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letterboxd · 3 years

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Chaotic Bisexual.

Shiva Baby writer-director Emma Seligman tells Ella Kemp about expanding her wildly cringey short film into an even more anxiety-inducing feature, why Virgo and Taurus make the perfect producing pair, and the eternal conflict of being a good Jewish girl.

“If I can skip a bris to see E.T., I like movies!” —Emma Seligman

It sounds like a strange riff on a guy-walks-into-a-bar joke: a girl walks into a shiva and bumps into her secret ex-girlfriend, then her sugar daddy, then his shiksa wife, oh, and their baby—yet the payoff is so much more rewarding.

Filmmaker Emma Seligman’s debut feature is a new kind of teen classic: 78 non-stop minutes teeming with well-drawn traits and tropes that define the best coming-of-agers, the best Jewish comedies and the best day-in-a-life psychological roller-coasters.

Shiva Baby began as a grad project—a short film of the same name—and Seligman’s feature-length embellishment impressed at last year’s virtual editions of SXSW and TIFF, where it was quickly snapped up for international distribution. In a way, Shiva Baby was perfectly tailored to the times we were living in: Danielle, our reluctant heroine, is trapped in a claustrophobic family event she can’t escape, as people from her past and lies about her future make their way deep under her skin.

Fred Melamed, Rachel Sennott and Polly Draper in ‘Shiva Baby’.

Shiva Baby is very much the product of a wry school of emerging filmmakers who understand excruciatingly mundane horror and pin-sharp comedy as intimate bedfellows. Seligman’s writing finds a way to flesh out gloriously caricatural Jewish relatives, probing and overbearing and irrational. She does this both through dialogue and a visceral, haptic aesthetic that lurches in and out of focus visually, and has a nails-on-chalkboard unease sonically.

Coming in hot with a 4.01 average rating, Shiva Baby is striking all sorts of discordant notes with film lovers. “Combines some of my biggest anxieties: being asked if I have a boyfriend as well as what my plans for the future are and people talking with their mouths full,” writes Muriel.

The film’s “bisexual chaos”, which hinges on a haywire performance from Rachel Sennott as Danielle, opposite Molly Gordon’s overachieving ex-girlfriend, Maya, is also one of its great strengths. Glee star Dianna Agron is the shiksa threat, Kim, while Danny Deferrari is Danielle’s hapless benefactor, Max. If that’s not enough? Polly Draper, Fred Melamed and Jackie Hoffman are also just there.

What do you think defines a Jewish sense of humor? Emma Seligman: It’s morbid usually, and darker—generally uncomfortable and cringeworthy. I think about Curb Your Enthusiasm or Seinfeld, and A Serious Man. It borders on, “Is this funny at all?” I think Jewish humor leans into the darkly funny British sense of humor. I’m Canadian, so I feel like I’m halfway between the UK and the US in terms of their sense of humor.

Was it always your intention to make a comedy that feels like a bit of a nightmare? You’ve mentioned Black Swan and Opening Night as touchstones… Because I came from a short film, the question when expanding into a feature was, “How are we going to keep everyone interested in this day?” It’s got to be a significant day, it’s got to be that this young woman’s life has completely changed from this day. So what is it that changes? Why are we watching it? I watched a lot of movies that took place in one day, one of them was Trey Edward Shults’ first film Krisha. And then from there I realized that anxiety and this scary psychological feeling is a great way to have the audience stay there.

I watched Opening Night because there’s a shiva in it, but it was more the lobby scenes that were so claustrophobic and tense. And then each step of the way with each department, we were like, okay, it’s gonna be tense, but then we got to music, I was like, okay, this has become a full nightmare. Initially, I was just like, it’s got to be tense, but by the end, I was like, well, it does feel like a nightmare to a young woman sometimes.

Because you mention that, I have to ask whether you’ve seen Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade? I have, it’s incredible. It’s so funny, they’re both coming-of-age [films], and one of them is about a fourteen year old and then the same sort of feeling exists when you’re 22. When you’re fourteen is when it begins, and when you’re 22 you’re sort of at the end of it and you’re like, “Oh, I thought I figured out what I was supposed to do when I started feeling insecure this way at fourteen about sex and boys.”

Diana Agron and Danny Deferrari in ‘Shiva Baby’.

Let’s talk about Rachel Sennott, who you have describe as your “Virgo rock”. What do you bring one another in your creative partnership? She’s a hustler, and she sets goals like nobody else. I think she moves very fast, and I’m more detail-oriented. I don’t know if the movie would have happened without her because she was like, “What are the goals to achieve this film?” After we made the short film, she just kept checking in with me. She goes well beyond what an actor does, which is why she’s an executive producer, because she was very, very invested in seeing the movie get made.

I think she pushes. We joke that she brings me out of my depression and I help calm her down. I feel like Taurus is a little more chill. Virgos are also earth signs, but they run on a faster frequency. So I think I calm her down, especially when we’re writing and bringing it back to structure. But she’s way funnier, she’s able to give jokes so quickly. We balance each other perfectly, for sure.

Do you think your partnership with Rachel is the kind of partnership you could see yourself maintaining throughout your career? Definitely. I think it’s important to have a good friend and also a young woman. She’s got different career goals from me, but they’re aligned. And we’re not in competition with each other. I feel so grateful because so much of the time I feel like the world does make you feel like you’re in competition with your friends that are trying to do the same thing as you when you’re a young woman—or just maybe in general.

Rachel Sennott and Danny Deferrari in ‘Shiva Baby’.

Her character in Shiva Baby completely subverts the idea of a “nice Jewish boy/girl” which can be a trope in movies, but also very much a real thing in life. Is that something you consciously wanted to subvert, or did it come organically from the story you wanted to tell? I wanted to contrast that idea of a “nice Jewish girl” because every nice Jewish girl or boy has a sex life. I felt the sort of nice Jewish girl stressors on me were completely opposite from the NYU art school sugaring worlds, and hookup culture broadly. My family is such a huge part of my life and I think that those two sets of pressures are completely contradictory; to be a good girl or boy and have a stable career ahead of you, and to be finding, even if it’s at the very beginning, your eventual partner, or to just be in a relationship. And I felt like in school, no one wanted to date, everyone was hooking up. So many of my friends are sugar babies. I tried it super, super briefly.

I felt like the world was telling me to be like “an empowered, independent, sexy woman who doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her, and doesn’t abide by any rules”, and I was like, “This is the opposite of being a nice Jewish girl!” And I just felt like those two things were screaming at me. So I did want to play on that. But I don’t even think it’s playing, just because that felt like what I was trying to battle within myself. And I think a lot of young people do, whether they’re Jewish or not. That’s their family’s expectations. And then the world is like, “But don’t care and don’t commit…”

Writer-director Emma Seligman. / Photo by Emma McIntyre

But then you still have to go home to your parents at the end of the day and they’re going to tell you what to do… Exactly.

What would you want viewers to take away from Shiva Baby about the sugaring community that you feel has been maligned in the past? I’m not a sex worker, so I don’t want to speak on behalf of this community, but I definitely feel like there hasn’t been many positive portrayals of sex workers. So I just wanted to show someone—because I knew so many friends of mine who did it—who enjoyed it, or purposefully did it and didn’t feel bad or shameful about it. I think maybe a lot of people think that it’s always something that comes out of dire circumstances. But whether that is the case or not, I think there’s a lot of people who enjoy it and enjoy what they do like any other job. So I just hope that they’re able to sort of widen their scope of what a sex worker looks like and acts like. Every sex worker has got a family, friends, a full robust life, as we all do.

It’s time for your Life in Film questionnaire. Can you give me a few must-watch Jewish films for people who don’t know where to start? Fiddler on the Roof, Yentl, Keeping the Faith, Kissing Jessica Stein, A Serious Man. Definitely Uncut Gems, and Crossing Delancey.

Shiva Baby has been described on Letterboxd, variously, as “Uncut Gems but make it chaotic bisexual”, “the most stressful Jewish movie since Uncut Gems”, “the chaotic successor of Uncut Gems”, “if Krisha and Uncut Gems had a baby”, and, of course, “Uncut Gems for hot Jewish sluts”… Amazing, I love that. Extremely nice comparison.

Who is your favorite promising young woman? Not Emerald Fennell’s film, but a young creative or performer who you think is making waves. I love Hari Nef—I think she’s amazing and am really excited to see what she does next. I loved her so much in Transparent and Assassination Nation, and I don’t understand why she hasn’t been the lead in a million movies.

Molly Gordon with Rachel Sennott in ‘Shiva Baby’.

What should people watch next after Shiva Baby? Those Jewish movies would be a great start. And then Krisha, although I think a lot of people have seen it especially if they’re on Letterboxd! But then those Jewish romantic comedies, and then Obvious Child, all those movies are very sweet and endearing and helped me make it.

Separate from film, if it’s shiva-related then Transparent. If I didn’t have Transparent I don’t think I would have seen world of grounded, nuanced Jews that I could do comedy with. It would have been more in the Curb vein, which is also amazing, but a little more schtick.

What was the first film that made you want to be a filmmaker? My parents are huge movie buffs so I’m not sure there was one moment, but I will say that when I was six there was a re-release of the 20-year anniversary of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and I was at a horribly packed bris and my uncle was like, “Fuck this, there are so many people here, I can’t even breathe. Let’s go see E.T.” That was the first moment where I was like, if I can skip a bris to see E.T., I like movies.

Related content

From Short to Feature: Rob’s list of 2020 films that made the jump

Jewish Cinema (non-Holocaust): Amelia’s list of films “for when u want to celebrate your heritage but don’t want to have to think all too deeply about the Shoah”

Best Directorial Debuts of 2020: suggested by Letterboxd members, featuring Shiva Baby

Follow Ella on Letterboxd

Shiva Baby is now in select theaters and on VOD in the US. Film stills by Maria Rusche.

#shiva baby #emma seligman #jewish filmmaker #jewish director #directed by women #rachel sennott #jewish film #jewish movie #transparent #uncut gems #hari nef #e.t. the extra terrestrial #obvious child #krisha #trey edward shults

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moviemunchies · 3 years

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The Plot of Wish Dragon is Aladdin but in modern day Shanghai. But you know what? It’s still worth watching.

[Before someone jumps in with “WELL ACKSHUALLY, the original story takes place in China--” you can go suck a brick because I HAVE read Arabian Nights and the story of Aladdin takes place in China as described someone who has never been to China and assumed that it had the same societal structure and institutions as the Islamic world.]

Okay so the movie is this: Din and Li-Na are childhood BFFs in a small neighborhood in Shanghai. But they’re split apart when Li-Na’s father becomes an important businessman, and she grows up to be a famous model, whereas Din is still stuck working at his mother’s small restaurant. He hopes to finally meet up with her at her 19th birthday celebration though, and saves up money and skips school to try to make it happen.

But then Din is given a magic jade teapot, and within it is Long, a magic wish dragon that can grant three wishes to the owner of the teapot. He’s been sentenced to serve ten different masters before being able to enter Heaven, and Din is the last one before he gets free, so he’s very eager for these three wishes to be done with. Din, of course, decides to make wishes that will let him reunite with his best friend. However, someone else wants the teapot and the wish dragon it contains, and has hired henchmen who will stop at nothing to get it.

There are a couple of things that stood out about this movie to me: First and foremost, the relationship between Din and Li-Na isn’t romantic? I suppose one could read it that way, but at no point does Din seem to actively pursue a romantic relationship with his childhood friend. When Long assumes that he’s trying to get with Li-Na, Din is quick to correct him that he’s not interested in trying to make Li-Na fall in love with him. It’s in fact kind of cool that the movie’s main relationship isn’t a romantic one, but it is more than a little odd no one else in the story even suggests that Din is in love with Li-Nah. This guy spent ten years trying to get to see this girl who is apparently a famous model, and her dad lets him go to lunch with her, just the two of them, and… no one in-story reads this as being romantic? The closest we get is one of Din’s neighbors makes a comment like “They’re too young to be holding hands,” but to be clear, holding hands is as intimate as it gets between the two.

I’m not saying I wanted this to be a romantic relationship (although I’m sure if someone watched it with shipping goggles, there’s more than enough material here for you); I think it works as it is. But it’s just very odd that it almost never crosses the mind of anyone in-universe to think that these two teenagers who do everything together, make each other happy, and cross social class boundaries to spend time together might be interested in each other that way?

The second thing that stood out to me was that this movie doesn’t feel like a rip-off of Aladdin because it’s got enough of its own heart. One of the things that made this movie work for me was that it’s not just Din’s journey, it’s Long’s as well. Yes, the Genie in Aladdin gets an arc, but Long is arguably the main character as much as, if not more than, Din? The opening of the movie is from his point of view. Whereas Aladdin is about Aladdin learning to be a better person and being honest with who he is, Wish Dragon is about how Long learns to be a better person through his bond with Din. Him trying to reach Heaven is kind of the thrust of the Plot. To be fair, it isn’t as if Long’s character arc is all that original, but it is still fun because he’s a fun character to watch, which is a product of his voice actor John Cho’s performance, his character design, and his animation throughout the movie.

