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Comedy Theory: The Two Types of Audience

Some comedies seem cruel instead of funny. Bad things happening to innocent people. Who thinks this is funny? My theory is that there are two types of audience.

The first type suspends disbelief by default, and so they empathise with the characters, even in a story that is obviously absurd or impossible. The second type perceives the story only as abstract manipulation of ideas, and so they view it at arm’s length, without suspending disbelief.

If you’re the first type (which I am), there’s a lot of comedy that’s clever, but just too depressing. Tom Goes to the Mayor (2004), for example. And if you’re the second type, the cleverness is enough to carry you through.

In a broader sense, this also applies to how the audience approaches any art form. Some filmmakers are not trying to tell a story, or entertain the viewer, or make something beautiful. They’re only interested in manipulating information in smart new ways.

The films they make may be worse than useless as entertainment but may delight a viewer that comes to them with a purely analytical approach. In Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), this type of creator falls into the category of “formalist.”

Of course if you can make a film that experiments with form and is entertaining, do that instead. That’s way better. David Lynch does that. Well, usually. Inland Empire (2006) was pretty hard to get through. It felt like it was six hours long.

I’ve come a long way in my ability to appreciate David Lynch since I was young and bored by Eraserhead (1977) many years ago, but Inland Empire managed to exceed my David Lynch threshold. It’s like when a musician you trusted releases an album that makes you feel betrayed. Inland Empire is the …But You Can Call Me Larry (1993) of David Lynch movies.

Pomodoro Update

When I mentioned the Pomodoro system at Graeme’s fannish Zoom meeting, someone pointed out that the word “pomodoro” literally translates to “golden apple.” So there’s something for fans of Illuminatus! (1975) and mythology generally. Maybe using Pomodoro will have an alchemical effect for me. You’re not just good, you’re golden. Golden Graemes.

Exciting Font News

I’ve been going through my monospaced fonts, opening them up in FontCreator, and fixing them so that the em-dash and ellipsis are exactly twice as wide as they were. By making them precisely 200% wider, the grid-like ratio of the text is preserved, but this way, I don’t have to use two hyphens instead of an em-dash and three periods instead of an ellipsis to avoid those weird stubby em-dashes or those weird crowded ellipses. Alert the media.

Going to the Movies Again?

For the last 11 years I’ve been deliberately not going to the movie theatre. Partly this is because the experience has gotten worse and worse over the years, with more and more advertisements that are louder and louder.

Partly it’s because the last time I went to the movies, the first ad before the movie was so loud that I actually shouted “Too loud!”, hoping the projectionist would turn it down, and my “friend” sitting next to me sarcastically said “Oh, that helps,” and some bro in the audience yelled “Shut the fuck up!”

And after the movie, the bro stood up and said “Where’s that psycho that said ‘Too loud’?” like he was looking for a fight. So I thought, “Well, that does it. The moviegoing experience has been ruined forever.”

Two things have made me reconsider in the past week. One is that I’ve been reading a ton of Roger Ebert reviews from his website. (He was a professional movie critic from 1967 to 2013, so there’s a lot of reviews to read.) At the bottom of every page there’s an epitaph: “Roger Ebert loved movies.” And it’s true. You can feel it in his reviews. And it’s infectious.

The other thing is that a fellow commenter on Aggro-Gator mentioned going to the movie theatre with blankets because the air conditioning was so strong, and I thought that sounded nice and cozy. Strong air conditioning, blankets, snacks, the cloak of darkness, letting the light and sound of a movie wash over you in soothing waves.

There’s a few hurdles I can think of. One is that until I’m fully vaccinated, I can’t go to a movie theatre. Another is that modern movies tend to not speak to me, so it’s going to be hard to find new movies that I want to see.

On the other hand, I’ve already had my first injection, and I should be getting the other one a couple of months from now. And one of my favourite filmmakers, David Cronenberg, is filming a new movie this summer: Crimes of the Future. It’s supposed to be a film noir about transhumanism, starring Viggo Mortensen. Cronenberg made a body-horror film with the same title in 1970, but apparently this is not just a remake of that one.

The Rise and Fall of Star Trek

I got lucky when it came to my exposure to Star Trek. I saw the original Star Trek (1966) series on TV and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) in theatres. I fell in love with Star Trek when I was 12 (the proverbial golden age of science fiction).

I had enough time to get to know the original crew before I saw Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987). But I was still young enough to accept a whole new Star Trek. I didn’t mind the updated look-and-feel, production values, and effects. It was the 1980s, and I was of the 1980s. (I still am.) And I accepted the new characters immediately.

I was even the right age to have the best possible chance of identifying with Wesley Crusher, the precocious teenager of the group. Except, of course, Wesley was really good at STEM, and I’m not. And he kept endangering the ship (and then saving it). But the point is, I didn’t find him inherently annoying just because he was young and gifted.

But it was all downhill from there. Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991) came out during the dark times of my university years, so even though most fans regard it as a much better movie than Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), it has almost no nostalgia value for me. And I never connected with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993) or Star Trek: Voyager (1995) the way I had with The Next Generation, though I kept trying. It just wasn’t the same. The magic was gone. The world had lost its innocence.

Maybe it’s because people like Rick Berman redefined the ethos of Trek after Gene Roddenberry died. The behind-the-scenes scuttlebutt says that by the end Roddenberry was more of a hindrance than an inspiration, but he still fought for the idea that humanity could grow up and make progress. Meanwhile, in the post-Roddenberry era, you’ll notice that (for example) they could no longer imagine a future without money.

Then again, I could have just been very depressed at the time. After all, it was during that dark age of university, getting kicked out, and being underemployed during the recession.

Then Star Trek: Enterprise (2001) moved even further away, aesthetically. The ships and sets were completely modern even though the show was supposed to be a prequel to the original series, and just for that little extra burst of depressingness, even the traditional style of theme song was replaced by generic-sounding Boomer pop.

The episode set in the mirror universe was fun, but that was too little too late, and then the show ended with an odd finale where the events of that final episode turned out to be a holodeck simulation the Next Generation characters were watching.

Comic Book Guy: That was from a dream sequence. It never really happened.

Bart: None of these things ever really happened.

Comic Book Guy: Get out of my store.

One good thing about Enterprise being the show that killed Star Trek for me is that when the Jar Jar Abrams movies came out, I’d already lost interest, so it hurt a lot less that he rebooted the Trek universe.

“The USS Lensflare” would be a funny comedy-of-reduction name for the ship.

Also, NuTrek is so alien to my idea of Trek that it makes Deep Space Nine and Voyager look much better, retroactively.

You Know What the Music Means

Anyway, that’s 1400+ words. That’s enough for today.