From a Chat Dated 10/8/08

[photo stolen from a blog called mccain sucks]

Some of the topics - okay, all of the topics - we cover in this chat will be outdated, since it's mostly about the Palin/Biden VP debates two years ago. But I think Laurie's and my points about impersonations are interesting. For those who fear wading through our (VERY HILARIOUS) gchat transcript, the gist is: Laurie expects impersonations to shed a new light on the person being impersonated. As she says below, "what makes an impersonation funny is teasing something out about the person that I, as the audience, either didn't notice or didn't realize I noticed-- it creates that "a ha!" kind of humor."

I, on the other hand, am perfectly willing to accept/laugh at impersonations that are just impersonations. In the chat, I reference a Saturday Night Live sketch that isn't good, but Bill Hader's impression of Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood is just really, really accurate. I don't feel like I'm learning more about the character by watching the impersonation, I'm just delighted that someone is that good a mimic.

But then I thought maybe there was some sort of undercurrent of the "a ha" humor Laurie refers to in my enjoyment of impersonations as well. Donald Glover's Obama impression (starting at about :50 in this clip) is one of my favorite impressions, Obama or otherwise, because he really nails the eye-blinking, I think, more than anything else, and Obama's eye-blinking was not something I noticed on a conscious level before seeing Glover's bit in . (Also the part about the Cheesecake Factory is just funny. Obama at CF? LOLOL 4EVER.)

Then, later, Laurie brings up the fact that Jason Sudeikis as Biden is funny to her, even though she has no real way of knowing whether the impersonation is accurate. This brings up an interesting point: is a "good" comedic impersonation measured by its accuracy? Or by its stand-alone funniness? I feel like I have seen impersonations that are not necessarily super-accurate, but are still funny, but I will always find something entertaining in a really amazing accurate impersonation. What do you guys think makes a good impersonation?

Anyway, here is the chat, slightly edited to exclude references to earlier conversations and for flow purposes.

Laurie: i'm thinking about writing a fake joke structure thing about tina fey's sarah palin

did you see this week's SNL?

or at least the vp debate bit?

[ed. note: I fucking love Queen Latifah]

Anna: i did

Laurie: i thought it was interesting because i've never seen joe biden speak, ever

and i've only seen sarah palin speak once, briefly

and, coming from that perspective, i thought jason sudeikis' joe biden held up really well

i laughed a lot at his part

but i don't think tina fey's sarah palin got even one sincere laugh out of me

and i was, like, trying

her impersonation kind of reminded me of 'men never ask for directions' jokes

like, you laugh at the impersonation because you want to laugh at sarah palin, moreso than because the jokes were legit funny

although i don't know, that's just my perspective

Anna: well, it's not like they're even jokes at this point

Laurie: right, right

Anna: she could literally just say everything palin said

Laurie: but how is that legit humor

i mean, to me, i don't know

Anna: what do you mean by legit humor?

like - actually funny?

or like - respectable?

or like - with some intelligence?

Laurie: i guess i mean an actual crafted joke

which is maybe not required

Anna: it's an impersonation, though, which i don't think takes the same kind of joke-crafting

Laurie: hmmmm

Anna: there was another sketch in like an ice cream parlor

in re: the “I drink your milkshake” line in there will be blood

and it was NOT funny at all

but i watched it and liked it because bill hader's impression of the character in twbb was PERFECT

Laurie: i guess this is a preference thing, but to me, what makes an impersonation funny is teasing something out about the person that i, as the audience, either didn't notice or didn't realize i noticed-- it creates that "a ha!" kind of humor

Anna: oh ok

Laurie: just mimicing what the person said in a funny accent isn't really funny to me

Anna: that makes total sense

Laurie: but i am not the arbiter of humor for snl

UNFORTUNATELY

Anna: srsly

Laurie: i only saw that opening sketch

Anna: i keep giving it a chance

and it keeps failing me

i still love kristen wiig though

Laurie: i don't know her

i haven't watched it in years except for little youtube clips here and there

so i'm not up on the new class

Anna: there was another sketch called "mark wahlberg talks to animals"

where one of the guys in the cast was mark wahlberg

Laurie: haha

Anna: and he just went up to different animals like "hi, dog. so, you're a dog. how's that?"

