms, but I suspect any group of people could go back and forth over what means what and the degree of practical relevance in the distinction.
That said, clearly one can delineate different types of attempts to be funny, and that feels a little closer to the point: the distinction between character-embracing humor and character-rejecting humor. I tend to subscribe to the view that good humor is about subverting expectations. Clearly, it's easier to subvert expectations by using a known structure and then doing some massive, large-scale subversion that rejects all of the underlying structure.
Let's call this the fanfiction.net approach to humor.
We can also do small-scale rejection, where only a subset of the underlying structure is rejected (such as changing the characterization of a single character, in isolation, to create a humorous effect within an otherwise consistent scenario). This seems to line up with Flutterrage humor, etc.
And we can consider what I want to call situational humor, where none of the underlying structure is rejected, but a scenario is created in which consistent depiction will lead to absurdity.
Anyway, just wanted to toss out perhaps an alternate way of thinking about it. I figure staying consistent in how you depict characters and setting is always preferable, though it's not clear to me whether this is intrinsically a higher quality of humor or if it's largely an effect of the fact that it will tend to take a higher level of authorial skill to create humorous scenarios that remain true to character and setting, and that the skill level effect is going to carry on to reflect the quality of the humor they choose to employ.
To quote the Joker when throwing Harly Quinn out the window, "If you have to explain the joke, it's not funny!" I'm struck by a scene that I read back when I was a young sprout from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress where the POV character is trying to communicate just what is funny to a computer who had just aquired sentience. The terms "Funny Once" and "Funny Always" have stuck with me (and considering my age, and the state of my memory, that's no small task) until now. In this regard, Comedy may be regarded as Funny Once, and Humor as Funny Always.
If I remember my Ernie Kovacs and Charlie Chaplin correctly, the classic humor bit involves a guy walking down the street while reading the paper. In front of him is a banana peel. The camera looks at the guy, looks at the banana peel, looks at the two of them together as the guy walks towards the banana peel... and steps over it into an open manhole.
It requires a lot of talent (of which my pool is stagment and shallow) to keep a funny story funny from beginning to end. You can't zoom in too closely on slapstick, or it just becomes violence, and you can't zoom out too far with subtle jokes or they just become whispers. Musical comedy works, but you have to keep it short or you'll find you've gone a bridge too far. And speaking of puns, it takes a certain taste among your readership make them work. Bad taste.
Humour is wherein it's all fun and games until the small child gets hurt. Then it's comedy.
I was just pointing out that comedy has nothing to do with laughter or funny by the most true definition. That being said, I think I understand your point more.