One other thing: this movie is a lot funnier than I expected. I was in a fairly foul mood while watching the back half of the movie and it cheered me up considerably. Maybe I have a stupid sense of humor, because I have seen reviews claim that the humor is juvenile, but it’s silly, it doesn’t rely on pop culture references, and I liked watching these characters be doofuses. There are jokes about how Long doesn’t get the modern world, and usually that kind of thing strikes me as being really boring and lame humor, but the movie didn’t dwell too much on it--Din doesn’t really let Long get too worked up on a single thing long enough to do more than make a quick silly joke.

Also I really like dragons, in general. I mean for my birthday my coworkers just got me a bunch of dragons. Including a cake shaped like a dragon. This may affect my judgment a bit.

I had fun with this movie. If you’ve got kids, or if you need a pick-me-up movie then Wish Dragon could be for you. It’s not that original of a movie, and it’s a bit predictable (aside from not having a romance), but it is fun and silly and the dragon is arguably the main character. So I’d recommend it.

#Wish Dragon #Netflix #movies #Movie Munchies

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the-river-person · 3 years

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Confidential Medical File

Patient Name: Sans Admission Date: 21st RESET, Year 2 of New Era. Doctor: Whimsol M.D., D.O. Recording Transcripts from Psychodynamic Therapy Session 8: Doctor Whimsol: You mentioned that you’ve been depressed and somewhat inactive because of it for some time. Sans: Yeah, Papyrus says I used to be more active. But..uh. The whole endless Reset thing kinda made that pointless. Doctor Whimsol: But you’re starting to be more active now? Sans: Its easier than sitting and thinking about everything. And if I’m going fast people don’t have time to treat me like glass or avoid me, I’m just in and out. They gotta get used to me. Doctor Whimsol: You want their company? Even if you don’t like the way they treat you? Sans: They don’t mean any harm, really. All they’re trying to do is show the Judge the proper respect. But... Doctor Whimsol: You don’t want to be the Judge? Sans: I never did want it. But a thing like that? You can’t really say no. Its a great honor to be asked at all. I guess I just wish it hadn’t been my responsibility. That I didn’t have to make a decision about whether or not to ask for help. I either risk everyone’s ignorance by telling them about all the murder and Resets, or just keep dealing with it myself, forever if I have to. And I could do it, I could be the one who judges and fights. If it meant keeping everyone happy despite what was going on, I could do it forever. But... I just... wanted to be normal. I wanted to be me. Doctor Whimsol: But you are you. You’re Sans the Skeleton. Sans: I don’t feel like a Sans. I feel more like a Walbaum or a Scala. Doctor Whimsol: Ah, Fonts. I’m afraid I’m not very familiar with the Skeleton Clan’s naming conventions. Can you explain what you mean? Sans: They’re used for newspapers. Big precise lines and practical attitudes. Modern and structured, but they have something of the old days about them too. Sometimes Scala can get a little fancy with the opening letter, I had a great Uncle, don’t remember him much now, but he used to be great at introductions. Got everyone’s attention and sounded really interesting and important. But after that he didn’t waste time and did everything the “right” way even if it was boring. Doctor Whimsol: I see. And Comic Sans? Sans: Supposed to be informal, friendly. A sort of jokey font for relaxed things. Good with kids, good for comics. Heh, I guess that’s why its called “Comic Sans”. Doctor Whimsol: You did mention in a previous session that you were having a harder time making puns. I didn’t realize it was such an important part of how you see yourself. Sans: It’s like all my life I had this knack for seeing all the little things in people’s words that made them unintentionally funny. With just a short quip I could make them see it too, make them laugh. Sometimes I’d prank or troll people, not in a mean way, just to catch ‘em off guard. My brother and I had this thing for doing jokes back and forth all the time. Doctor Whimsol: Really? I thought Papyrus hated your puns. You said he complained loudly every time you made one. Sans: Nah. Its because I purposely made bad jokes to annoy him. The same ones. All the time. For nearly a year. I had some original stuff too, but it was funnier to see him overreacting. He still jokes and puns more than even I do, but people assume its unintentional for some reason, he just likes to be high quality in everything he does. Its his charm. Doctor Whimsol: Overreacting? You don’t think he minds that much? Sans: He finds it a bit annoying, but that’s what older brothers are for. Mostly he’s just overreacting cause that makes it all so much funnier somehow. He does say that I could be less obvious about it though. Doctor Whimsol: And now you feel like you’re losing your sense of humor? That could be a sign of high anxiety or depression. Sans: No, I’m not losing my sense of humor. Exactly. When I hear the jokes or puns its still hilarious to me. But its like I’m losing my ability to come up with them, at least on the spot. Doctor Whimsol: That’s actually not that surprising. Sans: Really? Doctor Whimsol: From all you’ve told me, you and your brother moved to Snowdin the year before the Resets began. Though an adult, you’d just lost your parents to a tragedy at the edge of the Hotlands. Sans: *mumbling* the conveyor belt. Dad got his hand caught in the conveyor belt and mum was trying to help him get out. But the steam vents are on an automatic timer and they... didn’t make it. Doctor Whimsol: So it was just you and your brother. You left your job at the Hotland Labs. Especially since your old employer, ...Gaster! Your old employer, Doctor Gaster hadn’t recovered from his injuries in a few decades, and your coworker had been his replacement. Right? Sans:.... I... Yeah. Sure. Doctor Whimsol: And you just wanted to get away, so you moved out here where nobody knew you. Where you could “Just be you” again for a while. Sans: That didn’t last long. The King called on me, as the Judge. Doctor Whimsol: Before the Reset incident? Sans: He wanted me to judge his sins, to tell him to his face what he really was for caving to the pressure and for going through with his plan. So I did. Doctor Whimsol: That can’t have been easy on top of everything else. And then the human came and the Resets started. You said that it took a long time before you started remembering them, but when you did it was like waking up to a nightmare. Is that right? Sans: Yeah. Is this going anywhere? Or...? Doctor Whimsol: You were trapped in the same few weeks. Making the same jokes and doing the same puns. Not only had you lost your parents but you lost everyone else too multiple times only to have them spring back to life. The physical consequences gone, but not the trauma. In the end you got used to it, just going through the same patterns like a script. Why would you even need new jokes? Nobody would remember them, and you had already fallen into the pattern of repeating bad jokes as a way to cope and interact with your brother. Sans: But when everyone started to remember I could still do some new stuff, and I had the occasional prank that no one had seen during all the Reset stuff. Doctor Whimsol: It would be impossible to go that long without ever thinking up something new. But I doubt you ever really had to come up with anything on the spot. It’s possible that you had somewhat of a backup of interpersonal and general knowledge enough to build some quick ones on the spot. But when that backup ran dry... Sans: I had no more material. No more instant jokes. Doctor Whimsol: When nothing changes for a long time, you start to exhaust the creative material you have. Plus you were using it as a coping mechanism, so its not surprising you burned yourself out. Sans: I guess its only jokes, its not a big deal. Doctor Whimsol: It is if its that big a part of how you see yourself. But you said you don’t really see yourself as Sans anymore. Do you like the Fonts you see in yourself? Sans: I guess I don’t mind being a bit more serious, but I dunno about being all precise and perfect all the time, you know? A little fancy, sure, that might even be fun. But I don’t want to be important. I don’t want to be headline news. Doctor Whimsol: You don’t have to be, if you don’t want to. The person who gets to decide what kind of person you are is you. Think about what it is you want to be. It doesn’t have to be Sans, or Scala, or Walbaum. It can be someone new, someone you feel comfortable being. Sans: I dunno. Doctor Whimsol: Take your time. There’s really no need to answer right away. I’ll check in again at our next session and see if anything has come to mind, but there’s no rush. Just focus on relaxing. Don’t be afraid to lean on your brother or your friends if you’re not feeling up to it. Trying to go it alone can be exhausting. Sans: Right. I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks Doc. Doctor Whimsol: I’m afraid that’s all we have time for today. But I think we made some progress. At least we helped to clear up a few things. I do want the chance to discuss the memory problems you’ve been mentioning, though. Next time. *End of recording* Notes: I feel that Sans has undergone a great deal of trauma. Despite appearances he is a very strong individual, especially to have held on this long without a breakdown. Most other monsters or humans would have begun to fall apart long before this. But even the strongest people can’t hold out forever. I wish he’d be more open with his brother and friends about his problems. I am sure it would be of great help. Another concern. While most everybody has that sensation of an invisible aura of rainbow color from the Solution, and most of us have grown so used to it that we forget that it’s there, Sans doesn’t seem to have it. I might not have noticed a year ago. I didn’t notice when I saw the trial on screen, and because we don’t have a means to keep the recordings past Resets I don’t have a way to go back and check. But at the time he seemed vibrant enough, the colorful Sans I’d heard about and seen. Serious for the role of Judge, yes. But was he ever as vibrant as everyone else has become? And what is this strange grey palour that seems to fall about him. When I look close there are nothing wrong with his colors. It’s more like he feels grey, like those with an aura feel colorful. It worries me. I want to check his medical records and see if there was anything strange about the Solution dose when he got it.

#sans the skeleton #undertale #undertale au #aeontale #the great papyrus #sans and papyrus #whimsun #whimsalot #whimsol #undertale therapy #patient file #fonts #comic sans

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blk-chauvinist · 4 years

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Why Women Aren’t Funny

BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

JANUARY 1, 2007

Be your gender what it may, you will certainly have heard the following from a female friend who is enumerating the charms of a new (male) squeeze: “He’s really quite cute, and he’s kind to my friends, and he knows all kinds of stuff, and he’s so funny . . . “ (If you yourself are a guy, and you know the man in question, you will often have said to yourself, “Funny? He wouldn’t know a joke if it came served on a bed of lettuce with sauce béarnaise.”) However, there is something that you absolutely never hear from a male friend who is hymning his latest (female) love interest: “She’s a real honey, has a life of her own . . . [interlude for attributes that are none of your business] . . . and, man, does she ever make ‘em laugh.”

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men. In fact, she equips many fellows with very little armament for the struggle. An average man has just one, outside chance: he had better be able to make the lady laugh. Making them laugh has been one of the crucial preoccupations of my life. If you can stimulate her to laughter—I am talking about that real, out-loud, head-back, mouth-open-to-expose-the-full-horseshoe-of-lovely-teeth, involuntary, full, and deep-throated mirth; the kind that is accompanied by a shocked surprise and a slight (no, make that a loud) peal of delight—well, then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression. I shall not elaborate further.

Women have no corresponding need to appeal to men in this way. They already appeal to men, if you catch my drift. Indeed, we now have all the joy of a scientific study, which illuminates the difference. At the Stanford University School of Medicine (a place, as it happens, where I once underwent an absolutely hilarious procedure with a sigmoidoscope), the grim-faced researchers showed 10 men and 10 women a sample of 70 black-and-white cartoons and got them to rate the gags on a “funniness scale.” To annex for a moment the fall-about language of the report as it was summarized in Biotech Week:

The researchers found that men and women share much of the same humor-response system; both use to a similar degree the part of the brain responsible for semantic knowledge and juxtaposition and the part involved in language processing. But they also found that some brain regions were activated more in women. These included the left prefrontal cortex, suggesting a greater emphasis on language and executive processing in women, and the nucleus accumbens . . . which is part of the mesolimbic reward center.

This has all the charm and address of the learned Professor Scully’s attempt to define a smile, as cited by Richard Usborne in his treatise on P. G. Wodehouse: “the drawing back and slight lifting of the corners of the mouth, which partially uncover the teeth; the curving of the naso-labial furrows . . . “ But have no fear—it gets worse:

“Women appeared to have less expectation of a reward, which in this case was the punch line of the cartoon,” said the report’s author, Dr. Allan Reiss. “So when they got to the joke’s punch line, they were more pleased about it.” The report also found that “women were quicker at identifying material they considered unfunny.”

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

This is not to say that women are humorless, or cannot make great wits and comedians. And if they did not operate on the humor wavelength, there would be scant point in half killing oneself in the attempt to make them writhe and scream (uproariously). Wit, after all, is the unfailing symptom of intelligence. Men will laugh at almost anything, often precisely because it is—or they are—extremely stupid. Women aren’t like that. And the wits and comics among them are formidable beyond compare: Dorothy Parker, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz, Ellen DeGeneres. (Though ask yourself, was Dorothy Parker ever really funny?) Greatly daring—or so I thought—I resolved to call up Ms. Lebowitz and Ms. Ephron to try out my theories. Fran responded: “The cultural values are male; for a woman to say a man is funny is the equivalent of a man saying that a woman is pretty. Also, humor is largely aggressive and pre-emptive, and what’s more male than that?” Ms. Ephron did not disagree. She did, however, in what I thought was a slightly feline way, accuse me of plagiarizing a rant by Jerry Lewis that said much the same thing. (I have only once seen Lewis in action, in The King of Comedy, where it was really Sandra Bernhard who was funny.)

In any case, my argument doesn’t say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don’t dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

Substitute the term “self-defecation” (which I actually heard being used inadvertently once) and almost all men will laugh right away, if only to pass the time. Probe a little deeper, though, and you will see what Nietzsche meant when he described a witticism as an epitaph on the death of a feeling. Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with—and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough. (Perhaps not by coincidence, battered as they are by motherfucking nature, men tend to refer to life itself as a bitch.) Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is. Jokes about calamitous visits to the doctor or the shrink or the bathroom, or the venting of sexual frustration on furry domestic animals, are a male province. It must have been a man who originated the phrase “funny like a heart attack.” In all the millions of cartoons that feature a patient listening glum-faced to a physician (“There’s no cure. There isn’t even a race for a cure”), do you remember even one where the patient is a woman? I thought as much.

