Humour Assignment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z79yOGQBdRg

Humour Assignment Reflection

The types of comedy used for this humor assignment were satire and comedy of ideas. The types of satire used were parody, reversal, and exaggeration. My video was a parody of Wii Fit and ridiculed its ‘breathing exercises’ and other very simple movements. It was easy to make fun of because the user is learning to breathe deeply from a 400 dollar worth of gaming console. Reversal was used when the narrator said that Wii Fit will decrease the time spent outside and increase the time spent in front of the TV. It is opposite of the normal order because Wii Fit is suppose to get the person fit but it will also increase their time in front of the TV. Exaggeration was used when exercises like Deep Breathing and Balancing on two legs are said to be difficult workouts.

         The easiest thing to do while producing this video was to find things to ridicule about Wii Fit. There were plenty of workouts to make fun of and I thought that the price of Wii Fit was ridiculous in general. The hardest aspect of the assignment was trying not to copy the original ‘Wii Fit Parody’. I decided to do a parody after watching a Wii Fit Parody made by CollegeHumour and it was very hard not to imitate their video. For example, they had a very good Hula Hoop workout and I thought it was a great idea but it was obvious about what to make fun of. So I feared that my video and their video would be alike. As the solution, I looked for all the exercises that they did not use and made fun of those.

         Overall, I really enjoyed working on this assignment. I liked making videos and editing them to my favor and I really liked the topic of the project. In addition, making this project humorous was difficult because everybody has a different perspective on what is funny. If I could change parts of my video, I would try to make the scenes less exaggerative and longer. Still I am happy with what I produced.

Third Blog Assignment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhSRcTuv2lg

 The scene from, ‘Stepbrothers’ is satirizing the plot of ‘Good Will Hunting’. The type of satire used is reversal because Dale from, ‘Stepbrothers’ is definitely not a genius but tries to imitate the genius character from, ‘Good Will Hunting.’ Incongruity is also present because the psychiatrist obviously knows that Dale is out of his place. For example, Dale says he thinks all the students in the ‘good’ university aren’t as smart as he is when he works as the janitor. This scene is funny because Dale is a very unwise person and he tries to show the psychiatrist that he is a very intelligent guy.   

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s1i1068

90

This article about penguins is a great example of satire. The article is about three dozen penguins entering a club in London. The penguins try to enter the club but the guards and the manager would not let them in for some unusual reasons. Although they are wearing tuxedos, they don’t have shoes, so there is a conflict. Obviously, this is a case of both reversal and incongruity. The incongruity stems from the fact that not wearing shoes is the issue here, rather than the fact that the penguins are neither people, nor dressed. The reversal is in the form of the penguins being anthropomorphized, meaning that they behave as humans.