Reading through Noël Carroll’s “Notes on the Sight Gag,” I was tempted, in much the same way as Caroline Golum, to connect Caroll’s observations to trends on TikTok and other such media platforms. Golum notes that the majority of the content on TikTok is filmed within the app, although as a user I would like to point out that the landscape of TikTok is shifting towards different, more experimental formats. If we want to stick to a media platform that is aligned more closely with the silent shorts discussed in Carroll and Gunning’s works, I would suggest Vine. The strict time limit of 6 seconds meant that any video would have to be efficient, whether scripted or not, and thus users came up with a set of shorthand devices that draw upon the fundamentals of the sight gag.
In scripted Vines, the creator would often be forced to play all of the parts involved. This meant that Vine creators to develop a language for distinguishing between themselves and other characters. Men would often throw a towel or piece of clothing on their heads to signify long hair/portraying a female character, which became such a common practice that other users would then elevate its inherent absurdity as an object analog.
(Fig. 1, Jay Versace wearing a red shirt to signify long hair. Fig. 2, Jay Versace with a toy Tesla lamp on his head)
Two Vines from Jay Versace perfectly demonstrate how the trend evolved.
https://youtu.be/MN3JkoCpt5w?t=6
The Vine at 0:06 illustrates the original form of this gag, where he uses a sock to indicate that he’s playing the role of his mother. This gag is brought to an extreme at 1:57 when he uses an entire vacuum cleaner to do the same. The audience understands implicitly what is being portrayed, and at the same time we are confronted with the fact that the differences between the two are so vastly different that this connection is ridiculous.
I found The Pawnshop (Chaplin, 1916, USA) in its usage of object analog to have a similar effect. The initial gag of Viners using shirts and towels has less in common, but the later evolutions of the comedic device fall in line with the whimsical nature of Chaplin’s Tramp character and his odd behaviors. As much as we’re laughing at the fact that he uses a tuba as an umbrella stand or a Viner puts a wallet on top of their head to portray their own mother, we are also laughing at our own hyperactive pattern recognition.
I really like your creative outlook in finding vines that display sight gags in their content and I completely agree with how our response to such vines, what you call “hyperactive pattern recognition” is what becomes an amusement factor. Sight gags bring distant objects together, but more so in the mind of the audience rather than onscreen, which I think is essential to understanding why we find such vines comedic or worthy of rewatching. It’s almost like a ‘mind game’ that is being played on the audience.
I would also be interested to hear more about how Tik Tok’s moving towards more experimental formats and whether this would align with or mimic some of the sight gags in early cinema. How would it be different or similar to some of the typical tropes of early comedic cinema? Even though 6 second vines include a brevity of action, would the material or structural nature of vines and that of films influence the comedic content?
I really like your comparison between Jay Versace and Chapiln when it comes to recognizable physical gags. I also agree that the comedy in these gags elevates when they devolve into absurdity. In terms of TikTok, it reminds me of the “Vape? No. ______.” when creators would pretend vape and then the camera would can out to whatever object they were holding, starting out with water bottles and devolving into things like violins or their largest lego set. the more niche and absurd, the funnier the video was.