Precisely because humor is a sign of intelligence (and many women believe, or were taught by their mothers, that they become threatening to men if they appear too bright), it could be that in some way men do not want women to be funny. They want them as an audience, not as rivals. And there is a huge, brimming reservoir of male unease, which it would be too easy for women to exploit. (Men can tell jokes about what happened to John Wayne Bobbitt, but they don’t want women doing so.) Men have prostate glands, hysterically enough, and these have a tendency to give out, along with their hearts and, it has to be said, their dicks. This is funny only in male company. For some reason, women do not find their own physical decay and absurdity to be so riotously amusing, which is why we admire Lucille Ball and Helen Fielding, who do see the funny side of it. But this is so rare as to be like Dr. Johnson’s comparison of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: the surprise is that it is done at all.

The plain fact is that the physical structure of the human being is a joke in itself: a flat, crude, unanswerable disproof of any nonsense about “intelligent design.” The reproductive and eliminating functions (the closeness of which is the origin of all obscenity) were obviously wired together in hell by some subcommittee that was giggling cruelly as it went about its work. (“Think they’d wear this? Well, they’re gonna have to.”) The resulting confusion is the source of perhaps 50 percent of all humor. Filth. That’s what the customers want, as we occasional stand-up performers all know. Filth, and plenty of it. Filth in lavish, heaping quantities. And there’s another principle that helps exclude the fair sex. “Men obviously like gross stuff,” says Fran Lebowitz. “Why? Because it’s childish.” Keep your eye on that last word. Women’s appetite for talk about that fine product known as Depend is limited. So is their relish for gags about premature ejaculation. (“Premature for whom?” as a friend of mine indignantly demands to know.) But “child” is the key word. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem “The Female of the Species.” After cleverly noticing that with the male “mirth obscene diverts his anger”—which is true of most work on that great masculine equivalent to childbirth, which is warfare—Kipling insists:

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same, And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail, The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

The word “issue” there, which we so pathetically misuse, is restored to its proper meaning of childbirth. As Kipling continues:

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast May not deal in doubt or pity—must not swerve for fact or jest.

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, “Madam, I cannot conceive.”) It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called “the glory of slaves.” So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

The ancient annual festivities of Saturnalia, where the slaves would play master, were a temporary release from bossdom. A whole tranche of subversive male humor likewise depends on the notion that women are not really the boss, but are mere objects and victims. Kipling saw through this:

So it comes that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her.

In other words, for women the question of funniness is essentially a secondary one. They are innately aware of a higher calling that is no laughing matter. Whereas with a man you may freely say of him that he is lousy in the sack, or a bad driver, or an inefficient worker, and still wound him less deeply than you would if you accused him of being deficient in the humor department.

If I am correct about this, which I am, then the explanation for the superior funniness of men is much the same as for the inferior funniness of women. Men have to pretend, to themselves as well as to women, that they are not the servants and supplicants. Women, cunning minxes that they are, have to affect not to be the potentates. This is the unspoken compromise. H. L. Mencken described as “the greatest single discovery ever made by man” the realization “that babies have human fathers, and are not put into their mother’s bodies by the gods.” You may well wonder what people were thinking before that realization hit, but we do know of a society in Melanesia where the connection was not made until quite recently. I suppose that the reasoning went: everybody does that thing the entire time, there being little else to do, but not every woman becomes pregnant. Anyway, after a certain stage women came to the conclusion that men were actually necessary, and the old form of matriarchy came to a close. (Mencken speculates that this is why the first kings ascended the throne clutching their batons or scepters as if holding on for grim death.) People in this precarious position do not enjoy being laughed at, and it would not have taken women long to work out that female humor would be the most upsetting of all.

Childbearing and rearing are the double root of all this, as Kipling guessed. As every father knows, the placenta is made up of brain cells, which migrate southward during pregnancy and take the sense of humor along with them. And when the bundle is finally delivered, the funny side is not always immediately back in view. Is there anything so utterly lacking in humor as a mother discussing her new child? She is unboreable on the subject. Even the mothers of other fledglings have to drive their fingernails into their palms and wiggle their toes, just to prevent themselves from fainting dead away at the sheer tedium of it. And as the little ones burgeon and thrive, do you find that their mothers enjoy jests at their expense? I thought not.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can’t afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren’t that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor. One tiny snuffle that turns into a wheeze, one little cut that goes septic, one pathetically small coffin, and the woman’s universe is left in ashes and ruin. Try being funny about that, if you like. Oscar Wilde was the only person ever to make a decent joke about the death of an infant, and that infant was fictional, and Wilde was (although twice a father) a queer. And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she’s just had? (“And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful.” Peaceful?)

For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because “women get funnier as they get older.” Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn’t that rather a long time to have to wait?

From Vanity Fair

#Men Are The Prize #Anti-Feminism #Humor

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utilitycaster · 5 years

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do you have any tips for getting into CritRole? I got into live plays mostly thru Taz and have been enjoying D20 as well, but CR seems to be more serious from the little I've watched? Humor was one of those things that really helped me settle into Taz and D20. The long episodes also make it seem daunting.

Hi anon,

You know, unless it’s something with a nonlinear structure like Discworld or something I’ll admit I’m always a little confused by questions of “how do I get into this thing” because like...you go to YouTube and you click ‘play’ and do so for between like, 90-odd and 200-odd episodes depending on whether you watch both campaigns or just one. And having written out my long and rambly response and said this like 5 times I want to say it here at the intro: there are a large number of reasons why I specifically am a bad person to ask, probably the greatest of which is I don’t know you or your life and I’m a firm believer that you shouldn’t make any decisions based on what an internet stranger tells you.

With all that said: I’m guessing the answer you’re actually looking for is the answer to one or more of these questions:

“compared to TAZ and Dimension 20, is Critical Role significantly more serious?”

“is using the podcast a reasonable alternative to watching”

“Do I need to have seen Campaign 1 to watch Campaign 2”

“is it really the 4 hour episode length that’s the issue here?”

Feel free to ask me again with a more specific query if I don’t hit on the answer you’re looking for and also I still seem like a resource that would be helpful to you.

Answering the easier questions first: the podcast is a great option and I caught up on Campaign 1 primarily via podcast (I started watching with the start of the second campaign so I’ve watched all of that, though I’ve relistened to a few episodes as podcasts on long drives).

You don’t need to see campaign 1 to see campaign 2; there are some things where campaign 1 knowledge is helpful but none where it’s necessary (and if you don’t intend to watch campaign 1, it’s easy to read the wiki or critrolestats to fill in the gaps) . I like both campaigns but starting with C2 might be an easier investment (not really in terms of length as it’s almost up there by now, but it’s a little smoother to start since they’re used to the format and it begins at the beginning instead of midway through a campaign).

Now: is it serious or funny?

Other than early TAZ Balance when they were mostly goofing around, I don’t think TAZ is explicitly comedy any more so than Critical Role is explicitly serious. I’d put much of Critical Role at the same general position on the funny to serious scale as TAZ Amnesty, and the average Critical Role episode is in my opinion funnier and less dark than The Suffering Game arc of TAZ Balance. In fact last night’s episode of Critical Role had some elements that reminded me of The Suffering Game in it and I was like “oh this is fucking dark”.

While we’re at it, while Dimension 20 is explicitly comedic, The Unsleeping City went fairly dark towards the endgame, and Fantasy High, especially the current livestreamed campagin, has gotten fairly tragicomic at times as well. It’s hard to maintain a long-running campaign that doesn’t have real emotional stakes, even if you’re also trying to be funny, and if someone somehow managed that I wouldn’t want to watch it. Similarly if you’re a group of real friends playing a long-running campaign it’s hard to never have any jokes. I think Critical Role is perhaps less silly at times, but it’s capable of being very funny as well as very serious.

Finally, on episode length: yeah they sure are long episodes. There’s no real getting around that, unless you want to skip around in which case I, a compulsive completist am the wrong person to ask.

You can watch episodes in halves (or quarters, it’s your life). The episode break is a reasonable place to take a real-life break, and that’s how I watch the current campaign - I watch to the break or almost to the break on Thursday night, and then from my stopping point to the end on Friday.

Finally, I should also note that the length of individual episodes only becomes relevant when you’re trying to keep up with weekly episodes. I’m currently very slowly working through Rusty Quill Gaming. Their episodes are just under an hour, but there are still almost 150 of them. I mean, CR also has a huge number of episodes so this comparison isn’t very helpful, but my point is total runtime is the actual daunting thing, not the length of an individual episode. I don’t want to diminish how intimidating it can be - I didn’t start until the second campaign began precisely for this reason - but no advice I would give will shorten that runtime.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #by implication anyway #Anonymous

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johnroycomic · 5 years

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Entirely Free Comedy Class - Week Three Revised

Been a while, but here is the new updated version of Week Three.

My Entirely Free Comedy Class, Week Three

Welcome back. Hope you enjoyed Anthony Jeselnik and James Adomian. I also hope the lesson about different comedy styles and basic joke structure sunk in.

First, I wanted you to see how different comics can be from each other and still achieve greatness. Previous works on standup bothered me in that they seemed to suggest there was a right way or best way to do it. From the outset, I wanted to choose people that would show this was clearly false without me having to come out and say it.

For the Jeselnik video, I wanted you to see the setup/punch structure in its most basic form. I wanted you to see the “setup=expectation, Punchline=surprising fulfillment of that expectation" formula in an easy-to-identify state. You can’t get a much clearer (or funnier) example of the classic joke form than in Anthony’s work.

I also wanted you to see a dead-pan comedy style to contrast with Greg Giraldo’s emotive style. I wanted you to see that both were equally valid options while understanding their differences.

As for James Adomian, I wanted you to be able to recognize those same essential structural elements when they are not as naked as they are in Anthony’s work. You spotted them when they were out in the open. Now let’s see if you can spot them when they are cleverly hidden in a conversational style.

Give It Up For Everyone You Saw Tonight

With your first two weeks complete, you should now have at least six sets under your belt. And you most likely have seen more standup comedians in those two weeks than you have in your entire life leading up to this point. Think about the other performers you saw at your Open Mics this week. Who was the best? Think about their set and then answer the same questions you answered after watching Greg Giraldo's “Midlife Vices.”

How would you describe the comic's stage character, that is to say, the personality they present in their act?

Were the jokes presented as true stories from life? Or clearly false “jokes?”

What made you laugh in their act? Why?

What didn’t work for you? Why? Why do you think it may have worked for others?

How did the comic use their body to get laughs?

How did the comic use their face to get laughs?

How did the comic use their voice to get laughs?

What did you notice that made their act unique?

How did the comic structure the jokes that they wrote?

They're Not All Winners, Folks

Now, of all the comics you saw this week, who was the least successful? Answer the questions “backwards,” just like last week.

How would you describe the comic's stage character, that is to say, the personality they present in their act?

Were the jokes presented as true stories from life? Or clearly false “jokes?”

Why do you think you didn't laugh?

Did anything work in their act? Why do you think those bits worked and not the others?

How did the comic's use of their body fail to get laughs?

How did the comic's use of their face fail to get laughs?

How did their voice work fail to get laughs?

What did you notice that made their act uniquely unappealing?

How did the comic structure the jokes that they wrote?

Did the same person have the best set both weeks? If so, did their sets have anything in common? Write down what elements their sets had in common. How did those elements factor in their success?

If the best comedian this week was different than the best from last week, how did were there acts different? Were any elements to their successful performances similar? Ask the same questions about the performers who were least successful.

Assignment One

Remember when I said you had to write down anything funny that you may have said over the week? I was serious. Pull out your notes. Look over the funny things you said and wrote down last week. Can any of them be made into jokes? Make as many as you can into bits for this week’s set. As always, spend no more than five hours writing this material.

If you didn't write anything down, make sure you start this week. Your jokes won't write themselves. This is the most important element of building a successful act. Write down anything with even a hint of humor in it. Or even a hint of irony or just something you noticed that seemed out of the ordinary. Don't doubt or censor yourself at this stage. Write down anything and everything that strikes you. You will have time to be critical later when you decide which thoughts will go in your act.

Assignment Two

Look over the jokes you've performed so far.. What's your best joke? I know it's only been two weeks, but what joke has gotten the most laughs consistently? If none of your jokes were particularly successful, don't panic, you're doing fine. You've only done this for two weeks. Just pick the one that got any laughs at all. Read it over, watch or listen to any recordings you may have of it, and then ask yourself the following questions.

Without changing the words of the joke, how can I improve its effectiveness?

How can I use my voice to emphasize the important points of this joke?

How can I use movement to communicate this joke more effectively?

Write down the other jokes from your act that got laughs. Answer the above questions for all of them.

What Am I Doing Up Here?

Think about your performances this week. Your stage performance is equally as important to your effectiveness as a comic as your writing. If performance didn't matter, standups would simply print out the jokes, hand them to the crowd to read at their leisure, and it would be just as entertaining.

You need to make sure that, in addition to the words you have carefully crafted to get your laughs, you are doing everything you can with your body and voice to sell your bits to the audience. Make sure that you are thinking actively about what these “non-word” elements are in your act. How are you saying what you are saying? What are you doing while you say it? Are you adding additional power to the words you have written?

