Changing (Faces of) Uni-Comedy (Formulas)

At various times last night I caught bits and pieces, snippets really, of the BBC's Comic Relief broadcast. As someone who has written comedy, satire, parody and other supposedly funny stuff, I often prove hard to please. Like many others and their individual taste in art, I know what I like, I know what makes me laugh, I know who are the masters of comedy and why. Below is Ken Dodd - One of the my Heroes of British Comedy: He knows all the rules and formulas but specifically knows how to use or break each one or all for maximum titterlarious effect. The man is a legend and a hard working life-time comedy connoisseur.

( image found on the daily mail site @ http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/12_03/doddDM2312_228x280.jpg )

When lesser (much lesser then Ken) comedians and their comedy becomes formulaic, I'm mentally beyond the upcoming punchline usually figuring the mnemonic linkages while most of these standard comics are still exposing a set up to Joe Public. Its a game I play, Guess where the joker is going after the punchline.


In Ireland we have a comedian called Jason (Burn him, Burn him) Byrne as maybe living proof that determination and ambition can triumph over (utter lack of) talent, quite simply one of thee most unfunny people on the planet, even if he tries his best to 'look funny, say stupid things that might be funny if actually thought out, He also acts outrageously, over and over and over again - he laughs and laughs and guffaws and laughs and seems to believe being silly can be like a forest fire, drilling that friction of his unfunny laughter into audiences heads, over and over and over again, will somehow eventually catch a spark of laughter in one clone - like thicko Audience head, thereafter sparking a wider reaction in Burn's audience. His attempts to do this are beyond any cringe comedy ever offered by the office or the superbad crew, particlularly when it it actually works for him.

Found again at the telegraph but we easily tire of Burn's flat comedy

While there is a place for burn him burn him's (lack of) style of unsophisticated humor, his cringing ginger simpleton perosna tries to be funny without recourse to any other formulas, superficially cajoling his audience with his repetitiously rebellious analytical antipathy, all of which is terrific if you are an inherently funny person with a natural ability to make people laugh, which he isn't and he hasn't.

But many naturally gifted people do eventually end up investigating the cause / theory behind their own humor successes, particularly if their 'stage character' impinges upon their off-stage personality in some regard. Some invariably end up back at the classics, P.G. Woodhouse, Aristophanes, Groucho, Vaudville, Music Hall, etc, where they can discover century and millenial old comedic tricks. Pity Burn didn't take the time to try to figure out another strategy to be funny, like in his particular case, maybe just pay someone to write some funny material for him.

Little Britain of course is held in high regard in the UK, as is Catherine Tate, you would need to be very high indeed to find last night's intersecting character comedy funny. As stated and repeated above, while repetition is a recognized comedic device and Jason (Burn Him Burn Him) is a blatant example of singular overuse due in part to his (to quote George Bush) misunderestimation of the power of repetition and Unicomedy to also irritate as well as entertain.

Williams and Tate were the archetypal 'comedy stars' last night, but overly formulaic and ultimately equally as flat and unfunny as Burn Him Burn Him. Burn Him Burn Him is certainly No Dylan Moran, Dara O Brien, Eddie Izzard or the very talented Mr. Jimmy Carr - those guys simply don't do unicomedy - while working hard at it all daily, they also meticulously research and learn the various aspects of their trade. So Burn Him Burn Him may end up traveling that Jim Eoin Unicomedy route of 'fooking no where talentless twat' pioneered by the once funny Roy(ston) Chubby Brown. ( FYI: That once was on tuesday april 15th 1986, 4 33pm for approximately fifteen seconds)

Tate and Williams reside at the opposite side of the scale from Burn Him Burn Him & his unfunny Co, instinct once central to their success, has been usurped by over reliance on a previously proved array of formula. Faced with the last nights reality of a national requirement to perform and be funny, they should have forgetten about doing a Hancock, and take the same advice I've given Burn Him, Burn Him, above - Yes they too should just get some freshly talented writers in, give your comedy some legs Lurvy, spread that lurve, and the paydays too folks. Old puns about greedy Bankers have already entered reality.

