Humor

The goal of the humor project is to apply techniques that we’ve learned from professional humorists such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter-House Five.

For my project, I had originally intended to make a satirical video presentation with Alex Chen from Film. However, the timing didn’t work out with finals and his schedule, so we instead opted to create something easier. The idea I had played into the fact that we had less time to prepare; I actually wrote the script and created the presentation in a single period of English.

Process and Inspiration

My inspiration was originally credited to Hannah. We were considering working together, and she had the idea to create satirical tiktok videos. I built on that, and proposed a parody of 5 Minute Crafts’ hack videos. This particularly tickled me because of the irony of a “hack” that turns out to be more frustrating than the straightforward typical solution. A sample from the original script, which was never fully realized, is below:

Scene from the Five Minute Crafts parody

During the production week, Alex told me that he had issues to work through and that he wouldn’t be able to take on the workload of a short film the week before the APs (who would have thought?). This meant that we had to redefine the entire project. What started as a comic strip assignment evolved into a newspaper clipping and then a short skit. As mentioned earlier, this had a much smaller workload. The positive of doing two different projects was that I was able to write my essay about the original plan, which had more content and was easier to analyze. The second skit, however, was much easier to perform, memorize, and produce overall.

I was influenced by the situational humor of sitcoms such as Schitt’s Creek and Community. I really enjoyed the conflict between characters that these sitcoms use, especially playing into tropes. I love the spoiled brat trop and wanted to incorporate it into the skit because it just seemed so fun to act out! David Rose from Schitt’s Creek was the second fictional character in mainstream media I discovered with my sexual orientation, so he holds a special place in my heart. I wanted to emulate him with my character. Additionally, as a design student, it was so exciting for me to draw outside the lines for once and violate the traditional laws of art. I did this as much as possible with mixing fonts, misspellings and de-centered images reminiscent of the “graphic design is my passion” line of memes. I feel that that’s what Picasso strove to do in his work.

Production

The final product! It may seem like the laughing in the video is delayed, but this is only because Mr. Flo overlayed the slides without the entering animations.

Reflection

Overall, I thought that the production went about as well as I expected it to. It was definitely on the short side, given the time frame of the overall project, but considering the fact that it was a completely new idea, I’m proud of it. Some of my lines, such as, “I know! My father did the scrambling.” Weren’t exactly perfect due to my delivery. I was extremely nervous and hesitated a bit. (If you look closely, my legs are shaking as I accept criticism.) I also regret that Alex and I didn’t rehearse together. I reminded him to look over the sketch a few times before class, but on the day of our performance, he was surprised that we were performing it live. Lines such as, “Your father will be hearing a lot,” weren’t exactly as I had imagined them, as well as the fact that he read from his phone. However, he did a good job for a cold read, as Mr. Greco would say, and I admire his enthusiasm and energy for the performance. Overall, our delivery was mixed, but I was glad that nothing disastrous happened.

I was very proud of my personal performance, however, because I had memorized the lines I was given. I’m terrible at memorization in general, but having rehearsed so many times with my friends, I minimized my nervousness. As my boyfriend said, in a perhaps biased manner, “You carried that performance!” I was so glad that the visual aspects, such as the Garfield cartoon, were met with applause. I don’t know if it was as successful as my junior parody, but it did make me happy that some people found my performance genuinely funny.