Laurie: HA

Anna: and while i was watching it, i was like "this is dumb"

but in retrospect, it was kind of amazing

Laurie: it sounds amazing

Anna: also another impersonation-based thing

"hi, goat, i like your beard. i had a beard in the perfect storm. did you see that, goat? say hi to your mother for me."

and there was an actual goat

Laurie: haha

Anna: but yeah - the fey/palin thing is like a lot of their sketches, actually, where they pick one joke

that is sometimes funny

and do a skit around it

even though it could just be a one-liner

Laurie: as you were telling me this, i was thinking, "i wonder if they were high when they wrote that"

Anna: god, i hope so

Laurie: and then i went to my google reader and one of my tv writing blogs has this post-- "How common is marijuana use in writers' rooms? Do companies really enforce a no-drug policy, or just let the kids play as long as the shows are getting ratings? Is Canada different than U.S. in this respect?"

Anna: HA

Laurie: well the weird thing about the palin/biden thing to me

was just that the biden impersonation held up for me even though i've never seen him before in real life

it was still funny to me

but the palin impersonation wasn't funny to me, without having seen her in real life

i don't know if that's, like, the measure of a good impersonation haha

Anna: gotcha

Laurie: and i'm obviously only one person

but i just thought it was interesting

Anna: i think your definition of impersonation gives comedians too much credit

Laurie: haha

Anna: i'm not saying you're wrong

i'm just saying most people are not as smart as you

Laurie: well i know that, duh

Anna: haha

Laurie: but i don't believe that TINA FEY isn't as smart as me

Anna: i'm gonna give her a pass on this one

because i can't think of anything she could do that is funnier than palin herself

it's like trying to write an ultra-condensed movie for a comedy

i like can't

and they are never as funny

Laurie: yes exactly

that was the exact comparison i was thinking of on sunday when i watched it

it's like there's no way to make it legit funny

i mean, for me

although i do think a big thing for me is when comedians don't really commit to a character, but do this "wink wink nudge nudge" thing with the audience

i HATE that

and that's what i felt like tina fey was doing-- but, it's hard to tell how much of that was tina fey wink-nudging and how much of it was the palin character doing it?

i don't know

Anna: haha i was JUST going to say that

because i didn't get that at all from fey

but then i thought about it

and that's palin's whole MO

Laurie: i mean, i think that's part of the joke

right

Anna: but i completely agree on the winking

Laurie: btw, the answer to the marijuana in the writers’ room question was: "no one gets high at work."

Anna: HAHA

now THAT'S comedy

my roommate is like always high at work

but she's not a tv writer, i guess

Laurie: hahahhaa

he meant tv writers

not, like, people at dunkin donuts

Anna: hahaha

wait, no one gets high or no one is high

I HAVE POKED HOLES IN YOUR LOGIC

Laurie: haha

i think no one IS high

Anna: if i worked at dunkin donuts i would be so high

This is not a post about jokes.

At least, not intentional ones.

A friend of mine is a graduate student in a theater production program at a Prestigious Ivy League University, and as such she gets access to many free theater tickets that her program has made it very clear she must use or she will be reprimanded/shunned/thrown in a fiery volcano. So she invites her friends to a lot of shows. I had an opportunity to see the amazing-sounding Brief Encounter with her, didn't hear what show it was when she told me on the phone, and ended up doing my laundry that night instead. I'm still pissed about that.

But I digress.

The show I did go to see with her, under no small amount of coercion, was Love, Loss, and What I Wore. For those unfamiliar with this title, it is an off-Broadway show with a rotating cast of five women. In Vagina Monologue-style, they tell stories about Important Life Events and the clothes that defined them at those times. It's not a bad concept - everyone has a piece of clothing that they associate with a particular person ("He broke my heart, so I stole his Def Leppard t-shirt.") or event ("I was wearing this jacket when I saw Def Leppard in concert for the first time.") or time in your life ("Those jeans had the perfect pocket to hold my Walkman so I could listen to my Def Leppard tapes."). I sort of* love clothes, so I might have somewhat more of these than a normal person.

