For our final project in English, we attempted to make each other laugh with the humor unit. We were tasked with finding influences in comedy and learning from their techniques to make our own comedic presentation.
Humorist Study
The two comedians who definitely inspire me the most would have to be Eric Andre and Nathan Fielder. From a glance these two would seem like polar opposites, Eric Andre is loud, crass, and heavily relies on immature gross out and shock humor while Nathan Fielder is soft spoken and relies more on sarcastic humor. However after watching countless pieces of both of their work(like I have) you start piecing together similarities. Both comedians heavily employ incongruity/practical jokes and absurd humor in their projects as well as using the public for a very confused audience. In order to showcase this I will be comparing and contrasting episodes/clips from both comedians’ main shows. From the Eric Andre show I’ll be looking at his public skydiving/sprite sponsorship prank and from Nathan For You I’ll be talking about the episode where he visits a struggling car wash.
For the Eric Andre Clip I’ll be talking about, I’ll be looking at his skydiving/sprite sponsorship prank he does in season 4 episode 8. It starts with a focus group discussing Iphones and Androids when all of a sudden, a guy falls through the ceiling breaking it and the table below. That man of course, is Eric Andre. He stands up with a gash in his head and a faulty parachute. Everyone in the room is scared and confused for this poor man when tensions are raised. Eric opens his skydiving suit to reveal a Sprite shirt underneath, to which he weakly proclaims, “I’m trying to get sponsored by Sprite and I thought this was the Sprite building.” He starts going around trying to ask people if they have any connections to anyone working for Sprite which makes all these poor people very uncomfortable. This clearly unwell man who very well could have a serious brain injury is approaching them going off about Sprite. This continues until one bystander has had enough and tackles Eric Andre.
If you’ve never seen Nathan For You, you owe it to yourself to check out at least one episode. It may not appeal to everyone, but even if it doesn’t appeal to you it’s still a whole experience worth sitting through. The premise of the show is that Nathan Fielder, C student at one of Canada’s top business schools, goes around to struggling businesses and gives them questionable business advice. Is the advice good? Debatable. Is it Legal? Sometimes. The point of his advice isn’t to be good, it’s to be so crazy enough that it just might work. In season 2 episode 4, Fielder visits a carwash that’s struggling to find customers. What was his idea for attracting customers? Simple, it was to attract more birds to specific tree branches overhanging roads nearby so that they’d poop on cars driving past. With more birds comes more bird poop on cars which will lead to locals in the area to go get more car washes. He starts with planting bird seed and worms on the perfect tree branch to attract birds to it as well as putting up scarecrows in other trees to ward off birds from those trees. However this doesn’t work so he hires a bird wrangler to put pigeons in the tree. However the pigeons weren’t going enough so he put chickens in the tree. This increased the amount of poop but it wasn’t enough. So he puts a CENSORED Peacock in the tree because, “It can drop loads 50% larger than the chickens.” He says this all in a monotone voice which adds to the feeling of “ what” you might have when watching this. Just imagine driving down the street and seeing chickens and a peacock sitting in a tree overhead. Would you even know what to think at that point? We see drivers with this emotion when Fielder stops them to ask them mundane questions under the branch so that poop hits their car. This goes on and on and actually does manage to bring some customers to the car wash.
So why did I take up a page talking about these two clips? It’s to give context before comparing and contrasting. Both of these practical jokes/acts involve a heavy use of absurdity and incongruity. Seeing someone fall through a roof then get up and start proclaiming their love for Sprite like some soda zombie or driving through a residential street and seeing a bunch of chickens and a peacock in a tree is pretty out of the ordinary. You might say it’s as absurd as seeing a stampede of rhinos run through downtown. The way these two clips differ is that while Eric Andre relies on chaos, Nathan For You is more like planned out stupidity. Eric Andre will do some crazy stuff in public and wait for reactions from people whereas Nathan Fielder will plan out a whole absurd way of saving this business and wait for the reactions from the store owner and customers. I really love this brand of absurd humor and I hope to use it in my own project.
Reflection
In terms of comedic techniques that I feel impelled to use in my own project, I’d say it’s the absurdist humor used by comedians like Eric Andre and Nathan Fielder as well as black humor which Eric Andre is also known for. With this style of absurdist black humor, I feel like I can produce a product that just feels like me.
In my opinion, absurdism is quintessential to comedy. Humor is all about the unexpected and absurdity is all about the incongruity and surprise. What makes a bunch of rhinos stampeding through town funny? Well, it’s not everyday you see rhinos downtown. Imagine sitting outside a restaurant enjoying your meal when a herd of rhinos come through town running over anything in their path. You would probably be taken back by the situation just like most of the citizens. That event would already be pretty absurd which is humorous, but then you throw in a character like Berenger who acts like it’s an everyday occurrence adding layers to the comedy. All these things happen that you don’t expect fueling the satire of the scene.
When I think of black or dark humor, the first thing that comes to my mind is always the humor in the Fallout games. Fallout is known for having some very dark humor in it’s titles that add a lot of depth to the atmosphere. From the cheerful iconography of the 1950s juxtaposed against a wasteland ravaged by nuclear devastation to the various poses you’ll see skeletons in depicting the lives of people before the bombs dropped, this type of satire litters the wasteland. A memorable example of this would be the town Megaton from Fallout 3. The town is like most post-war settlements except for one thing; it’s built entirely around an undetonated nuclear warhead. This doesn’t phase the citizens though, in fact they view the bomb as a god and have even established a religion around it. This bomb is leaching chemicals into the water and giving the residents of Megaton radiation poisoning but despite that, they still love this weapon of mass destruction that’s slowly killing them. This is a very dark situation but it adds a charm and humor to the dark and bleak Capital Wasteland.
My sense of humor and comedic taste is driven by everything I consume on a day to day basis. Whether it be from the internet, TV, movies, music, video games, etc. My style is a hodgepodge of my many different interests. But despite it being from such a diverse place, there is a common theme within all the satire that I’m drawn to. Most of them use the techniques of absurdism and dark humor to make you laugh. That’s why I’m planning on heavily using these two techniques in my own work to encapsulate my sense of humor.
Humor Presentation
I decided to make an absurdist parody of trashy reality/documentary shows. I was inspired by other parody shows such as the Eric Andre show and Nathan For You. After a good deal of planning I decided to make a trashy TLC style documentary reality show following an overconfident egotistical internet rapper/conspiracy theorist. I worked in some absurdist and dark themes where I could but most of it is just a straight forward parody. There is a dark twist at the end but I won’t spoil it.
