Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Community and Stuff I Find Funny and Something to do with genres

Recent episodes of Community:

Episode 18
This was the one with more of the Chang/Shirley's baby, Chang at Jeff's house as it's main plot and Troy and Abed hanging out with the war criminal as the B-plot. Both were quite funny. At first I thought the whole baby plot wasn't going to be around as much as it was but they're doing funny stuff with it so I'm alright with that. B-plot was... pretty weird. Sort of funny concept but the concept was funnier than the jokes I think. Also weird in that the resolution of the A-plot was hilarious, the most hilarious part, whereas the resolution of the B-plot was sort of just okay standard sort of dismissal.

Episode 19
This was the one with the Pulp Fiction birthday party and Abed trying to do My Dinner With Andre. Pretty funny stuff. I liked Troy's plot of being jealous of Jeff, that lead to a lot of funny scenes, but I feel like the whole Pulp Fiction party side was a bit underutilized. Of course if they had done more with it it may have gotten lame, I dunno. Movie parody episodes are pretty hit and miss with me but this one was kinda funny what with the like, parody combined with references combined with in-universe parody.

Episode 20
This was the one where they were taking electives and Pierce starts dating the Asian woman. It's like, one funny plot line (Abed's) that has a fair number of funny scenes combined with two unfunny plot ideas (Troy pretends to be molested so he can fit in? A woman tries to con Pierce out of his fortune but Jeff, motivated by envy, finds her out?) that were pretty packed with good scenes, the latter having a pretty great resolution I thought and the other one having a lame one lampshaded in such a way that I was okay with it.

Episode 21
This was the pseudo-clip show motivated by Chang discovering the monkey's stash of stolen goods. You know the one I mean or you now think this show is much weirder than it actually is. So basically they do a clip show where all the clips are things that weren't parts of earlier episodes. Has this been done before? I feel like South Park did it. Some shows do mainly actual clips and then do a gag where they remember something that wasn't in an episode. Anyways it is ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT. Seriously. This was one of the funniest sitcom episodes I've ever seen, I think, the execution was just flawless. It was the sort of thing where I wasn't just impressed with that episode, I realized just how well done the characters were that they could have the confidence to do this sort of thing. All the jokes are based on knowing the characters, knowing the tropes of the show, even knowing specific things in previous episodes. All the stuff with the Dean was just nonstop laughs. It was so good that I decided I would talk about these episodes just so I could talk about how good this was. Also I figured I might say something interesting about that maybe but while looking up some details about them I saw that the AVClub has huge and really insightful reviews of every episode that knock whatever I could say out of the water. Oh well. All I know is I'm addicted to watching sitcoms and maybe if I write about it I can figure out why and get that much closer to the “ideal sitcom”. I know for sure it would have episodes like this: gimmicky enough to be really memorable but so packed with quality scenes that you begin to forget anything weird is happening at all. See some of the best Simpsons and Seinfeld episodes for examples, and I'm more than willing to push this up near The Chinese Restaurant, etc. Sure it doesn't have any of the “other side” of Community – heartwarming scenes, good character development, actually interesting moral ideas, etc, etc, but I honestly couldn't care less. This was demonstrated an awareness of their own show without being too stuck on it, executed a perfect sense of comedic timing with only the freedom that the structure could bring and, most importantly, was literally non-stop laughs. The laughs did not stop!

Episode 22
This was the one with Shirley delivering the baby, and it's definitely the other side that I mentioned. Really good interaction, a really nice message, a great resolution to the season's main plot. I loved the reference to the “hidden Abed baby delivery” plot, that was a clever way to involve him in the main events a decent amount. The Troy-Abed plotline was totally pointless thematically/atmospherically and was just there to provide some easy laughs, but it succeeded, and the very element of its out-of-placeness was played well without playing the deus ex metama card (if we're doing something lame, referencing it will make the lameness go away!) too much. Dean subplot was pretty funny too, and the setup of the anthropology final was hilarious. I really liked how they resolved the pregnancy arc. With the baby being Andre's, they aren't forced to keep doing Chang as dad jokes, which I think would get old. They did something pretty great with the whole scene of Chang trying to help Shirley and her finally finding inspiration in what he's saying. Naming the kid Ben was maybe a bit corny but a pretty nice touch, really. The whole plotline was pretty lopsided against Chang, realistically so, but this and the scene where Shirley recognizes Chang's bravery in the drug play episode (which, as a quick aside, I thought was hilarious, and I was stunned to see how much it was hated on in the Community community, more on these guys later) I thought were a nice way to make it a bit more rounded and give Chang a bit more depth. So yeah, great episode!

