Intro
The humor project is a project providing students with the chance to explore a lesser taught form of art, comedy. During the unit, we read and analyzed the infamous satire Slaughter House 5, watched and analyzed comics of our choosing, and created a final humor project with all of these influences in mind.
I valued this project for being something new and untouched by many including myself. It was a chance for me to think in a new way, attempting to create something for the sole purpose of making people laugh.
When making the project, my partner Jack and I came across one large speed bump and that was our proposal. We wanted to make a stand up routine but were forced last minute to change the idea, resulting in us writing and filming the entirety of our project in about 12 hours. The final product, despite its quick turn around, came out incredibly well and I could not be more proud of it.
Proposal
What I found to be the most useful about the comics that I studied was their use and delivery of absurdism. Our whole concept is absurdist at the core so having a deeper understanding of this form of comedy through these comedians gave us a very good perspective going into our final project.
Initially, Jack and I were going to perform a standup routine, however due to time restrictions we decided on creating a parody drug PSA. The drug at hand… Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Milk. The final product came out to be around 2 minutes in length, and featured a mix of absurdist and dark humor, giving the project the tone of a real drug PSA while providing a lot of visual comedy through the absurd nature of the video.
Final Product
Script
Behind the Scenes
Behind the scenes image showing Adobe Premiere Pro file
Overall, this project helped me learn how hard true comedy is to master, and immensely grew my appreciation for comedians in all forms. It also taught me a lot about how deliberate comedy must be to strike the audience the intended way, and how much each small detail matters in the grand scheme of a comedic piece of work.