In This is Awkward, author Alexandra Plakias states that awkward situations arise from an individual failing to follow the social “script” that guides most interactions.… Read More »“Oh, so you just interrupt people? Is that your whole gig?”: Awkwardness and Zaniness in The Detroiters
In Horror and Humour, Noel Carroll explains how the lines between horror and comedy can be easily blurred, as the genres share many characteristics –… Read More »M3GAN: Kind of Human, Kind of Not (Caroline Scott)
Both Sigmund Freud’s essay Der Humour and Simon Critchley’s response Why the Super-Ego is Your Amigo outline the characteristics and functions of internalised dark humour. In… Read More »Freud’s Melancholia vs Chris Fleming’s Moping In a Leather Skirt
Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp describes some of the characteristics which designate a piece of art as camp. It needs to be overambitious, exaggerated,… Read More »Neil Breen: The Accidental King of Camp (Caroline Scott)
In Rabelais and His World, Mikhail Bakhtin defines several distinguishing features of folk carnival humor. Popularized by Francois Rabelais in the 16th century, carnivalesque comedy… Read More »It’s Always Carnivalesque in Philadelphia
In Chuckle, Chortle, Cackle: A Phenomology of Cinematic Laughter, Julian Hanich identifies several types of cinematic laughter. One, “conversion laughter”, involves laughing at something that’s… Read More »Archie Andrews Could Write Chuckle Chortle Cackle but Julian Hanich Could Never Create the Red Circle: Riverdale and Types of Laughter (Caroline Scott)
In The Argument of Comedy, Northup Frye identifies some of the characteristics of Greek “Old Comedy”; like New Comedy, it culminates in a marriage, but… Read More »“I’m OLDDDD (Comedy)”: Freaky Friday and Its Parallels to Greek Old Comedy and Shakespearean Structure
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Sigmund Freud summarizes Kuno Fischer in stating that “a joke is a playful judgement.” He emphasizes the… Read More »Rest in Peace Sigmund Freud, You Would’ve Loved Bojack Horseman (Caroline Scott)
In Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths, Tom Gunning defines a “mischief gag” as a humorous physical prank consisting of a set-up and… Read More »Mischief Gags and the Disruption of Narrative in I Think You Should Leave’s “Prank Show”
The introduction to Henri Bergson’s book Laughter: an Essay on the Meaning of the Comic offers several examples of how humour is created in the… Read More »“Perry the Platypus?!”: Bergson’s Humourous Humans, Animals, and Machines In Phineas and Ferb (Caroline Scott)