Episode 23-24
This was the two-part finale where they do paintball again. I liked the first paintball episode alright, but it wasn't my favorite part of season 1 the way it seemed to be for most others. I wasn't sure what to expect with them going back like this, but with the first one being so popular they really had to. Anyways, they escalated the premise very well. Movie parodies are fine but what I really like are genre parodies, or even better, atmosphere parodies, which the first part nailed. The second part's Star Wars parody wasn't limiting either and really was more of an atmospheric parody too. All the characters were very well used, and it was great that they had “main plot” advancement during an episode where you might not expect it without it being intrusive. That's actually an interesting development, too! Sets up the third season, which I'm now pretty excited for, nicely. So yeah, this was executed well, lots of fun, action, suspense, etc. plus all the good timing and solid character-based humor I've come to expect from the show. It was almost too good. I'm worried they'll feel the need to do another paintball episode next season, and I don't know if it'll be able to keep it up. Maybe they'll do another D&D one, that seems to be a standout for people of this season the way the first paintball episode was for the first season.

Other Community stuff
Since I had seen it all and couldn't be spoiled (yeah yeah spoilers for a sitcom, I just like to go into an episode without knowing already what the premise will be) I decided I'd look around for jokes I might have missed etc. There were a ton, obviously, but I also stumbled on a few communities for Community (I'll probably keep saying this so I might as well acknowledge that yeah that's the same word twice yup haha) and they kinda really weirded me out. Okay first off in general though I still approve. I approve because they're enjoying themselves and not hurting anyone, including themselves, (I hope), and that's all I really need to approve of something. Anyways yeah so the way these people watch the show is totally different from me. Discussion is split pretty evenly between three topics: 1) which character should end up with which character? 2) What character are you like? 3) Which characters do you like or dislike? It's important to note that these categories are usually lumped by character, i.e. a thread gets made, usually many many threads, for each character/pairing/approval/etc instead of threads being made for kinds of discussion. They “ship” stuff, ship it pretty hard, and use that word unironically and unmockingly. They'll dislike an episode because a character they like did something they didn't like. They have like, internal rankings of each character's chances with all the other characters. It's bizarre. The only people who don't do this are the people who go “I don't care who ends up with who, I'm gonna enjoy the show anyways! To me this demonstrates a massive misinterpretation of what the show is actually about. It seems like there's a certain subset of fans for everything that thinks about it like this. Then I started feeling weird because there's shows, particularly slice of life anime, where I'm much more prone to think about the characters as if they were real people and not just elements of the show. But... that's what those shows are designed for, right? It sometimes surprises me when I remember just how differently people can view the same thing. Sort of shakes up my ideas of objectivity in art and such.

Anyways it always strikes me as funny when people massively misinterpret the genre of something so here are a few things to do with genre and things I find funny.

Things I find Funny: Complicated explanations of humour

So I like giving some thought to why I find the things I find funny funny. Like, there, I find that previous sentence funny because of all the ways I could have worded it, I worded it in a way that has a double word at the end, and I find that double “funny” funny. I think this is because I think the way people naturally enunciate words depending on their place in the sentence is interesting, and that people really wouldn't give a second thought to how they enunciate those two “funny”s in such a way that the meaning is clear even though it's a very unintuitive and sophisticated element of speaking a language, and really, since most words have a “natural” emphasis and flow and such to them, the result is that you're saying one of them “wrong”, i.e. you're saying a funny funny.

And there I find that whole paragraph funny because I kept doing the thing with two “funny”s at the end, and I find this sentence funny because it somewhat ruins the joke by acknowledging it but at the same time makes it potentially even funnier by acknowledging the acknowledgment.

I think really esoteric funny things, especially very situational things or things that more just “strike you” as funny versus actually being funny, are some of my favorite funny things because I can't help but picture the whole train of thought required to find the situation funny, and I can't help but find the absurd complexity of it funny as well.

So in these other examples of funny things you should keep in mind that some of the funniness on my end is coming from just how elaborate the examples are.