But the execution of said concept was less than ideal. A lot of the humor was based around "ladies, AMIRITE?" type "jokes" - good jeans are difficult to find! My purse is disorganized! My mom hated the way I dressed as a teen! Ha ha, we all have these things in common because we are LADIES!! It was as though the characters were all actually the women Cosmo thinks exist, the ones who rub ice cubes on their nipples and flirt with dudes in the produce aisle by asking them which banana looks riper. Also, my mom never cared what I wore, thus the inclusion of a pink spandex unitard in my sixth-grade wardrobe rotation.

There were some successful parts - the parts that were actual stories that sounded like real people were cute, mostly. But sometimes even that didn't work. One of the cast members in the cast I saw was Jamie-Lynn Sigler, most famous for her role as Meadow Soprano in That HBO Show I Never Watched. Based on her performance in this show, I am going to go ahead and say she is not very good at acting. She is very pretty, certainly, and I'm sure she is good at something, but acting is not really it.

So she is doing this monologue about boots: I. Love. Boots. I remember my first pair - they were army green and I wore them every day. They made me feel powerful. Now, in Jamie-Lynn's defense, this monologue was not exactly Tom Stoppard, but I think in the right hands it could have been good. But then this happened:

I went off to art school in Berkeley, and I had two pairs of boots: one was caramel brown and one was dark brown. I wore them with very short skirts. I felt so powerful in my brown boots and my short skirts.
[incredibly long pause]
But then one night, a guy broke into my apartment...and raped me.

Obviously, this is not supposed to be a joke: "haha! You got raped! BURN!" Not cool. But my friend and I were both COMPLETELY OVERCOME in paroxysms of laughter, shaking uncontrollably in an effort to stifle the giggles that wanted to bubble up and disrupt what was otherwise a completely silent moment in the theater. I have no memory of the rest of the monologue, because we were doing that thing where we would regain control of ourselves, but then just feel the other person shaking next to us, and we were back in it again. I believe this is called in the medical profession a "giggle fit."

I was thinking about why this happened. Certainly, a girl getting raped is not funny. And it's not like we were being affected by the crowd - they were all stone-silent. And I figured it out, before I read Erin's post, and then I read it, and she mentions the phenomenon as well:

An unexpected moment interrupts the narrative and subverts your expectations and you’re laughing

It's not comedy rule #1 (I think that is "farts are funny"), but it's up there, certainly: set up expectations, then flip them. We can talk more about that, and the reverse-double-flip used by a lot of newer comedies, in another post, but for now, just trust me. It's a thing.

What I expected Jamie-Lynn to say, based on the fact that she had been going on and on and fucking ON about her goddamn boots, was "one night, a guy broke into my apartment...and stole my boots." So the fact that she said something SO COMPLETELY MORE TERRIBLE than her boots being stolen was somehow hilarious. Again, I think that in more capable hands, this transition could have worked - maybe. But the setup, still, did not lead us to a place where we expected, and that made it funny to us.

Perhaps this is part of the reason that sometimes a "dramatic" scene written or acted poorly is sometimes funnier than a comedic scene. What do you guys think?

*understatement. COMEDY GOLD

Joke-Work: Freud and Douglas Adams

“Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.” –Douglas Adams

I had to start with Adams. No one more clever, but also, I think the compass from which he operated totally fits the ongoing project of this blog. His famous pro-science stance in combination with that arresting wit is evidence that we can totally scrutinize humor as closely to its origins as we can crouch without losing all perspective on what’s funny. It’s like how examining the supposed mysteries of our universe’s origins from an atheist standpoint can yet be a transcendent and inspiring experience!!! It might not be like that, but I was obviously determined to force relevance upon the above quotation. Because it’s boss. I seem boss by association, you’re probably noticing right now.