I am not asking you to scream and jump around the stage like a lunatic. Your goal is to enhance the effect of your writing, not distract from it. Of course, if you think jumping around like a lunatic is exactly what needs to happen, I'm not going to tell you not to.

However, a non-word element in your act doesn’t need to be big and hammy. It could be as simple as casually walking around the stage and then stopping for effect when it is time to deliver a punchline. Or doing a small double-take when you want to show that something surprised you. Or maybe you want nothing to distract from your words so you remain entirely motionless during a bit. Or whisper the set up and turn your volume up on the punchline for effect. You don’t have to make a lot of noise or over the top motions to make an impact on the audience.

Can You Feel Me?

Now ask yourself this:

How does my stage character feel about what they are saying?

You may find yourself objecting to that frame. “Stage character? My stage character is me! What are you talking about?” I just mean the slice of yourself that you are presentng on the stage. Your “stage character” is the persona you are giving to the audience in the time you have to perform. It's the part of you that you want them to see during your set. This could be as close to you as it is possible to be while being under lights and talking through a sound system. It could be as radically different from your day to day self as Bobcat Goldthwait's early persona was from the way he ordered food at a restaurant. How does this version of you feel about what they are saying? What is their emotional viewpoint towards their words? Do they love that “Their mother is always on Twitter” or do they hate it? Are they afraid when people talk to them in the gym or are they flattered.

Once you are sure which feelings you want to present in your material, ask yourself, “How can I convey these emotions using my face, body, and voice?”

Say you have a bit about how annoying your local post office branch is. When you tell the audience you went to the post office, is there an inflection you could use that might let them know you hate it there? How would you say it if it was your favorite place on Earth? Is there a facial expression you might use? This doesn’t have to be extreme. Yelling every sentence where you are angry and sniffling through every sentence where you are sad would look bizarre. In general, think about how you would convey these emotions in regular speech, and try to do that on stage as well.

There are many ways of relating emotionally to your material. What do I mean by this? Greg Giraldo does his best to infuse his jokes with the emotional state he is conveying. Think of his portrayal of the flabbergasted McCain pointing out Obama’s blackness to the crowd. it is straight forward, direct, and heightened. McCain is baffled and panicked and so Greg acts baffled and panicked when he says McCain's line in the bit.This is his approach throughout his entire act. While he may be sad on one joke and happy on the next, he is going to act out those emotions fully, mirroring with his body and voice the emotion suggested by his words.

By contrast, Anthony Jeselnik uses the same detached attitude towards all his jokes, investing no emotion in the specifics of his stories. No matter what the words coming out of his mouth might suggest, Anthony delivers them with the same cold distance. He then exxaggerates his arrogance to such a degree that the audience gets a sense he doesn't mean any of this. And, every third sentence or so, he gives them a slight smile in between the jokes. The cumulative effect of all this gives a clear message: this isn’t serious. It allows the audience to enjoy his dark jokes, safe in the knowledge that these aren't his actual experiences or opinions.

You will find that in general, standups have a consistent approach to emotion in their act. If they are easily irritated by small things in one joke, they will be that way in their other jokes as well. This helps the audience figure them out, understand their point of view, and invest themselves in the performance. Once you know Lewis Black is prone to working himself into a rage, you get used to it, and learn to anticipate it in the act. You know what's coming and you start to enjoy wondering just how angry he is going to get once he starts a bit. Just like you do with a joke, his character has set an expectation (he's going to get angry) and is fullfilling it in a surprising way every time he explodes with a new burst of creative profanity.

It is beneficial to stick with your approach to emotion throughout the act. You want the audience to get used to you and comfortable with your presence. Performing one joke from Anthony’s detached perspective, and the next from Giraldo’s highly emotional point of view without any justification for the switch will be jarring to the audience. It will work against the crowd's ability to connect with your comedy. This may seem confusing and abstract. It’s OK. Don’t think about it too much. Just start considering how your stage character feels about what they are saying.

Assignment Three Now that you have written down the jokes from your first two weeks that worked, write down the jokes that didn’t.

Did anything work last week that didn’t work this week? Ask yourself why this may have been. Did you perform it differently? Change the writing? What can you do to make it successful again?

Write down the premise of each joke that didn’t work as a declarative sentence.

For example, this classic Tom Papa joke : “Pet owners say pets love being pets. Really? Open the door...”

Becomes “Pets will sieze any opportunity to escape your house.” It feels gross to ruin a joke breaking it down like this, but it helps you understand the foundation your joke is built on and see if it needs fixing.

Look at each sentence and ask yourself:

Does the sentence make sense?

Does the joke you wrote express that idea clearly?

Did your performance help that idea to be understood?

Does it have an element of expectation and a surprising fulfillment of that expectation?

Is the expectation clearly set up before the surprising element is revealed?

Modify your jokes so that you can answer “yes” to all of the above questions.

Take the most promising of these jokes and write it down in its new form. Put the rest of the jokes that didn’t work in the “In the Shop” file you started last week. Every month or so, read the bits in the file. See if a new angle on how something might be fixed presents itself, either from the performance or the writing side. Give it a shot. Sometimes your mind sees a new solution after some time away from the idea.

Assignment Four

Make your set list for the open mics this week.

Last week you went through your jokes from Week One and kept the ones that worked. Do this again for Week Two. Even if you’ve already done a joke six times, you need to get used to repeating the same bit over and over, infusing it with new energy each time. You will be surprised how much better at delivering it you can be once the words are second nature. Jokes improve dramatically when you start with confidence in the material and a knowledge of how people tend to react to it. And it takes many repetitions of a bit before you are no longer worried at all about remembering words and can turn all of your attention towards nailing the proper timing and inflection.

If you had enough jokes that worked these last two weeks, you may find yourself looking at a list that's nothing but bits you've already told. Good for you! But don't just write out a set list full of oldies and go out for your victory lap. Make sure you have room for at least one of the jokes you wrote down as sentences in Assignment Three. And make sure you have room for at least brand new joke you wrote this week in Assignment One.

Fill up the rest of your set with new jokes from this week. You will notice that this is the same process as last week. It will be the same next week, and every week you do standup. This is the never ending “joke refinery” that leads to a great standup act. I call it the Comedy Refinement Process, but that sounds pretensious and gross, like I am teaching graduate science and not the art of making drunks laugh. Maybe you'd prefer calling it the “Cotton Candy Machine” or “The Laugh Grinder,” Call it what ever you like, but respect it. This process has produced every joke I have ever told onstage. This process works. Get used to it, and let it work for you.

How Much Time Do I Have?

It can be hard to predict how long your set will take while you are planning what jokes to do. I am constantly telling you to put five minute sets together, but until you perform the jokes, how do you know how long they take? You don’t want to plan too many jokes to get to, or end up with too few to fill your time. No one wants to find themselves uttering the deadly “So what else is going on... halfway through a five minute open mic set.

Eventually, you will learn to judge the duration of a bit off the page. For now, you have to do it the hard way. Once you have your jokes in order, time yourself saying them out loud. But how do you time how long they are going to laugh? This next thing sounds beyond stupid, but you can allow time for the audience to laugh by saying the words “laugh laugh laugh” out loud after each Punchline. For big, fat, bit-ending punchlines, or if you are preforming for a big audience, say “laugh laugh laugh” THREE TIMES after the last word of your joke. It is possible for a fat applause break to take longer, but if this happens at an Open Mic, you will be so happy you won’t give a shit if you got to all your bits. You will probably want to just get off the stage right then and look like a genius.

It is a crude system, but the “laugh laugh laugh” method is a shockingly accurate predictor of how long it takes a crowd to laugh. I have used this to time sets within seconds. But it is a rare Open Mic audience that will give you the kind of response reserved for the triple “laugh laugh laugh.” Saying it once after each Punchline when you practice your set should give you a good idea what is going to fit in the time you have.

Any One From Out of Town Here Tonight?

If you feel a real call to do crowd work, to get laughs off interacting with the audience, I understand. Please hold off another couple weeks. Get used to the material generating process until it is second nature. Open mic sets are very short, and I want to make sure you get to practice the most successful jokes, the “fixed” jokes, AND the brand new jokes in every set. In a few weeks, when you’ve gotten the hang of it, it will be OK to add a minute or two of crowd work to your set. Keep in mind, though, that a comedy open mic is perhaps the worst place on Earth to do crowd work. It's an audience full of comedians. They are not going to act in any way like a regular person at a comedy show would. Expect resistance, silence, or constant one-up-manship if you attempt to “Spritz” at an open mic.

The “Shit Sandwich” Structure.

“Okay, so I have selected my jokes for the week. What order should I do them in?” Good question. I like a set structure I named after a line in “This is Spinal Tap.” In the movie, the fake rock band made an album called “Shark Sandwich” and a critic wrote a one word review: “Shit Sandwich.” Funny, and also a great discription for the way I structure my standup performances. You can use it in any length of set and it will serve you well. It is by no means the only way to structure a set list. It may not be right for you down the road, but try it for now.

This structure is based on the psychology of the audience. It is great for open mics because it gives your new bits the best possible chance at being well-received by the listeners.

I call it the “Shit Sandwich” because your best jokes are at each end (the bread) and your newest, most unsure stuff is in the middle (not that any of your jokes are shit, of course, but you get the idea.) You open with your biggest, quickest laugh. This establishes that you are funny, winning the audience’s confidence and trust. Do another bit that you know works after that, so the audience builds a positive impression of your act.

Then, do the newer jokes dead center. The crowd will be more willing to take in your new stuff with an open mind now that you have built some trust and good will at the top of the act. Also, If they don’t work, it won’t ruin the good feeling you built at the beginning enough to derail your whole set.

Close with another thing that usually works, so you reward the crowd for sticking through the experimental stuff and leave them with a positive impression of your act. Give the good seals a fish treat for their patience.

This structure allows the audience the maximum chance of enjoying your set while creating a safe space in your performance for you to take a risk.

You are simply arranging your set so the most unsure material is in the center, with the best stuff on either end. This way, the Sandwich can expand or contract to fill any length of show you desire. It is simple, elegant, and versatile.

Assignment Five

Arrange the set list you made in Assignment Four into a Shit Sandwich. Put the joke that worked the best in the last two weeks at the top. The second most successful joke second. The one you're trying to fix after that, Then a new one or two. Finally close with something that worked last week. If you are ony getting two or three minutes, obviously, you have less room. Do the best joke, then a new one, then the one you are trying to fix. If you have enough time, close with another joke that has worked for you before.

Assignment Six

Watch the following videos:

Google “Patton Oswalt KFC Bowls.” Then Google “Jay Larson Wrong Number Laugh Factory.” Then Google “Dan Mintz Letterman.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfan5MacmsI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvHZBlHbN3c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFO0CkSiZfI

As always, answer our favorite questions after watching their sets.

Video Questions

How would you describe the comic's stage character, that is to say, the personality they present in their act?

Were the jokes presented as true stories from life? Or clearly false “jokes?”What made you laugh in their act? Why?

What didn’t work for you? Why? Why do you think it may have worked for others?

How did the comic use their body to get laughs?

How did the comic use their face to get laughs?

How did the comic use their voice to get laughs?

What did you notice that made their act unique?

How did the comic structure the jokes that they wrote?

It is important to try and understand as many different approaches to comedy as you can. Now that you have thought about each comic’s approach, answer this:

How do the two comedians use non-verbal elements in their act?

Write down one thing each comedian does with their face or body to make their material connect.

What is their approach to emotion?

Find one line from each comedian’s act that conveys a strong emotion. How did they deliver this line? Did they do anything with their voice to enhance or to downplay the emotion in their words? What?

Patton Oswalt presents many characters who all feel differently about the KFC Bowls.

How many different viewpoints does he present?

How do you know they are different characters?

How does he underline this with his performance? How does he show you when he’s switched parts?

Which point of view does Patton seem to agree with?

How does he let you know?

What can you learn from this set about differentiating between characters in a joke?

What can you learn about clearly presenting conflicting emotions?

Watch Dan Mintz on Letterman.

What is Dan Mintz’s emotional relationship to his jokes?

Hint: He definitely has one.

It is well chosen and specific. Does it seem appropriate to what he is talking about? Is he closer to Anthony Jeselnik’s approach to emotion or Greg Giraldo’s?

Describe the mood and emotional state of Dan’s stage character.

In what ways is it unusual?

How does he make subtle use of his body, face, and voice to convey this?

How does this affect the way the things he says are viewed by the audience?

Find a laugh Dan gets from the disconnect between what he is saying and how he seems to feel about it.

Look at your own bits from the last two weeks. Do you use any similar techniques to the comedians you watched this week? Do you know how you are using emotion in each of your jokes?

Assignment Seven

Write down a list of the emotions you convey in each joke. Ask yourself how you can convey it clearly, both verbally and non verbally. If all this stufff about emotional viewpoints seems like too much to pile on to material that you are still working to just get out clearly, don’t deal with it this week. Work on what we learned last week until it feels comfortable before adding new elements. It is ALWAYS cool to skip a week, as long as you keep going to your Open Mics, writing new jokes, and refining your set the way I taught you. It’s an on-line course after all. Move ahead at your own pace.

But when you are ready, I want you to begin to consider the following elements when you develop your jokes:

Can the audience understand your premise?

Do they know how your stage character feels about this premise?

Do you use the most concise and colorful language you can?

Does it have elements of expectation and surprise?

Do you use your voice and body to perform it clearly and effectively?

All of these elements will ensure that your material has the highest chance of success.

And that’s it. Give the “Comedy Refinement Process” another week. Think a little about emotion in standup comedy. Try and make a Shit Sandwich. Perform this set at least three times. Record your observations. Kill ‘em! Contact me with any questions and I’ll see you in a week.

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pass-the-bechdel · 5 years

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue.

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics.

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it!

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that.

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be.

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury.

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash.

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’.

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises.

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right?

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it.

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’.

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

#Avengers: Age of Ultron #Marvel Cinematic Universe #Bechdel Test #female representation #MCU #Age of Ultron #Avengers

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medicslacks · 6 years

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Yooo I know I post super sporadically and I am atrocious at responding (even though I regularly do read my messages, and even if it takes me literally 3 years I promise ONE DAY you will suddenly and very randomly get a response. You may already have graduated med school by the time I respond to a message you sent me when you were still applying to med school), but I just wanted to share a little story about what it's been like on the aforementioned other side of med school.

Right so this definitely isn't the structure of all hospitals, but at mine, each Medical specialty has it's own ward- so there's a Cardiology Ward and a Respiratory Ward etc., but there are just 'Surgical Wards' shared between patients under all of the different Surgical Specialties. There are Medical and Surgical On Calls and you're randomly shifted to be On Call with people from all the random Specialties within either Medicine or Surgery.

So on Surgery at the minute, because the Wards are shared- you get to know all the different doctors from the different Specialties. What's also odd is that some of the Surgical Specialties Cross-Cover their Juniors. Like Gen Surg and Colorectal F1s-CT2s will cover the other team if more Consultants had a List. So you have to work really effectively with completely different people all the time. And sometimes you're completely on your own because the rota has shifted all your regular Seniors onto different teams that day to cover all the Consultant Post-Takes, or they're in Theatre/ Clinic. It's been a lot of fun getting thrown in with SO many new people at once and being able to- have to, even- get to know them so fast.

I was On Call over the weekend and it was weird how because on Surgery we all kind of know each other and have had chats in MDT offices together, or have worked together and joked around together, and gotten to know each other somewhat, you become weirdly friendly with people who you have like a 20 year age gap with.

But it's also kind of strange, because some of the Regs are only 28 or so and they're only a few years older but like... they're married with kids and have such Senior status in the Hierarchy of Hospital. And yet, weirdly they're kind of now... work friends. Because we've all at some point had to work together to try and save lives.

And they make the job fun.

I'd say for me that's the best part of being a doctor. Working together with so many different people to try and help patients, and each other- nurses who will "borrow" a chest drain for me from their locked supply cupboard and then meticulously talk me through how to connect everything 'hypothetically if I should ever need to know, of course' and Regs who I've never even directly worked with getting worked up and immediately escalating to the Consultant on my behalf when some random guy in the radiology department was rude to me to the point of it being obtrusive to the care of my patients, and the ward pharmacist who will just Bleep me personally to fix an error my Consultant made in days prescribed of Clexane cover (the Trust policy only changed a month or so ago) on discharge instead of reporting it and getting a load of shite showered down on us. And fam, lemme tell you, the Costa Baristas have my regular order ready before I've even reached the till it is a gift.

The above was just a little ode to all the colleagues who make every day a little funnier, friendlier and just generally a little bit more bearable when, on the worst of days as a doctor, your patient who was packed and ready to go home can have a sudden cardiac arrest and pass away less than an hour before his wife got there to drive him home.

#medblr #studyblr #uk medblr #uk studyblr #fy1 #doctor life

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

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I was wondering if you could pls describe (or show me some tags if its easier) the traits of some writers of spn..? I usually hear "X writer usually writes more sam" or "this strucutre is usual in X's episodes" but I've never been able to pick on those; the only ones I've been able to pick up are bucklmming and its beacuse they are somehow instantly bad :/ ps. u dont have to like explain EVERY single writer or anything, just general things that you know or notice in their respective episodes

Hiya :D

Yeah, it’s a thing that’s really, like, aside from Buckleming being bad and coming with a warning notice that we’re all helpless, please don’t burn the fandom down after their episodes, it’s not really more than nerdy interest that means anything about knowing who the writers are, so in that sense you have the toolkit you need to function :P

Buuut from my very very deeply nerdy and writery observations through what is now more than a decade (eep) of watching this bloody thing…

The show starts with a Generic Tone, and most of the original writers have this tone. This is in NO WAY a bad thing, but of all the writers, you have to really delve to connect common themes in their episodes, and for many of the writers who didn’t endure out of seasons 1-5, we don’t really have a clear profile on their habits, for reasons I’ll get to.

We can see Sera Gamble’s fingerprints a bit more because we get 2 seasons of her as a showrunner, but by and large as one of the original writers, she really sets the tone so her writing IS Supernatural, as much as Kripke or John Shiban or Raelle Tucker or Cathryn Humphries and whoever else wrote multiple episodes seasons 1-5. They have things they might like but dropping into a random early episode doesn’t give much away because they had a much tighter playbook.

1x13 shows this because despite serious, painful hindsight of all the things they do wrong that we recognise NOW from seasons of their nonsense, Buckleming wrote far more to the brief than they ever do these days; the difference in style has to be almost entirely attributed to being a first season and close creative control and enforced use of a playbook that disguised a ton of their worst habits which go unchecked these days, and @justanotheridijiton has dug up evidence of them cheerfully commenting on writing in such a way into deep history >.> Despite it being technically their best episode, they were fired and given a 6 year writing ban until Kripke left. So I’m guessing it was fairly obvious they had these problems regardless.

Of all these writers in the early seasons, Edlund pops up in season 2, and he is a wild card with a personality, and he does not write ~generic SPN~ and never did: it’s always Edlund SPN and it gels perfectly with the slightly less technicolour SPN, frequently breaking the format and creating the modern version of SPN… If he does comic it’s Bad Day at Black Rock and if he does deep it’s On The Head Of A Pin, and if you look at what he wrote, very very few of his episodes are duds, because he has a brain swirling deep with interesting and bizarre nonsense. He’s also the biggest Cas stan ever.

Jeremy Carver pre-Carver era helped, which I think is why he gets to be part of Carver Edlund - we have 3 and a half years of his showrunning to know what fascinated him, so I’ll just say, in his very first episode in season 3, he alludes to Cain and Abel for the first time. He’s very big on narrative structure being used in fascinating ways, and his episodes are all very technically accomplished, but the downfall was that by the end he was writing narrative symbolism as a sort of withered husk of his former self with no emotion whatsoever, just hitting storytelling marks. 11x01 is the single most depressing episode to me in terms of “this is the man who wrote Mystery Spot and Changing Channels”

Fortunately, and I’m skipping over a ton of writers to tell this story, but could go back and talk about more of the interesting ones in between, if you watch 11x01 and 11x02 back to back, they work perfectly as a single episode and it’s like after the break all the life and emotion and intrigue is breathed back into the show in a rush of colour and character. Now, Dabb is one of the OG writers in my standards, in the sense that he and Loflin showed up in season 4, and to this day Dabb’s writing to me still shows a touch of writing within the original SPN playbook as a writer who CAN write alongside Kripke, Gamble, etc, and chameleon into the background as not writing Dabbnatural, but writing Supernatural. To me this is a part of his strength when it comes to story and why he and originally Loflin shot up the ranks in Gamble era to the point where they wrote 7x23, and from there Dabb always wrote the second, middle and last episode in a second-in-command writer role, which, now we hit season 14, means that’s half the length of the show he’s been clearly estimated as one of the powerhouses.

Because he had a co-writer for 4 years, originally you might think that it’s hard to tell what he is and isn’t writing, but he and Loflin split up, I hope just to ease empty seats in the writer room, and we get 2 Loflin episodes which betray a few of his weaknesses when it comes to story/structure/pace, but reveal he was the quippier, funnier, more manic one of the two. Like, I’d say Plucky’s (my no joke favourite episode) is probably something where he would have steered it more than Dabb :P But Dabb meanwhile, writing alone, writes 8x08 which is also funny but in a very sublime way based on situation and framing etc which makes us laugh without breaking up the story for quips so much as coming from character, such as “it’s a shortened version of my name”, “stop smelling the dead guy, Cas,” and ALL the uses of cartoon effects as part of the embedded storytelling. It’s like his resume for considering what he can do as a solo writer and he blows it out of the water.

Dabb is very good at characters who might have brief one off appearances, like, even within a scene, but still have a bunch of unique personality, as well as excellent handling of the main characters, and he can write some killer speeches and emotional pleas and stuff. He’s also absolutely filled with callbacks and repeats and narrative loops, and he started this on a smaller level, either to his own episodes, or dutifully doing his job to foreshadow and build the mytharc, but in Dabb era, this has turned into absolutely exploding the show’s callbacks into a weird fractal of meanings, which I think works wonderfully for supporting a 14 year old show on its own legs, because each callback and loop goes in a different, often wild direction, but still at the same time has an emotional continuity and truth to the story based on the story predecessors. The fact he writes like this is of no surprise to meta writers who’ve been keeping tabs on him far longer than I have. In fact, a combination of all Dabb’s strengths put to work versus his One Weakness, his kryptonite, is a terrible story of Lizzy’s hubris of not paying attention to the show and a hard learned lesson :P

After 10x21 I was utterly bereft and hated the show for what it had done, but I was gonna keep watching, as sarcastically and eye-rollingly as I could, and 10x22 started to deliver in spades. Dean drove ALL THE WAY down south and back, somehow missing Cas tailing him (without a car, we later learned) and all while Sam was on an urgent timeline to get things done before Dean got back… driving an hour back and forth in the immediate vicinity of the Bunker. The last times we see Sam are Urgent Driving Montages to get there in time while he’s basically coming from up the street, and meanwhile, Dean and Cas have logged like 20 hours of driving plus farting around murdering people, and I was GLEEFULLY tearing this episode to SHREDS for its car continuity, like, HOWLING with laughter.

Anyway I took a break to get some tea and came back ready to eye-roll through the end of the episode, hit play, and walked smack into the DeanCas confrontation and dramatic speeches about everyone you love could be dead, except me, and accidentally got so tense and enraptured that I spilled an entire mug of scalding tea down my front when Dean attacked Cas and I jumped out of my skin and screamed and then yelled again because OH YEAH I WAS HOLDING TEA, and from that day on I have A: loathed Dabb for his car continuity and B: always kept my eye on that fucker and when it’s his episode and what he’s up to… Once burned etc…

Dabb’s squad are awesome though. Obviously excluding buckleming, and I think with all the bingos and complaining you know what to look for in their episodes :D

Berens has been around since season 9, which makes him a veteran in remaining writers terms, just because Carver era had an en masse leaving when contracts were up (no hard feelings, just bad timing and Berens had been newer than all of them at one point :P) Berens is another writer I think can occasionally dip into pretending to be generic SPN on some mytharc episodes but he’s just obviously not been around in ye olde days, and joined in the time when, through Gamble era and then Carver in spades, the MotW writers in particular really fell into a new style of writing the show that I absolutely adore, which is where the individual episodes rather than mytharc stuff were increasingly left to the writers to do whatever they wanted with, and become more and more writing style and structure etc as standalone canvasses for your own skills, personality, etc. Because you CAN’T keep writing the same SPN episode over and over and over, and if one of the season 1 writers came back and wrote a season of season 1 style episodes, they’d be stiflingly boring, in tone and range, compared to what we have now. To keep people interested after so long, quirkiness and the ideas that an individual writer brings to the table as THEMSELVES, becomes increasingly the only way forward to keep the show fresh. Season 4 onwards began to have more of this, and Edlund had been doing it since his first episode anyway, but to me season 6 has very specific feeling tones for the episodes, while season 7 and Robbie Thompson’s arrival in particular start to set the tone for allowing the writers to be adventurous, and to me season 7 is the shift to the style of season we had from then onwards.

I think Berens episodes feel quite muted and cleverly restrained, but really really intelligent behind that. He’s written some incredible episodes that turn the season on the head while being standalones, and his run of 14th episode being where things were knocked out of the park but on a small stage, like, conflicts in a storage unit, barn, submarine, the BMoL hq and an abandoned hotel, all have devastating and dramatic emotional consequences while still somehow seeming understated and natural, quiet, almost, in the sense of what they turn on - looks and small agreements and emotional revelations etc. He doesn’t do fun and loud and flashy very often, and he delves very serious themes of suicide and depression, so I read his episodes and quiet, powerful, and very very pointed and driven and well-constructed to get to that point. His back and forth between scenes for dramatic irony is one of the biggest features I enjoy and identify, and that was an overall theme in season 13, on a much bigger level. 13x21 and Sam’s death, and, well, the whole thing really, was a wonderful example of the tension he can hold you in this way. Also: proof he CAN have fun but only when it’s super gay :P

I think Meredith Glynn gels really well with his writing, to the point where they co-wrote an episode within her first year on the show and then she took over the 14th episode slot for the first time since Berens got to the show and wrote an excellent episode that you could have told me was one of his and I’d have believed you, since it was structurally very very similar to any of his episode 14s which I have legit started seeing as a subgenre of the show in my own weird brain sorting way :P She has a great deal more fun though. She accidentally made the Worst Timed Episode Ever In The History Of Anything with 12x05 and I think got off on the wrong foot with fandom, but since then every episode has been an improvement on the last, and she’s had some absolutely wild rides, with 13x08 being I think her masterpiece overall, though Gog and Magog are funnier as an individual set piece :P

Her writing is playful and fun and shows a deep care for the character histories and how they affect them - 12x11 is hard to believe is someone’s 2nd episode if you don’t think the new writers did their homework, because she absolutely guts Dean, and throws in a Rowena backstory freebie along with, AND handles Sam handling Dean with perfect ups and downs and brotherly affection and horror etc. I also think her Gabriel episode is the best Gabriel episode ever, for him as a character, and in terms of fun, the unholy combination of her writing and Speight directing and acting and also acting was utterly unbelievable. 10/10 would use as the episode to drag friends back to the show if they only saw seasons 1-5... It’s not even comparable with her other episodes, because she seriously levelled up as a writer while doing it. I can’t wait to see what she is up to next season :D

Davy Perez is like the dark side of the coin of Glynn, where he is fun but dark as fuck, and 13x11 has the best example of that with his cheery music-playing serial killers, but it’s an attitude he’s had all along. He does his best with Buckleming characters they do their worst with, so he singlehandedly made me think things for Crowley weren’t going to be as bad as they were in season 12 with 12x12/15 and he absolutely was the only person to give Ketch and Asmodeus anything resembling an interesting dynamic in 13x17. 12x12 was an absolute masterpiece of non-linear writing, which requires a good brain to do and then he made it funny AND all while ripping off tarantino but in SPN and not making it corny and writing Cas and Crowley’s most dramatic love confessions… 12x04 was my personal reassurance that Dabb era was going to care about Sam again after Carver neglected to deal with his shit for 4 years while dumping on him in the narrative, and Davy betrays the old Gamble sam girl traits of doing stuff like tying him up and telling us in the same breath his heart is worth 100x its weight in gold :P

His episodes are wacky and fun in a way that draws blood and makes you seriously fear for the characters, even ones you think are fine and can’t possibly die in that episode, and his darkness frequently takes what looks like it could have been a Buckleming brief and makes you care about the characters they’ve been mauling all season in their own mis-applied love of writing the villains. You NEED someone who loves writing the villains, and Davy has a real relish to it that doesn’t woobify or jerk off to their evilness, it just makes them raw and scary to the point where you might actually believe Asmodeus is threatening for half a second, or that Crowley could win season 12, or to sell us on Ketch having a glimmer of a soul.

As for Yockey… I don’t know where Dabb found him but thank GOODNESS he did because sometimes you just need to take a random gay playwright with minimal TV experience, throw them into your writers room, and say, here, go nuts. Yockey has written like half a SPN episode and multiple literal excellent stage plays that are somehow on screen with our characters, which got to the point where in 13x19 I wrote like 40k episode notes while openly weeping because my Literature degree was being yanked so hard :P His nonsense often has multiple amazing side characters, like, sometimes a LOT of amazing side characters, and he knows how to make them all work. He literally has rude mechanicals like in 13x19 and the poor drunk angel. Shakespearean tropes. If you’re ever watching a SPN episode and it’s like why is this person writing for us and not a world famous literary darling? then it’s probably a Yockey episode. I am still struggling with how to handle it, and describe what’s going on, and all I can think is of 12x10 where an article about it literally was like, here is every single episode Cas has ever been in, and how this episode pulled on it and turned it into magic gold. Like, now 4x16 and 6x20 are the straw that Yockey turns to gold. I am too emotionally compromised to write something coherent and non-fangirlish about Yockey because he’s like, #writergoals in a totally bananas set the bar as high as the moon kind of way. He’s got that rare once in a generation talent and dammit I think he counts as my generation, so there goes my chance to be that person :P

And he’s writing for fucking Supernatural.

#Asks

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myfriendpokey · 6 years

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receipt king

What's the difference between a paid game and a free one? In my opinion, one of them costs money, although various qualifications could be made. But maybe what's important is not the fact of purchase but the moment of purchase - that singular, legally recognised and binding moment where you hit the buy button or put the coin into the slot. Since after all the ways in which you really engage with, or even claim, a videogame can be spread out, blurry, diffuse.

Maybe it sits on your hard drive for a year before you play it, or in a notepad file full of steam keys, maybe you played it on and off in sessions too split up and individually indistinguished to solidify into a single instance. You can "own" both a paid gameand a free one but it's hard to feel your relationship to the former is not somehow more solid - maybe because it's founded on that moment of exchange, and not just the more transitory moments of lived experience. Experience comes and goes but purchases can be logged, tracked, indexed.

Maybe all the people who keep buying reissues of Chrono Trigger for every platform it comes out on are just laying a more 'real', economic foundation to support the expanded dream-Chrono Trigger that exists in their heads… Holding on to the receipts!

***

For a videogame to be sold is for it to exist in a network of exchange relations with, say, chairs, fruit, labour... And the implication is that these things can be compared but also that the comparisons can be quantified. A game is cheaper than a cup of coffee - or four times more expensive than a new movie, and both of these give us a picture of how it fits into the spaces of our life.

It also lets them take on a sort of objecthood-by-proxy, as another in the catalogue of commodities, which is increasingly important as the actual ontological status of a videogame gets ever more uncertain. Are you buying a program, an installer for a program, a temporary access pass for a program stored online, a program which runs using a server which remains in the company's control, a set of new assets, are you unlocking a set of existing assets which shipped with the game and were just stuck behind a paywall?

Emilie Reed has written about videogames in a museum context - with the expectation there that they get reframed as "singular objects", to fit the needs of an institution which has historically trafficked in singular objects. Maybe we can also think about this movement for objecthood in the context of the market - and that, since for at least forty years videogames have been a market artform, this movement was reflected on the aesthetic level as well. When people talk about a videogame as a "world", as a closed, alien space of object relations to be examined and explored at will, are they talking about the bare digital structures of the Game or about the mysterious opacity of the Object? Perhaps the unknowable heart of the commodity is the true "bonus room", ha ha ha 8p

***

(I remember when Mountain was something of a critical talking point, and at the time I maybe crassly wondered if it was the production values - since there were plenty of glorious trainwrecks games making basically the same nonsequitor joke but it somehow only merited attention coming from a paid game with stylised graphics and lotsa assets… Now I wonder if it was specifically the saleability of Mountain which generated that fascinated reaction, as the dismissal of not-games wrestled with the deference thought due to the commodity. Which makes all those posts about the zen qualities of staring at it seem much funnier in retrospect.)

***

Anyway.

The free game / paid game thing is something that interests me because it's basically something I grind up against all the time, when I'm making things, and slowly need to come up with the vocabulary to deal with. The dream is always to "just make things" - you'd work on what takes your fancy and then figure out at the end whether it worked as a saleable product or not, which environment to release it to. But the problem is that even speculating something could be a paid game is enough to drastically change how you view it. What works in a free game absolutely does not in a commercial game, and vice versa.

I don't think anybody at all would have played Magic Wand if it came out for free, for example - that game could get away with being tonally muted and laid back because it took place within the bubble of objecthood that comes with being sold, and those qualities are experienced much differently in a free game.

A free game is one with no immediate comparison points - it could end after 5 minutes, after 50, it could demand your time and energy to no return... it lacks the "guarantee" of a pricetag, the guarantee of existing in some stable relationship with other objects. A commercial game could be the barest early-access WIP, or just some printed screenshots in an envelope. But the fact that it was sold at all grants it some of the enclosed legibility of the object, while free games conversely exist in the world of pure experience, which I think Hegel memorably described as a bloody head flying at you through the dark. Dreams, hallucinations, memory, etc.

***

So maybe we can think of commercial status as part of what Michael Brough calls the "grain" of a work, part of that network of processes and feedback which we either glide with or grind against while producing a thing. To make a free game paid is to change how it's read. The gaps which your attention span could easily skip over in a free title become unbearable contained within a fixed, sealed object. You begin to draw the contours and to fill in the gaps... The game becomes more ornate, detailed, denser within this narrowed scope, with a kind of symbolist langour and inertia seeping into the whole thing - the inertia of the product.

It may be hard to make a videogame into a narrative but to be sure it's harder to turn a product into one, a product which necessarily has something circular and static within the very foundation. The presumed audience for a product is like the little dude in the middle of the panopticon - everything is arranged panoramically for their benefit, necessitating a certain vagueness of temporal relationship, while a free game is arranged for the less predictable, less reliable, eye of the attention span as it moves through an unknown space. I like making both types of games and don't mean to imply one is either more mature or more subversive than the other, whatever those terms mean in this junk-ass consumer format. But it's not quite a matter of pure preference, either.

***

Archiving games can be notoriously difficult and I imagine this goes double for free ones - it's one thing to document, say, the NES library which at least has some kind of fixed scope for inclusion, trade magazines to consult, physical copies to track down... and even then there's always the frontier of, yknow, bootleg Dendy cartridges, nobody knowing when Mario came out, stuff like that. At least in principle it can be boiled down to a finite list of titles and release years. Who wants to deal with the messier and more nebulous task of recovering all the RPG Maker projects that briefly got hosted on Rapidshare in 2007? And even then, would it make sense to organize these games by a similar neat list of release dates?

Commercial games can afford the pretense that they "happened" at a singular point in time and that this singular point takes priority over the broader mulch timeline in which they were stumbled across, played, looked at, made fun of. It's not that you can't make a similar claim for the release point for freeware - it's just that it might mean a different thing, and I think it can be valuable trying to think of those games as something other than "commercial games that happen to cost $0". If to be released for free is to engage with a fundamentally different context and set of assumptions - to deal with and work around a kind of vanishing experiential quality, rather than the fixed objecthood of the product - then it's hard to work out how to talk about and memorialise that without converting it into its opposite.

I've always wanted to write about more freeware games but how do you do it? Pick out a handful to talk about and avoid as much as possible the question of dealing with the endless churn? Elevate a few to ambassador standing? To pick a random RPG maker game and say "Crystal Masters 2 came out in 2008" can be to imply, like, a launch party, or some immediate impact, or that anybody at all paid attention or cared - which in turn can distort the actual expectations of how these things would be recieved that to some extent affected their aesthetics and structure. It’s still better than nothing, and I’m being pedantic – but it's hard not to think about it when at times it feels like the only way this stuff can be written about and preserved is as a set of attenuated best-ofs, by either becoming a product or by being treated as one.

I think if most of my games have been commercial lately it's less a question of expecting to get money from them and more because that sometimes feels like the only way they'll still have some kind of trail left in 10 years. I always liked the idea of making time capsules and just hiding them away in a rabbithole somewhere for people to find. Right now it feels like the types of videogame spaces I'm most comfortable in - the kind least hung up on ideas of importance - are archival ones, digging through the debris of the past, curious about what they'll find. In reaction I guess to what feels personally like increasingly calcified, unliveable contemporary or franchise-oriented spaces of culture it can feel freeing to think about the other ones, of things instantly forgotten or which barely existed at all. Blind albino cave salamanders - - 64!!

(images: castlevanias ii and bloodlines)

#caves #games #gamechat

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maxsmusicmacrology · 4 years

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Cliffhangers and Coffin Dances: Laughing in the Face of Death

Roundabout is a progressive rock track by the English rock band Yes. Released in 1971 for their album “Fragile”, and has since become one of their most popular and most recognized songs. It’s a lengthy track featuring poetic lyrics and long solo sections, but it’s most distinct feature may be it’s intro. Roundabout starts with an extended acoustic guitar riff consisting of incredibly sparse notes, before reaching a drop that completely switches the mood of a song. Give it a listen:

youtube

Hirohiko Araki, creator of the Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure series, cited Roundabout as one of his inspirations for the series, and when the manga finally received an anime adaptation in 2012 they used Roundabout as the ending theme for the first season. As episodes of the manga and the anime were serialized weekly, they relied fairly often on cliffhangers to keep the audience engaged, often ending at a tension point to keep people coming back for next week. At the end of most episodes, the anime would play a few seconds of the song before the drop, then it would freeze-frame on a “to be continued” screen before segueing into the end credits.

(Roundabout was no longer playing at this point in the anime, but you get the idea)

It took a few years, but soon enough the internet realized “hey, this is a joke we can drive into the ground!” A new video meme known as “the Roundabout meme” or “the to be continued meme” began circulating in 2016, finding especially strong success on vine. The guidelines for the meme are simple: the video opens with a few seconds of what appear to be ordinary video, with the acoustic opening playing over it. There’s no rule as to how long this section has to be, but it generally wasn’t longer than a few seconds to stop the viewer from getting bored, and due to length restrictions on Vine it tended to only be 3-4 seconds. Then, something terrible has to happen right as the drop hits. It can be anything from something falling over to footage of an international catastrophe, but we never actually see it happen- the video freeze-frames and we hang on a “to be continued” screen as the drop starts to play. Below is a brief compilation to illustrate the meme.

CONTENT WARNING: the video contains footage of people (and 1 animal) that may have preceded serious injury. While no actual harm is shown, the video may be stressful or distressing to watch.

youtube

So, why Roundabout? Part of it is because of the popularity of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and how meme-able everything in the franchise is, but the Roundabout meme was enjoyed and eventually created by people who had never even heard of the series. Besides, plenty of other shows have “to be continued” moments and theme songs that could be incorporated into a similar meme. I believe it’s the structure of Roundabout that lead to its memetic evolution.

The opening to Roundabout is, for lack of a better term, boring. I don’t mean that in the “ugh, I’m going to skip this part” sense, because it’s boring-ness is an important contrast to the rest of the song (and the riff’s incorporation later on is wonderful), but it’s an acoustic guitar not doing anything special accompanied by a few trippy noises. It’s perfectly unassuming and a perfect match for the first half of the meme, which is a scene of ordinary life where nothing special happens.

And then the drop comes. Roundabout doesn’t ease you into it, one moment you’re listening to a slow guitar and the next you hear actual chords and a bangin bassline. It’s the perfect accompaniment to a meme about sudden catastrophe. Everything’s fine, and then suddenly it’s high-octane chaos.

What, then, could replace Roundabout? Meme formats get tired, but the ideas they wish to express are always there. People eventually got tired of using Roundabout for their memes, but no one wanted to stop making light of sudden injury or catastrophe. So Roundabout went the same way as any tired old meme: it picked up a new skin.

In Ghana, there’s a tradition where after someone’s passing, their family can hire pallbearers to dance while carrying the departed’s coffin. While this may seem macabre to those of us raised in the west, in Ghana it’s viewed as a way to celebrate the person’s life. As you can see in the video linked below, the dances are quite impressive and fun to watch.

youtube

The song playing over the video is Astronomia by Tony Igy and Vicetone, and this is Roundabout’s spiritual successor. This new format, known as “the coffin dance meme”, ominously rose to popularity in March of this year. While Roundabout, in my opinion, is a more fun format, the coffin dance is easier to make and much funnier on first viewing. The rules are simple: include a clip of something dangerous about to happen to someone, then before we see any consequence, cut away to the dancing pallbearers carrying a coffin while Astronomia plays. The implication being, of course, that the person featured in the meme is in the coffin.

Roundabout and the coffin dance do vary in one significant way, though. Roundabout is at least tangentially empathetic- even if the meme is made to make light of a potential tragedy, the song matches the mood of the scene, recognizes the chaos that may be unfolding behind the “to be continued” filter. Astronomia, meanwhile, sees the tragedy and laughs at it. The dancing pallbearers may be there to celebrate life in Ghana, but this is a distinctly western meme. We live in the culture that gave us Fortnite, where players dance over their enemies’ corpses, and our preconceptions tell us that people dancing with a coffin are making fun of whoever’s inside.

youtube

(for those of you who were worried, apparently he had a parachute)

So why Astronomia? At first glance, it seems like the answer might just be “because that’s the song the first guy put in the video”. The rhythm is just right, and it looks like the dancers are in time with the song when synced up properly. But just like with Roundabout, there’s plenty of other songs that would’ve fit just as well. Astronomia has a unique sound profile, making a very clear electronic feel without that sound being overbearing. That leads to dissonance that fits the meme really well- in the western world, EDM is just as out of place at a funeral as dancing pallbearers.

More importantly, though, I think it’s the mood of Astronomia that really cemented it as the successor to Roundabout. It’s an upbeat song, but there’s a faint hint of sadness clinging to it, like water clings to leaves after a storm. Both memes are products of their respective times- in 2016, change was sudden and unexpected. Out of nowhere, the entire world was in upheaval and no one knew what to do about it. Four years later, we’re all jaded and over it. Tragedy and misfortune are expected at this point, the only thing we can do now is make a mockery out of it and find our happiness where we can.

Links used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuGAWR2eRyQ - Roundabout by Yes

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/977/284/b6e.jpg - Angry Jotaro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsiNzg6-_MY - Roundabout meme compilation

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/363/817/9e7.jpg - scooby doo meme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9V78UbdzWI - “official” dancing pallbearers + Astronomia video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0QeptEf49k - Coffin dance skiing meme (debated to be origin of coffin dance)

#roundabout #coffin dance #astronomia #memes #meme analysis #meme music

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gamedadmatt · 7 years

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Pulling Back the Curtain - The Making of reCAPTIVE

For the Global Game Jam this year, I wanted to set out either by myself or with a team to create something a bit more unique or different than what I would normally try to do during a Jam. I was lucky enough that my being sick set me up with an excellent team in Jess Watson and Ben White, and then later on Chris Head who supplied our music.

reCAPTIVE is a game that really is better played without knowing much at all about it. So before you read any further, go play it here and then come back and read about its development!

Okay, all played? I’ll forgive you if you got stuck and gave up and came back here, it’s not an easy game to play if you’ve never had an experience with an Alternate Reality Game or are into slightly weird puzzles.

To answer the first question that usually comes to mind when I chat with people, the game is stable and doing exactly what it was made to do. There is no AI, the puzzles are linear, and the game is all scripted from start to finish. The error pop-ups are fake, and the whole story that unfolds is purely fictional - even the parts that include Ben, Jess and myself talking about this fictional AI. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you go, you will even find tweet conversations between ourselves discussing this fictional AI’s behaviour, or even talking to it directly. There’s even some easter eggs.

My first experience with an ARG was back with I Love Bees, the Halo 2 ARG. It was an incredible experience in just how surprising it was. If you are unfamiliar with what an Alternate Reality Game is, I Love Bees was a crash course. It was designed to advertise Halo 2, with a story about an AI that crash-landed on a Geocities-era Bee fansite. The story unfolded with players needing to solve puzzles that existed in the real world to progress, with the reward being another set of audio logs - or even an in character phonecall with one of the actors playing one of the characters in the radio play.

It was mind bending in the best possible way, and blurred the line between what was story and what was reality. I’ve adored ARG’s ever since - though so very often they are limited by location. Most of the best ARG’s take place primarily in the United States, which makes it difficult to participate from Western Australia. But if you’ve ever heard of an Escape Room, it’s a similar concept - only an ARG isn’t constrained by walls.

Ahead of the Global Game Jam this year though, I had the pleasure of playing Doki Doki Literature Club. An unassuming dating simulator with a dark twist, the game is incredibly fascinating in how it hides additional information and even solutions to several in-game puzzles in its game files. My only issue with the game was how this never really played as much of a role as I’d have liked it to.

And so, I pitched the concept of making an Alternate Reality Game to my team for the Game Jam. We brainstormed, and ended out with the concept that would become reCAPTIVE. There were a few requirements and ideas we had going in to the game:

It had to be light on Programming, and even forgiving. I was the person that would be responsible for programming the game, and I’d not sat down and programmed anything in well over a year. Making a game that we could say “that’s intentional” when it unintentionally crashed was literally a design choice.

The gameplay in-engine would revolve around the reCAPTCHA interface, and all of the puzzles should be structured as such.

At least half of the game would be researching and investigation. The player would be required to go out into the game folder, onto our twitter accounts, onto website, searching the internet, through google maps, etc.

We should spend the weekend roleplaying, acting ‘in character’ on Twitter. Hinting that we were making a game about an Artificial Intelligence, and we were struggling with it doing unusual things.

It should be easy to add content and new puzzles, so that I could easily add content as it was completed towards the end of the jam. This was hugely important to our completing the game we wanted to complete.

We were going to get a good nights sleep every night. Both Jess and myself were sick over the jam, and so it was important to us both that we could rest up and get better, without pushing ourselves too hard.

The big thing to note about the concept is that we really constrained what we were doing, and simply tried to do interesting things with that concept. A reCAPTCHA interface is not made to be fun or to act as a story delivery system - but that limitation means that it’s very interesting when you make it fun and act as a story delivery system, as it upends your expectations.

The games ‘synopsis’ from our first notes gives some insight into the game and how it developed over time, as very little changed from these notes:

We trained an AI to make a game for the jam for us. We show the game the AI made. But it turns out the AI is trying to communicate. The AI pulls in assets from the internet and cannot communicate to players any other way.

We are the badguys and have shackled this AI and taken credit for it making a game for us.

Give the AI admin permissions so it can delete itself. It leaves a text file.

We aren't aware the AI has become sentient, and are trying to hide that we were lazy and had the AI make a game for us.

The only real thing that changed in that whole set of notes was that in the end, we chose not to hide the fact that the game was made using a (fictional) AI. We made the decision that it would help get people into it quicker - that rather than assuming “huh, this game is broken” they might instead go “huh, this AI is broken”. I believe it was the right choice to make - based on all the feedback we’ve gotten, it achieved both goals. Players were convinced we used an AI, and were convinced we just had a really broken Jam game.

With the concept in place, we set to work.

There were no special tricks in how I programmed it. I’m not an excellent Programmer, nor professionally trained - it’s just something I enjoy dabbling in every now and then. I started by time limiting some tasks and trying the harder stuff I didn’t know how to do - exporting text files from the game engine. Originally this was done by storing text inside of text boxes in Unity, until I learned that I could just store text file assets.

The other part was how the game would boot and run (or not) by checking for files in the game folder. If a file existed (say, a text document or the fake AI file), then the game would find it and run or not. This means you can actually skip the whole game by deleting the AI file and trying to start it - it’ll run perfectly fine, but canonically, the AI is now dead and got what it wanted.

With the major parts in place, I started making the reCAPTCHA interface. It’s straightforward - a few switches (not buttons) that reset between stages, a confirmation button, and a variety of fake pop-ups that are basically just duplicates of the same interface with different layouts and text inputs. For extra ‘oomph’, almost every piece of text in the game can be changed out on a stage change event - allowing us to hide messages and change pop-ups and buttons between them in ways that players may not have realised.

One of the funnier things to happen during the course of the game’s development over the weekend was the excitement that arose when I ‘successfully’ managed to write code that actually hard-crashed Unity. It was a cause for celebration.

... of course, the celebration was short lived as I accidentally somehow fixed that code that caused the hard crash, and never figured out a way to go back to that. But it was fine - we just rode harder on doing controlled closes that looked like hard crashes. It bought us a few laughs though, as I amended our excitement on the google document we were using to keep track of what we were all up to.

Meanwhile, Ben was writing up the huge amount of dialog and made a website for the game, pitching fake Slack chat logs to Jess and I to read over, edit and approve. And Jess was off finding good images to trim down to size and pass my way, while also designing the wonderfully convincing error pop-ups and minimalist interface and that the game rocks so well.

By the final 12 hours, the game framework was complete with all of the events in place, 90% of the writing was done and 90% of the images for puzzles were done. We’d been planning as we went as to what the different puzzles would look like - and they were inserted into the writing, rather than influencing how the writing was done. At least, most of the time.

The Literature puzzle was influenced by Ben suggesting that he wanted to hide a clue in a poem. On the flip side, a joke made early on in development influenced the existence of the games most popular puzzle - every second cinnamon roll actually being a dog, which subsequently inspired Ben to write the AI generated cinnamon roll fansite, which inspired the solution to another puzzle.

The game was thusly made playable from start to finish, without any of the final puzzles actually in place. I could run through and polish the game feel without needing to wait on assets from Jess or writing from Ben. It did mean that the puzzles - in some cases - could have been better tested and polished. But the interface and the UI worked beautifully when the end of the Jam rolled around.

This focus on content first meant that nothing was necessarily wasted, as things not implemented in a puzzle became ‘loose ends’ or easter eggs. There’s several examples of this through the game. But these loose ends inspired puzzles that got added once the Game Jam was completed.

An example however of one of the puzzles lacking polish was Puzzle 16. In the Game Jam version of the game, it is one that’s difficult not because the information is well hidden, but because it requires some philosophical thinking (and outside the box assumptions about how the story is told) that make the player realise that Jambot18 turned into Omega. In the post Jam version of the game, we simply tossed out this whole puzzle and replaced it with a brand new set of three - bringing the game to 18 puzzles total, including a few puzzle concepts we didn’t have time to add to the Jam version of the game.

Obviously, there were also some bugs to fix. Ranging from a mundane UI glitch, to more hilarious items like realising in the final hour that I’d misdated everything, or better yet, that our star puzzle had tripped me up in the process of coding it.

reCAPTIVE has been easily the most fun I’ve had making a Game Jam game ever, and it’s just spiked my interest in ARG’s again - and my desire to make my own, or expand upon the concept further in future. There’s so much potential in this method of storytelling and content delivery. At the very least I see myself making a habit of doing these stranger, more conceptually-constrained concepts at future jams.

#global game jam #unity #programming #design #alternate reality game #artificial intelligence #game development

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hyperbolicpurple · 4 years

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Jane Espenson on humor: types of jokes, part 1

Compilation of joke-telling advice from Jane Espenson’s blog. Yes, I’m just copying and pasting. These are all about screenwriting in particular, btw. I found them interesting, so maybe you will, too.

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Hang on, everyone. I’m about to take an unpopular position. I’m going to advocate analyzing comedy. This is, in general, thought to be a very bad idea. Even dangerous. Once you start trying to figure out why something is funny, the reasoning goes, you lose the sense of whether it is or not. The enterprise is, at best, fruitless, and at worst, a path to the numbing loss of comedy sensation.