TIFF: Fake News Team

I want to do a fake news team. It wouldn't be like the Onion where it would be fake news, this would be like, we'd go to a news event with a cardboard video camera and some non-microphone for a microphone and report on it with the other real news teams. I talked about this with a friend of mine and he also suggested we should report on things that are technically news but only really relevant to us, i.e. go report on the Haagan Dazs sale at Sobey's, go ask for a word on the street when some new album comes out, etc, etc. This idea is a bit better maybe because there's not a whole lot of news events we'd be able to just show up at and get interviews and such the way we'd want to, and most of the ones we could would probably be the ones where a fake news team would be really insensitive and in horrific taste i.e. something bad has happened.

I still think this is an okay idea. I'm sure it's been done before but whatever. The more I thought about it the more I think, like, beyond just the gimmick of “ha ha this isn't news but they're taking it really seriously”, there could be the potential for some really cool things. Like maybe we'd go around interviewing people who are like, local legends, like maybe some dude at the barbershop that's been cutting hair for years and years or oh yeah there's a burger place around here that my dad used to go to and he says it's like, all the same people as when he went there 30-some years ago, it'd be cool to shoot a story on that. I dunno.

TIFF: Lame Movie Taglines

Okay origin story. So I'm playing Smash Bros. with one of my roommates. When we play Smash Bros. we often use “tags”. We both have a lot of tags and we usually choose one based on which characters we want to play then and how hard we're going to try and stuff. So since February I've been using the tag “TKOL” for a long time, referring to the Radiohead album The King of Limbs. But I decided a bit ago that I want to play a lot of Young Link and maybe get decent with him (or as decent as one can be without just camping all the time) and I decided I should get a new tag for playing Young Link. My other roommate, who had started watching, suggested “TPOL” for “The Prince of Limbs”. Alright yeah that's a cool concept but then he said a really strange thing which was “Just like Hamlet”. And I'm like okay interesting referring to Hamlet as The Prince of Limbs that's sort of interesting you know like TKoL has this strange aesthetic and almost mythos to it and Radiohead likes Shakespeare so that's a pretty cool thing to think about but I didn't say any of this and then my roommate says “He's not king yet!”. And that struck me and the roommate I was playing with as so funny that we pretty much had to stop the match because we were laughing so hard.

So why is that funny? Alright well the way he said it made me picture it like he was offering it up as like, the tagline to Hamlet. “He's not king yet!”. I said it'd be like if the tagline to the Titanic was “It hasn't sank yet!”. It's just so... lame! Such a desperate attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It's like, the tagline people totally missed the point of the plot, decided to find one element that they figured would sell, and then tried to really hype up the “suspense” of that element, creating an easy conflict or story the audience could look for, really oversimplifying it, etc. We started trying to come up with more and we did come up with a bunch of really good ones but I completely forget them now. Anyways. The other interesting thing is that I think The Hangover Part 2 has a perfect one, which is “We're in Bangkok?”. Er wait I could have sworn I saw that on a poster somewhere but some googling doesn't seem to suggest that so maybe I came up with it or dreamed it or something. So yeah I find this idea completely hilarious and hopefully you can understand why and understand the pattern and maybe SUBMIT SOME OF YOUR OWN.

Something to do with genres

I've been thinking about genres a lot recently, maybe it's due to reading a lot of
Ulysses again and really trying to pick up on the genre parody, which is hard, because a lot of the genres he's parodying don't really exist in any form that I'd be likely to see these days. Old romance pulp, for example. Or maybe it's because I keep trying to figure out what I'm expecting out of each genres, and trying to figure out what genres I've gotten “right” i.e. my expectations from are those most likely to allow me to fully enjoy and appreciate the piece. This sort of stems from when I recently decided I was enjoying brostep “as much as possible” or rather that there was “nothing more I disliked about brostep”, and it was because what I wanted out of brostep had become 100% aligned with what brostep was going to give me. This occurred when I listened to the new Skrillex EP, by the way, and it turned out to be exactly what I wanted from it with such freakish accuracy that I thought I was dreaming. So yeah, genres, it can be helpful.

STDWG: Bad genres

Sometime soon I'd like to write about video games as an art form because hey what the heck everyone does it. It'll probably be mostly about what separates video games from other mediums and one of the things I wanted to mention was that video games were one of the only mediums I could think of where there were genres that were just straight-up bad, like, above not having any good titles in the genre, the very qualities that define the game as being of that genre make it a bad game. I thought of this when I was looking at some seanbaby articles online and he made some comment about how he might be the most qualified person in the world to make the statement that some puppy management game was bad even for a puppy management game or something like that. And then I thought hey yeah that's weird to think of, that not only are there no good puppy management games, I can't even figure out how there could be one. And I spent awhile amused by the idea of what if you made a puppy management game so good that all the critics had to give it high awards and such and then I realized this did happen and it was called Nintendogs. So bun. After that I spent awhile trying to come up with other genres that actually were bad, for any medium. The closest I could come up to was Facebook-esque management games, but they barely qualify as games, and even then, some of the ones like Cybernations were pretty fun in their prime and even the cash-cow Farmville-ish ones are such huge successes that it seems weird, or besides the point, or just generally futile, to call them “bad”.

So I guess there are no bad genres, but that really bugs me, because I think there must be some.

STDWG & TIFF: Genre as movie name

Okay so the funny part of this takes a bunch of explanation which I will also find funny. I got talking to my one roommate about Seinfeld and he was being facetious about it being a “generic” sitcom and such, generally trying to “troll” me as he hadn't even seen it. So I start “grilling” him about what episodes he's “seen” and he gives me funny wrong synopses for famous episodes he's heard of, and then he starts claiming that other sitcom episodes happened in Seinfeld. So I say “I think you've mixed up the words “Seinfeld” and “sitcom”, like, you think every sitcom is the same. And he says something about yeah I'm gonna watch an episode of Sitcom, the sitcom named “Sitcom”. So that was the part I found funny. I also find “sudden quotations” funny, but it will take “a longer tangent than I care to bother with” to explain why.

Anyways so what if someone were to make the definitive example of many genres and just call them the name of the genre? I find this just incredibly cool and I can't really explain why. So you'd have like, a movie called “Mystery” and it would be a mystery, no bones or subversion or anything, it would play the genre orthodox (just realized orthodox and orthopedic have the same root word #etymologyswag), it would just do it extremely well. It seems too often our best genre examples are great because they step so far out of the genre itself, which is a problem because it sort of devalues the innate qualities of the genre. Er well sometimes that's not true, actually, now that I'm looking for examples, it seems like most of the best films are actually pretty inline with their genre's “specs”, but... maybe not as much as they could? Well also we're at a point where the way we think of genres are defined by these great old films and the reason most of the new great action films go outside the realm of typical action films is that the old action film pattern is now seen as “cliche”, and when something is heralded as a “return to form” for a genre it's almost like that's its gimmick, and usually it limits it from actually being considered for true greatness – somewhat ironically, it's now not really compared to other films of the genre.
So I guess I think there's room for this but it would be really hard to do and I can't really fully picture what it would be.

Bloomsday

I feel like I had something more to say about genres or things I find funny.

Oh wait I remember it let's do that first.

TIFF & STDWG: Stereotypes about esoteric genres

A few days ago there was a post on reddit about stereotypes you have based on music genre preference. There were a few pretty funny typical responses but, as I often do when I see a post about music genres, I subverted it by mentioning a bunch of really weird genres to mild karmic applause. Anyways I found writing these kinda fun. Already I find the idea of making up very specific genres for strange music to be really fun, the “parody of hipster blogs” aspect is part of it, but also general absurdity and such too. That, combined with semi-wacky non sequiturs that sort of follow a pattern but don't really (John Hodgman is great at this) adds up to something I find pretty amusing. I wish someone had challenged me to go on with them. I was planning on doing a bunch more in this very blog post but since for the rest of them I mainly just tried to explain what pattern I find funny and not actually try to come up with more examples I'm just gonna continue that.

Plus I want to say a few quick words about:

Bloomsday

So as of this writing it is Bloomsday. Hooray! You might say hey we've had like fifty of these why is this one special? And here is why:

1) This year, Joyce's works fall out of copyright and become part of the public domain! What exactly this will entail legally is somewhat beyond me, but I do know it is sort of a big deal. And if not, it's just a nice excuse because this is also a personally big deal for me because:

2) This year is also when I began to “fully appreciate” James Joyce, er, uh, appreciating maybe 0.1% of his genius versus the 0.0001% of previous years. So I'm excited about that.


Not sure what if anything I will do to “celebrate” but yeah gonna go sleep now so I have every opportunity to do so if I wish.

No comments: