First volley

Hello, and welcome to Thesis-O-Rama! the blog that says "Hey, I'm working on a thesis and I'm not sure if I'm a genius or a hack, so please tell me what you think of the stuff I posted up on this fershlugginer thing." Although maybe not in those exact words. But it could be...you never know....

Anyhoo, I'm working on a film involving a character named Batcat and some of his misanthropic friends. It will be formatted as a series or 3-5 15-20 second hand-animated vignettes: very quick, one gag sequences. Batcat is a study in modes of comedy, an exercise in something I started calling "freestanding humor."

The concept of freestanding humor is that traditional narrative joke structure is not necessary to make something funny. There are certain things that are simply funny, without any need of explanation by way of set-up. They are punchlines without jokes, made somehow more intriguing by their lack of explanation. For example, take my wife...please. But seriously, Lewis Black does a ten minute routine on overhearing a young woman say the phrase, "If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college." As he mentions in the routine, it's a sentence that makes the mind reel. But there is, of course, a logical explanation. He, and we, just never get to know what it is. In an old episode of the Simpsons, Homer walks into his bathroom to find Krusty the Klown soaking in his bathtub while Bart, Jay Leno, and Krusty's helper monkey all attend Krusty. Homer's response to the bizarre scene is: "Oops. Sorry, son. I didn't realize you, Jay Leno and a monkey were bathing a clown." And this is where the other aspect of freestanding humor comes in. Not only is the bizarre right there in front of you, stripped of explanation, but in this case, it is treated as commonplace, blase. We hear and see outrageous, outlandish, bizarre nonsensical things everyday...but we are trained to carry on with our lives as though nothing incredible is happening.

In one of my classes last term, a friend and colleague of mine uttered the phrase, "I'll Trojan Horse the zombie animation in." In context, it made perfect sense. He was working on an animated film that involved zombies, but was redirecting his thesis away from pure animation toward a new motion capture system he was developing. Another friend had just had his thesis proposal rejected because it was technically oriented rather than being focused on animation per se. So the first friend was going to pursue his technical thesis, but he was going to be sure to embed some pure animation within it. In context, this all makes perfect sense, and is rather unremarkable. Out of context, however, the phrase, "I'll Trojan Horse the zombie animation in" forces the mind to try to concoct a context, and at the same time defies rational explanation. You kinda had to be there.

This is what I mean when I say that we encounter bizarreness and absurdity on a daily basis. The entire television show Seinfeld was based around this idea: taking, tiny, minute occurances, and shining a light on them. Or, in Seinfeld's case, a spotlight. With a magnifying glass thrown in for good measure. In the last issue of Newsweek in 2006, Jerry Seinfeld describes his job as a comedian, essentially, as noticing things. "How come the side of bathroom stalls don't go all the way up and down?" he muses, basically defining "observational humor." He notices what we all notice: little oddities, petty grievances. For the most part we let these things pass, because we have other things to worry about. But Seinfeld, like any other practitioner of observational humor, makes his living by questioning what the rest of us take for granted. He searches for context where there is none, and when he can't find any, he makes one up. Of course, I'm sure there is a logical, rational explanation for why the walls of bathroom stalls don't go al the way up and down. I'm also sure that the real explanation is simply not funny.

So this is what I am going for in these concept sketches: to create this level of commonplace, banal absurdity. To generate a situation that has humor inherent in it that would be diminished by rational, traditional narrative explanation. To boggle a little, and baffle; I want the viewers to come up with their own explanation, if they must, but it would be far preferable if the response was simply to be present with the fleeting absurdity, and appreciate it for what it is, without having to search the past to see what it might mean. And if the audience can use these vignettes as practice to see the humor and absurdity that constantly surrounds them, to appreciate what perhaps they had taken for granted, then this thesis will have been a success.