🤣 #237 - It's OK to Laugh
Pain, pratfalls, and permission to let out your inner child.
There’s a lot Jerry Lewis has to say about creating comedy, but when asked about why we like slapstick, Lewis explains:
Because it takes the child in us and puts him in the forefront. There’s nothing better than being nine years old, Larry… Because the child within us is not only innocent and pure, but it has no inhibitions. And the fun of slapstick touches that soul, the soul of the child in us. There are too many people, particularly the boors that you and I know that have gotten so smug and so full of themselves because they’ve grown up. That’s where snobbery comes from. They’ve killed the child within.
Digging in to the idea of what makes slapstick comedy work, Pawel Mościcki looks to Charlie Chaplin and how his comedy comes from a place of vulnerability and creating characters at the mercy of situations well beyond their control. According to Chaplin:
There is little difference between comedy and tragedy: Comedy twists the dimensions of life in a grotesque fashion and tragedy twists them in an opposite direction - but both are twisted. Both comedy and tragedy are fundamentally based on one preoccupation that is: playful pain.
Comedy is playful pain. Its essence is ‘predicament,’ plight, danger and fear. Trouble is the subject of comedy. The object and predicate are the getting out of it.
We’ve previously featured Tony Zhou’s excellent video essay on the action comedy of Jackie Chan, but it’s worth revisiting because of the common ground it finds with slapstick. In both cases, knowing a character is in pain, or threatened with pain, helps to connect the audience to the performance. For example, this fight in Fearless Hyena features physical action shown in full frame (like Chaplin and Buster Keaton) with a performance that includes Jackie Chan going ragdoll and bawling (showcasing his physical and emotional exhaustion) in order to throw off his opponent in the middle of their fight.
Seldean Smith charts a path between Chaplin and modern comedy with a look at the specifics of silent comedy, and how modern practitioners like Rowan Atkinson find ways of communicating nuance without dialogue. Nerdwriter looks specifically at Atkinson’s physical comedy. Atkinson calls it “the comedy of personality,” where the source of humor isn’t any individual gag, but the way we see the specifics of the performer’s persona doing relatable things in a specific, often absurd way. You can see more of Atkinson explaining physical comedy in detail in Laughing Matters.
Some of this also comes into play in this scene from Jacque Tati’s Playtime, where an American tourist tries to get a picture on her trip to Paris:
The personality on display should be familiar to a modern audience: Here’s someone doing it for the ‘gram. In her attempt to capture something “that’s really Paris,” she keeps shooing away and interrupting actual Parisians (which sets up the twist at the end).
For a wider view on Playtime, Andrew Saladino looks at the seemingly chaotic choreography of characters in a restaurant on its opening night to show how physicality and pacing create a snowball effect to the comedy.
Payton Whaley talks with Ryland Brickson Cole Tews about the writing and execution of Hundreds of Beavers, and how they came up with thousands of gags to create the absurd feature-length version of a zero-to-hero training montage.
And if you’re interested in getting away from the keyboard and try some physical comedy on your own, Joe Dieffenbacher demonstrates safe ways to practice pratfalls.
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link, Cal Newport contrasts the experience of two YouTubers to suggest that constant, unsustainable growth isn’t the only path to success on the platform.
What else is inneresting?
Kendra Pierre-Louis shares photographs of what the US looked like before the EPA started taking on pollution.
Chuck Wendig wants you to stop feeling uncomfortable promoting your art while times are hard, because “We need the art.”
If you’re anything like me and just started watching Severance, you probably also thought “Ooooooh, look at those keyboards they’re using.”
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
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