All of which brings me to the reality of Comedy actually Traveling, three Cheers for the American office, south park, Frazier, Curb, Seinfeld, even, Jackie Glesson, Bilko, but more recently 'the big bang theory, Scrubs, Boston Legal, Etc, Which is truly great but I'm still expecting to see Simon Cowell turn up as head panelist on an American version of Dead Donkeys Dancing on Millionaire Ice or something, I'm wondering what happens when they eventually take British TV format formulas and cross fertilize them with formulaic American comedy - and then I came upon this image of this lady....

That's Iliza Shlesinger's above and her slightly sultry and very different take on the Ken Dodd or the Burn Him Burn Him comedy look, and I must say it's somewhat reminiscent of a one time Tea Leoni pose I can't seem to find to hand, ( i.e. she one time wife of an X-files sex addict called DD ??) Oh Okay this, legs in air reversed, one will just have to do you for now:

Tea (Leoni) for two Mr Woodhouse ?

Iliza does remind me, in terms of her actual delivery, of one Sarah Silverman, she who, despite her USA success (with a little help from Matt Damon) so miserably failed as a comedian in Britain, Her choice of material was so wrong, so... her attitude was wrong... just too 'American' for the British really. It will be interesting to see where Shlesinger goes with her career, whether her ego will do a Burn Him Burn Him or she travels the true route of comedy connoisseur.

Digital Wrting Down Under

Fans of Douglas Adams' BBC series ( which imho merely kidnapped rather than captured a percentage of the humor in the four books in his trilogy. yet developing in that flawed process a pretty slickly comedic distinctive screen style - derived from radio !) and anyone interested in digital writing as a potential career (in which we can fail miserably but make that miserable failure the basis of a phoenix like comeback - well I hope we can, that's my plan anyway. Enjoy

comedy is outright difficult

I signed up to the National Novel Writing Month partly because it's actually an international event and a tremendous way to (re)test self discipline for writers. There's also potential something there.

I genuinely want to spend part of the coming month writing a comic novel, but joining up I soon discovered that really wanting to write a comic novel can prove an unpopular and difficult idea. I am very grateful for all those folks who offered insight and opinion in that regard, below is part of my take on why writers tend to dilute novels and very rarely distill them into a purely comedic novel.

Yet it's potentially inspiring and fun but horrible and hard and ridiculously difficult to sustain and despairingly dumb when it dies and elating and frustrating in unequal measures when it flies, not only because comedy and the comedic somehow says publicly I want people to like me and find me and my writing funny, genuine, entertaining, slap on the back buddy brilliant, your stuff is like sooooo funny I'd buy the next one on Pratchett like pre-order. Its tough wanting to write comedy not just because it's some muted form of psychological defense mechanism developed over years scraping a living / learning on this miserable greedy weedy wee planet, not only because many of us have spent part of our life subconsciously examining the elements, components, structures and theories of successful comedy, and thus ensuring we socially conform if confronted with funny situations, It's odd and difficult not just because we can exaggerate in fifty million ways about what it is that makes stuff 'funny' to some people in the first place and totally unfunny to others in second place or in any sort of place if their's is being repossessed right now.

It's tough but rewarding not only because nonsense is often the least offensive vehicle to hold and transport actual sense and truth and attack the status quo, or that the history of clowns and court jester's is as valid and worthy as that of economic advisers, military commanders even spiritual leaders, or that to be prepared to be a comedy writer or comedy maker you MUST be prepared to lie, to cheat and trick your reader/viewer, even become a fool of sorts, that 'simple funny' is actually a very complicated process to which the vast majority of the planet is immediately capable of responding positively - while merely a minority are capable of instigating, sustaining or making those laughs and humor and the actually funny jokes live and, like a long line of incredibly convoluted unfunny dialog ...... going to the end of your tolerance level .. yet .....incredibly keeping your attention ...... last.

Even he who is regarded as that gifted 'wisecracker' or she as crackerette perhaps and we all know at least one, would have trouble with 70K words worth of wisecracking, you'd need to be slightly cracked to want to do that in the first place and he who laughs last, is he who didn't get the joke and he who says or writes 'he who' all the time sounds a bit like an ass backwards.

I think the objective of deciding to write comedy is making a decision to enjoy the process of writing that bit more than the straight forward or more mainstream genres - to be braver, to be more prepared than most to embrace failure, then on the other hand, there's four fingers and a thumb - I am always prepared to be this wrong in the pursuit of something that might somehow turn out right.