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.