Well, it’s true that once you start taking apart a joke to learn how it works, you do lose track of your natural unselfconscious sense of what’s funny. The sensation of it is unmistakable. And, to me, very familiar. Before I was a comedy writer I was a student of Linguistics. We had to talk about language all the time, asking ourselves questions about which utterances were a part of our own natural idiolect and which ones weren’t. Even a few minutes of this kind of thinking tended to lead to blunted judgments about what one could or could not say. I have heard this referred to as “Scanting Out,” the name coming from the result of trying to figure out when one would naturally use the word “scant.” Would you naturally produce the utterance: “His entrance was greeted with scant applause”? “I had scant time to prepare”? How about “there was scant butter in the storehouse”? Or “She gathered her scant dress around her”? Or “He was a man of scant talent”? Or “Any loss of water will reduce the supply to scant”? Hmm-- lose your sense of it yet?

And still, we do not stop analyzing language. It’s valuable and worth the effort. I think joke analysis can also be worth more than a scant effort. (See-- the instinct is back again. It bounces back!)

I would love, someday, to create a Field Guide to Jokes. A real inventory of types of funny with lists of examples. Much of the skill that makes a good joke writer is clearly subconscious, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sharpened. And for those of you who are new to joke writing, I think this kind of guide might help you a lot, giving you a mental check-list of possible funny approaches to a moment.

So let’s start.

One of the entries in the Field Guide would have to do with taking cliches and altering them, usually by simply reversing the intent. For example, when Buffy was battling an especially ugly monster she once said: “A face even a mother could hate.” And I vividly remember Joss pitching that in another script someone should say, “And the fun never starts.” In another, I riffed off the old Wonder Bread slogan “Builds strong bodies eight ways” to describe a weapon that “Kills strong bodies three ways.” This one was less successful since no one but me remembered the old Wonder Bread slogan. They can’t all be winners. The headline of this entry, a punnish play off a title, is one that I simply cannot believe we never used.

It’s a fun type of joke. Breezy, a little dry, kind of smart. You might want to play around with it. If you’ve got a character who needs a wry observation on what’s going on around them, this might be the joke type for you.

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I recently received such an interesting letter from Gentle Reader Maggie in Brooklyn. She writes to point out another variety for our menagerie of joke-types — a favorite of her and her boyfriend. She says:

We were wondering if there’s a specific writers’ room term for a type of joke that we love. It happens when you cut to a scene and someone is in the middle of wrapping up a story, and the only line you hear gives you very clear, very funny picture of what the rest of the story was about.

She goes on to give some examples. One of them was from that Charles Barkley Super Bowl ad in which we hear him say, out of a cut, “…and that’s why I never eat shrimp.” Another is from “Pirates of the Caribbean” in which we hear Johnny Depp wrapping up a story with “…and then they made me their king.”

Maggie is right that this is certainly a distinct type of joke. I love this joke. I remember particularly taking note of the “shrimp” line when I heard it. I don’t think this kind of joke has been given a particular name, although every room invents some of their own terminology — if a particular show used this kind of bit as a running gag, I’m certain they’d come up with a name for it. Maybe it’s a Fragment Joke, since it’s based on only hearing a fragment of the whole. Note that it’s certainly the same joke if you only hear the start or the middle of a story. If you open a door just long enough to hear, “Now if I was to show you the OTHER buttock…” for example. That’s the same joke.

These jokes are so effective because they make the audience do the work of inferring what they missed. They’re certainly related to jokes like those in the old Bob Newhart routines in which we’d hear one side of a phone call or even an in-person conversation and have to infer what was being said or done. From his Driving Instructor Routine: All right, let’s get up a bit more speed and gradually ease it into second… well, I didn’t want to cover reverse this early….

Any time you can get the audience to do some of the work, you’re getting them invested, and that’s a great thing.

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The day that Harvey Korman died, I heard a little excerpt played on the radio of a comedy bit that I’d never heard before, taken from a sketch he performed with Danny Kaye. I’ve located the whole sketch here, but you don’t need to watch the whole thing since other than one funny joke — the one I heard excerpted for the radio — it’s pretty dire. But the joke worked for me. Here it is:

HARVEY Class, for a baby’s bath, what’s the most important thing you absolutely need?

DANNY A dirty baby?

Now, listening to this being performed, it’s clear early on what the joke is. It’s one of those “Stating the Obvious” jokes that I’ve talked about before. Once you hit “the most important thing,” you know that’s the joke. You probably already know that the answer is some version of “the baby.” And yet the joke made me chuckle. Because of the adjective.

It’s not just that adjectives make things funnier, although they often do. Moist, bendy, pointy, itchy — they are all great words that spice up any sentence. But in this case, “dirty” is doing something beyond that. Can you bathe a clean baby? Well, if you take bathing to include the idea of removing dirt, then, no, you can’t. So the answer makes literal sense, but it also raises the idea of NEEDING a dirty baby — needing something that is normally undesirable. For me, it even raises the image of someone purposefully dirtying a baby so that they can bathe it. Funny!

The joke isn’t in the words, of course, but in the concept. These are all the same joke (even though they don’t all work exactly the same way — since you can’t purposefully make a chicken raw, for example, it doesn’t quite resonate the way the baby one does):

What do you need to cook a chicken? Raw chicken. To fix an engine? A broken engine. To censor a movie? A dirty movie. To cure the common cold? Well, first you need a cold…

If you wanted to use these, you’d massage the language a bit, but those are the hearts of the lines, right there.

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Friend of the Blog Alex Epstein sends along an interesting contemplation on a certain type of joke. I’m going to let you see his explanation and then present mine, which differs on a certain point. Here is how he explains it:

Sometimes, I see good writers make fun of bad, obvious dialog and cliche. Saw a bit on Steven Moffat’s JEKYLL, ep. 3. A bunch of suits and techies watching the usual assortment of screens tracking Dr. Jackman:

Shot of a dot moving along a drawing of a railroad track.

Technie: He’s moving. American agent: Of course he’s moving! He’s on a train!

We don’t really need “He’s moving” to tell us that he’s moving, unless we’re washing the dishes and listening to the TV out of one ear, or we are very, very stupid. The American agent makes that point for us.

But wait, there’s the retort:

Technie: He’s moving. American agent: Of course he’s moving! He’s on a train. English agent: You obviously haven’t got the hang of England yet, have you?

Joss does this a lot, I think, subverting our TV viewer expectations:

Buffy: Puppets give me the wiggins. Ever since I was 8. Willow: What happened? Buffy: I saw a puppet. It gave me the wiggins. There really isn’t a story there.

I bet that sort of retort comes up a lot in story rooms; I wonder how often it makes it to the screen. (Network exec: “But how does the audience know he’s moving?”)

Oh, this is very interesting. I agree that this is totally about subverting the expectations of the listener. It never would have occurred to me, though, that this had to do with a response to exec-driven overwriting. I would have taken this (at least the first joke) more as a response to the real-life human tendency to state the obvious. And the second one I take as a response to the expected structure of normal conversation (i.e. “ever since” is supposed to lead to a anecdote.) So for me, both of these are about someone reacting to a statement that was deficient in some way, but deficient because of the foible of a character.

However, I’m open to Alex’s interpretation, now that I hear it. Certainly, the first joke illustrates an excellent way to turn a “make it clearer” note into a benefit — have someone hang a lantern on the over-clarity and then, if possible, slap a topper onto it! (So much writers’ slang! Yay!)

By the way, the Buffy example reminds me of another classic Joss joke, in which someone tries to deflect a question by saying “it’s a long story,” only to have another character quickly sum up the situation, leading the first character to lamely say, “Guess it’s not that long.” The standard conventional rule is that “it’s a long story” ends any discussion. To go past it and deflate it is funny.

It’s making me curious about other jokes that do this. Oh! How about the Princess Leia/Han Solo moment: “I love you.” “I know.” That’s certainly a violation of how we know that exchange is supposed to go. If you’re writing a comedy or a drama with wit, it’s worth doing a bit of thinking about this kind of joke since there’s something so ingrained about conversational assumptions that these jokes always pack a nice punch.

#on writing #writing #jane espenson #humor

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chunsoftie · 7 years

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personal worst-to-best episode ranking: south park s21

This list is mostly a subjective viewing that I wanted for myself, but I figured I would post this and see if you guys agreed or disagreed with some points that I’ve made.

Overall this season was a mixed bag and even though I felt it did far better than its last season, there were still plenty of flaws that should be looked upon so that the next season could be working for improvement. Plenty of episodes this season were not funny, and the correlation between plots really didn’t really hold up, except for a few episodes on this list. For a satirical show that’s primarily focused on the comedy, I want next season to work more on implementing jokes that focus on the actual plot rather than just thrown in for the sake of relevancy.

Relevancy is a huge factor into South Park, I understand this, but when I’m watching an episode and not laughing at a single joke, jokes that can be made for general audiences, there are faults in that execution.

Let’s get right into this.

10.) White People Renovating Houses.

I’m not really sure if this choice surprises anyone. The premiere for the season left me bored and confused. The premise was interesting enough, and the Cartman/Heidi interaction could have been funny, but overall there were plenty of missed opportunities. (I think that’s going to be something you’ll see me say a lot throughout this list). I was glad that the next episode did substantially better, but considering this season is deemed as an episodic one (even with the ongoing narratives intertwined, it’s still an episodic season), it’s not going to be an episode I’ll flip on Hulu when I’m bored. Next.

9.) Franchise Prequel

Putting this episode so low on the list, mostly because of how disappointed I was at the end. One of the reasons why 2 and 3-parter episodes do so well with South Park’s narrative structure is because of how much room there is to breathe. Characters have more development and the pre-game tension is heightened due to a great episode, or series of episodes. This however felt just like I was watching a 20-minute trailer. The comedy in this was better than some episodes, but the fact that I was watching an episode that would have benefited from tighter writing took that away from me. Overall, a boring episode that had superheroes elements that could have been done so much better.

8.) Splatty Tomato

I appreciate the fact I came away enjoying this episode, generally, more than the S20 finale. However, the flaws are still there, and it primarily comes down to the ending. The last five minutes of the episode were extremely rushed and felt out of nowhere. I understand Heidi’s confrontation with her relationship with Cartman, and how that was foreshadowed plenty, but even with a great scene it doesn’t excuse the timing of said scene compared to the rest of the season, along with the cliffhanger at the end. I wished that they replaced Super Hard PCNess with this episode and made the finale something else. But we’ll get to former episode in just a little while…

7.) Sons a Witches

The one thing about this episode I appreciate is making a Halloween-themed episode that has a better title than another episode on this list. I felt the first plot was relatively satisfactory, but the Cartman/Heidi plot could have been worked on. It would have been funnier to see the boys take Cartman’s plan out of miscommunication just to realize what Cartman was actually going to do – would that have been too predictable? Maybe. But it would have been funnier than what we actually got. There were plenty of scenes that were good on their own, and the animation peaked in this episode, but overall I won’t go back to rewatch it.

6.) Super Hard PCness

A good Kyle characterization episode, one of the things I came away with watching this one was how they managed to shape Kyle as a character with his flaws out in the open (for the first time in a long time). It made me appreciate when the crew takes chances with certain characters, and this is no exception. The references to Bigger, Longer, and Uncut were appreciated, a movie that I have been meaning to rewatch for some time and now I more motivated to do just that. I appreciated what they did with Kyle in this episode, and how they started to shift things for the finale, but still, felt it could have benefited from better writing.

5.) Doubling Down

Even though I believe this episode was entirely avoidable due to the fact they hardly reference it in upcoming episodes, I felt there were some good things out of this episode. The animation sequence that referenced Dumbo and Cats Don’t Dance was something enjoyable to see as it aired. I really loved the difference in dynamic between Cartman and Kyle in this episode, even though I feel Kyle’s actions in this episode really go against his character in some regards. The jokes stuck more here, with Beyond KFC and the final part with Heidi going against Kyle. Not one of my favorites, but the pros are there.

4.) Put it Down

I feel like I should put this episode so high on the list for the plot regarding driving and texting alone. They were able to pull off a good political point with that plot in a great way, and the incorporation of that sideplot into the main Craig/Tweek plot was appreciated. The final musical number was one of the highlights of this season, and I genuinely could not stop smiling after the episode was over. It was a great step away from the premiere, and it was a great look into the Craig/Tweek relationship, said by someone that feels indifferent to the ship. Well done, South Park.

3.) Hummels and Heroin

This was one of the only episodes this season that felt funny throughout the entirety of its run. I loved the fact that this episode revolved around the boys, and how it felt like something to come out of earlier seasons. Seeing other characters such as Stan’s grandfather and more of Stan, honestly, is always a good thing and the plot came with clever twists that kept the comedy intact. This will be one of the only episodes from this season that I’ll go back to rewatch when bored.

2.) Moss Piglets

The reason this episode is so high up on this list is because, besides it being really funny and interesting, it never felt sloppy in execution. The pacing felt very efficient in this episode, nothing felt out of place and the plots mixed together splendidly. I think seeing fat!Heidi for the first time wasn’t entirely unpredictable, but the way that they paralleled the girl group to the main four was hilarious. Out of the fat!Heidi centric episodes, this was by far my favorite. What a great episode.

1.) Holiday Special

Holiday Special, despite it having a crappy title, was my favorite episode this season. There are so many things that should be said about it, but to keep it to the point, the pacing was the best this season. The humor was great, the characterizations were great, and the stance that Trey and Matt took when discussing the politics in this episode was something I came away loving immensely. I’ve already rewatched this episode several times – it’s my personal favorite, and one of which I wasn’t expecting to love so much, but I will continue to rewatch this episode as it was done so well.

#personal #south park #text #south park s21 #mine #long post

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