There was a time not long ago when I was going to earn a doctorate and make my living analyzing humor. GERMAN humor. You could argue that this quixotic choice of a research interest was an early sign that I somehow knew I wouldn’t finish my Ph.D. We should talk another time about cultural impact on humor, but even speaking superculturally (absolutely not a word), has anyone ever satisfactorily explained why a joke works? I did a lot of reading about this with the desperation of a person attempting to salvage her career dreams and my answer is still no. I spent that last year of grad school clinging to rafts of material providing mesmerizing descriptions of why people produce humor and how humor gets enacted: context, performance, word choice, etc. What makes us laugh, though? Nobody had nothin’ for me. In fact, I’m inadvertently kind of mimicking the way most articles or essays on the comic would begin—“Sure, we all love a good yuck, but what, indeed whhhhat, causes that laughter (Henry Higgins-like overemphasis of the H-sound mine)?” I failed to find out.

Freud was closest. I realize that that name is attached to all sorts of associations you may resent, probably for sturdy, unassailable reasons. But check this out because I’ve never gotten it out of my head: after he published his Interpretations of Dreams in 1899, a friend wrote to him and pointed out that Freud’s theory about dream-function could apply to any number of mental mechanisms, like how jokes work on us, for instance. “Huh,” Freud said, and then published another book in 1905 called “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious”. You’ll remember that his conception of dream-work went like this, and please do pardon my paraphrastic B.S.: you’ve got all these desires and responses that, if you expressed them to others or perhaps even to yourself, would be socially or emotionally disruptive. So you repress them and they submit to chilling in your unconscious mind for a while. However, their relegation does not sit well. They get restless and yearn to keep it real in your conscious mind. Psychic tension ensues—I could explain it in terms of the interaction of id, ego and superego but frankly I’ve always found it exhausting and distracting to keep those fellas and their tendencies straight. Your repressed desires emerge in your dreams in disguise and thereby attain a conscious manifestation that doesn’t bother anyone too much. Thanks, brain! Hope no Moravian cokeheads come along to extract meaning from your neatly encoded farce!

Freud went on to write about joke-work as a similar process during which your conscious and unconscious minds interact: you’re listening to a joke. Narrative, narrative, lalala…now for the punchline. An unexpected moment interrupts the narrative and subverts your expectations and you’re laughing, or at least acknowledging in some way that laughter would be customary at that stage (buh, no one even says “midget” anymore). Freud claimed that in that moment, your mind responds to this narrative upset by slipping into your unconscious in order to span this absurdity. It’s not our logical, intellectual facility that brings forth that understanding of and reaction to what’s funny—it’s in our capacity to bring forth the unexpected from the unformed. And that act of releasing energy into a structure that’s silly is joyful for us. Says Freud.

No way of proving this but something about it gets me. The spirit of it feels right, and powerful—instead of our psyches expressing some urgent consideration in the dark, we access feeling by giving one another catharsis—and ourselves, too. He also wrote that the joke-work is not complete until we turn around and tell the joke to someone else—it’s social! Kickass, right? I’m sure he’d say that sometimes we substitute a fantasy of telling the joke to someone else...though honestly, if I hear a decent joke, I’m telling it to the next person I see. You nailed me this time, Sigismund.

Part of why I like this is that it does connect to the spirit of Adams I was grasping at before. The wonder one can derive from a (semi-, I know) scientific explanation. The human spark that mingles with the measurable, insensate processes from which we benefit. Doesn’t a great joke feel like a reminder of who we are? Makes the mutual agreement between me and my former university that I’m not cut out to be a professor seem pretty insignificant.

Self-deprecation aside, humor has challenged and soothed and thrilled me for my whole life, especially since I got a new lease on the latter. I care about jokes. I have about four trillion smart-assed opinions about comedy and comedians and stuff I hate that the Internet needs to know about, but I wanted to begin with this. What do you think?