Julia Kipnis

STUDY AND PROPOSAL

Analysis:

Billy Eichner’s Billy on the Street is unscripted, chaotic, and all about confrontation. Eichner runs through New York City, yelling pop culture questions at strangers which creates humor through shock value and absurd interactions. A specific example of Billy Eichner’s interactions with strangers is when he demands, “For a dollar, name a woman,” where he pokes fun at people’s lack of awareness as they walk through the city. I also found the fact that the question is so simple and open ended, that it left a lot of room for funny reactions such as people running away screaming or being stunned and speechless at the ridiculously simple request, creating situational irony. With interactions like this, Eichner’s comedy is loud, fast-paced, and reactive, with lots of random interactions and quick banter. Another aspect of Billy Eichner’s Billy On The Street are celebrity appearances. Billy has celebrity guests on his show, where they are tasked with ridiculous challenges such as out-yelling a little girl, or completing an obstacle course. These segments of his show utilize slapstick humor and farce. On their own, these comedy tools work very well but I found that the fact that very famous celebrities are at the butt of the joke, that the challenges become even funnier. Often celebrities are placed on a pedestal. On one hand, billy further raises the pedestal by using celebrity and media trivia during his on-the-street confrontations, while on the other hand, he lowers the pedestal right back down by making celebrities look like fools during their ridiculous challenges, showing that celebrities are just like the rest of us. 
SNL skits are similar to Billy Eichner’s show in the sense that they’re all about social commentary, and often involve parodies of famous media and caricatures of famous celebrities and figures. One example of this is the “celebrity jeopardy” skit where they parody both the real game show as well as celebrities. They use humor tools such as parody, caricature, and satire, where they exaggerate impressions of celebrities, as well as farce where the celebrities struggle to understand basic trivia questions. This humor is very effective because it responds to current events, thus appealing to a broad audience. Overall, both billy eichner and snl utilize celebrity culture and social commentary at the core of their humor and often use absurdity and exaggeration in their bits. Their differences are that Billy eichner is spontaneous and unscripted whereas SNL is scripted and uses actors in staged scenarios instead of interacting directly with the general public. 

Reflection:

I found that the overall theme of social commentary is very appealing to me. I think that the whole point of humor is to highlight social issues and events, but making the commentary easily digestible and engaging through humor. I also really appreciate parodies and caricature humor and I often engage with various content on social media such as tiktokers and youtubers who do their own mini skits. We all encounter people in our day to day lives that are ridiculous or absurd characters of their own and I really appreciate that. By using caricature, we’re able to highlight both the good and bad in someone and make it entertaining. I originally wanted to copy Billy Eichner for this project and also ask people trivia questions on the street. I really enjoy the genuine reactions of people and I feel like I’d enjoy being embarrassed and making a fool out of myself while on the street. I also thought about doing a parody of “keeping up with the kardashians” because it’s a show that everyone is aware of and also a show that has lead to many celebrity memes. If I had more time and creative energy, I would’ve loved to do something like that. 

Part 2 – Description of Proposed Project

I’m going to collaborate with Jessie and Mallory on this project.We plan to develop satirical humor where our target is the popular reality TV show Keeping Up With The Kardashians. We chose this because it’s a very popular reality show and is a perfect example of celebrity behavior that can be parodied. We plan to use comedic tools such as satire, caricature, and parody. The overall tone of our project will be satirical, as we parody the ridiculous behavior of the family but in the setting of freestyle. Similarly, we will utilize caricature by exaggerating the drama and absurdity of the way the family interacts with each other and by exaggerating their personalities. I think this is the right humor project for us because we’ve always talked about making something like this and when we worked on mockumentaries last year we did a very similar project and we really enjoyed it. We’re all film students so it makes sense for us to make a video project. I’m excited about this project because it will be a lot of fun to act. I’m hoping that we’re all able to stay on track because historically the three of us have struggled to work together because we lose focus and we’re all procrastinators but I think I’ll be able to facilitate productivity.  

ROUGH HUMOR SCRIPT

Because my group and I have been incredibly busy these last few weeks, we don’t have time to plan, shoot, and edit a skit. We’ve compromised and decided on creating a comic book strip. We’re planning to make a comic panel about a student’s first day at freestyle academy. We’re going to include callbacks to freestyle academy concepts such as the evo, big brother posters, and the book we just read, Slaughterhouse Five. We’re using humor techniques such as call backs, absurdity, and situational humor (I think situational humor applies as the audience is freestyle staff and students). I wish my group and I were able to make the skit happen but it didn’t work out. Here’s an empty comic panel I generated using DALL-E and photoshop to fix up. The comic panel with words will be presented for the celebration!