Why Are You Laughing? FYW Blog!

To be completely honest, I thought that Julia was going to ask us to watch those cringe-worthy YouTube videos about a crazy girlfriend, but when I watched the videos that she posted I was laughing so hard, especially with the song "Face Your Fears." I'm a sucker for song humor such as Tenacious-D and Weird Al Yankovic. Something about humorous phrases being put to music is hysterical to me. So when the woman started singing about facing a bear instead of running away, I knew I was in for a treat. This absolutely demonstrates the theory of incongruity as songs are typically more serious and we naturally associate them with a rather serious tone, so when suddenly they are funny, it amplifies the humor through surprise. When the children's choir joined in, it was over for me. The response they added to each lyric was well-written and well-timed. As for the second song, I found it humorous in its own right. The singer's nihilistic tone in his acknowledgement of his n...

I first saw What We Do in the Shadows  on a Friday evening in 2015 with three other of my friends and my parents at a small local movie theater. We had an idea that it would be a simple vampire comedy. Oh boy, were we wrong. We took our seats in the small theater that resided up a flight of stairs and what appeared on the screen in front of us was, to be quite frank, quite unexpected. We were treated to one of the most hilarious movies we had ever witnessed. My parents sat in the row behind my friends and me with looks of mixed giddiness due to the humor in the film, but also slight horror due to the somewhat vulgar nature of parts of the film and fears of my friends' parents never trusting their children with my parents again (which luckily was not the case). Ever since first viewing this absolute masterpiece of comedy, my friends and I quote the movie often and never resist the opportunity to spread the movie to new people. So I am carrying on this tradition and introducing this ...

Contrary to Chris's comment, I am definitely not tired of reading about The Office  nor do I think I ever will be. The show has cultivated one of the largest followings in TV history and that is in no small part due to the level and consistency with which it brought and still brings laughter. I agree with Chris in that The Office  heavily relies on Incongruity and Superiority as its main sources of humor. That isn't to say that it doesn't use relief humor, but the main jokes that viewers tend to remember subscribe to the former two theories. As Chris stated, the episode in which Dwight begins the episode by setting a fire in the office and trapping everyone inside was a fantastic example of incongruity. The sheer chaos that descends on the office and constant stream of events that occur, such as Oscar climbing into the ceiling, Angela throwing her cat in after him, and Kevin breaking into the vending machine to steal snacks and then tackling the cameraman, are all perfect e...

I will admit that I find some of what others might consider  rather stupid  completely hilarious. Having something random and sudden happen will often send me rolling. T he Theory of Incongruity is truthfully one of my preferred forms of comedy. Kant put it well, "Something absurd (something in which, therefore, the understanding can of itself find no delight) must be present in whatever is to raise a hearty convulsive laugh. Laughter is an affection arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing" ( Lippit ). I find this very interesting in that it talks of the build towards something and then a direct switch to  a completely separate  thought and it caused me to think of  The Eric Andre Show . This show excels in incongruity comedy. For example, one of the guests on the show once was Haley Joel Osment, the child star from  The Sixth Sense . Eric claimed that he was going to show a clip from Osment's new mov...