In English class, we read and analyzed Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five to learn about different humor techniques and how they can be used differently and effectively. After completing the reading, we were tasked to take the things we just learned and create some sort of project that represents different humor techniques. Running short on time with our senior narrative film, Brad and I decided to make a short edit of our friend Zeke because that was all we could manage.
Humorist Study and Influences
Since Brad and I did an unconventional project for humor it is hard to pinpoint specific humorists who influenced our work outside of our own experiences and social media, I will explain where we got influence from.
Brad and I have gotten to know our friend Zeke for the past four years at school, especially through sports. I played basketball and lacrosse with Zeke and Brad played lacrosse with him. During the documentary unit in film, we interviewed many people on our lacrosse team. Zeke was one of them and he was completely hilarious. Zeke has a funny aura to him where just his gestures and expressions can bring people to laughter. We both agreed that in our short amount of time we could highlight one of our friends who we find really funny.
Another influence on us is the content we consume on social media. Fast paced videos with lots of transitions are very popular and are all over social media feeds. A lot of these videos are surrounding sports or tv shows/movies (etc) that people enjoy. At a certain point, people started making spin off edits of their friends where they take this concept of making something look cool and turn it into something that is silly. The contrast between stupid photos or videos and the style of editing and cutting creates a sort of humor that is absurd. Another really important part of these videos is the music. There is a lot of audio out there that pairs well with edits and can add to the humor of these videos.
Those were the main sources of inspiration for our project. Sorry that we couldn’t do something better. I had many ideas and was really inspired by the project but we ultimately fell short due to the amount of work we had prior to the presentation.
Our script is just a bunch of images of Zeke:
And at last, the final product: