reflection on humour project

What the process of creating something funny was like

- by vivian lou and heather park

The types of comedy used for our final assignment were comedy of ideas, especially satire. Satire was used in our presentation by illustrating people’s ridiculous needs for excuses. It exaggerated the extremity of this by imitating advertisements and commercials. We thought our presentation was funny because it ridiculed many subjects such as people who use extremely long words to appear intelligent, over excited advertisers, and people who are desperate for any believable excuse. In addition, a key point in making our presentation was saying every line as serious as possible. The incongruity of such absurd excuses being recited with such seriousness was chuckle worthy to us. 

Our advertisement was inspired by Nigahiga (Ryan Higa) from Youtube with his spoof advertisements, such as "The ShamWOOHOO". After looking around for ideas, we settled on making this video advertisement because of our Youtube inspirations. Since Nigahiga's video advertisements seemed the most humourous from our point of view, we decided to create one of our own. This led to our production of an "excuse- maker", a complicated and bizarre-looking device that generates excuses. 

The difficult aspect of comedy is that it is very ambiguous and appears in any form whatsoever. Choosing a form to present our project was hard. Furthermore, something that may seem funny to the creator can seem extremely weird or entirely idiotic to the audience. Our video was a great example of this because we used ridiculous logic in our excuses; it seemed hilarious to us, but we had no idea whether the audience would appreciate it. We also didn't realize how difficult making the video would be. Writing the script was a breeze and we had a good laugh thinking up the most far-fetched excuses. When we got to the actual filming, reality smacked us right in the forehead as our many attempts went down the drain. Advertising the product in a serious way that would seem hilarious was very awkward to do and took acting skills. The name of the product (Ultimate Superlative Exemplary Unsurpassed Splendid Excuse-a-nator), along with ridiculously long words, were a mouthful to memorize and say in front of a video camera. I guess the moral of the story was that comedians have a tougher job than we thought, at first.


Nevertheless, it was an amusing experience. We were able to watch the end product and be satisfied with what we had worked on to present. Even if our humour project does not seem funny to others, we still got good laughs out of creating it out of scratch. Like most assignments, it was strenuous work for our thinking minds, but in the end, the production of humour was something that we both enjoyed doing.

creation of something funny

The USEUSExcuse-a-nator (Ultimate Superlative Exemplary Unsurpassed Splendid)A Supposedly Funny Advertisement

Title of product courtesy of Thesaurus.Com

- by heather park and vivian lou

Please do not take this publication and product seriously... or you could get injured...

response to a book

What I thought about it

Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella, is a novel that uses comedy of manners with the character’s witticisms, and comedy of ideas with the satirical mocking of financial debt. The protagonist, Becky Bloomwood, is a shopaholic and an extreme spender who has severe problems with managing her money. Ironically, she is also a financial journalist but claims that her occupation does not require knowledge to appear impressive at conferences. She also replies with witty excuses to postpone her bank account meetings. These examples are comedy of manners because they portray Becky’s clever use of words to elicit humour.  The satirical aspect of the novel includes mockery of regular people unable to deal with debt, and regular people going about a pretense to impress others. In the novel, Becky deals with many situations in which she is unable to control her expenditure on excessive items and clothes. Using the technique of reversal, Becky is very determined to cut back, which fails miserably because she ends up spending more ridiculously. In addition, Becky’s preparations to impress others, such as ensuring she has a copy of the Financial Times but not reading it, are often hilarious. This is effective comedy of ideas because it focuses on the lighter, comical aspects of normal problems and habits of people. 

I recommend this book to anyone who would read a book for pure enjoyment. The protagonist’s frequent mishaps draw laughter from all readers. However, anyone who may be going through a severe financial crisis would not find it helpful to their situations. In the end, Becky suddenly becomes a regular on a TV show, which immediately allows her to pay off her debts. In reality, that chance is meager, so the reader should not take this this as advice. Furthermore, the book essentially pokes fun about people with expenditure habits have difficulties breaking the habit. Since Becky’s many attempts to stop buying things failed, this could come across as demotivation to the potential shopaholic who is reading the book. Otherwise, I appreciated the many funny retorts of the protagonist. It is definitely a good recommendation for an enjoyable read.  

a satirical video and article

Added "leap centimeter" corresponds with the leap year; many positive reactions from society:

http://www.thespoof.com/news/spoof.cfm?headline=s5i102904

This article has satirical aspects in the way that it mocks the philosophy of people in modern times. The willingness of people to believe ridiculous things in order to reassure themselves (as long as they are made official by authorities) is openly mocked. In this particular case, incongruity is present as a "leap centimetre" is added, much like the leap year, to the common measuring system. Because there are now extra centimetres in one metre, measurements become smaller in comparison to before. The Spoof mocks how people will believe this and use this to reassure themselves that now, they are either average weight instead of being overweight! Overall, this satirical article was humourous because it effectively poked fun at the ignorance of people and their willingness to make themselves feel better without making improvements individually.

Teenage Affluenza is a horrible pandemic that is spreading rapidly:

Teenagers of this generation are suffering form the affluenza, which affects many normal, healthy teens across first-world countries. These adolescents are constantly forced into unpleasant and horrendous situations, such as riding backseat in the car, not having enough space for music on their iPods, and eating dry cereal because they have run out of milk in the fridge.

This video convincingly parodies the everyday life of a normal teenager and highlights the little mishaps. It points out the fact that developing countries are much worse off, but it reverses the fact in the video by narrating with a very serious voice about how awful a first-world teenager's life is. By use of exaggeration, we realize that the teenagers' usual complaints are quite silly in comparison to the current issues in developing countries.