Week 4
Visual Comedy
"In comedy, a visual gag or sight gag is anything which conveys its humour visually, often without words being used at all. The gag may involve a physical impossibility or an unexpected occurrence. The humor is caused by alternative interpretations of the goings-on."
This week I wanted to write a bit about comedy, specifically visual comedy. Many of us have probably seen Police Academy series of movies. They are played on TV quite often after all. You probably also know a nice chap named Chaplin and his movies. You also probably recognize this guy's face.
Leslie Nielsen. The star of the Naked Gun series of movies.
I wanted to write about visual comedy because it seems a lot of films now a days do not use it. The comedy in films often is from funny things the character says rather than what happens. Which is a shame because visual comedy is often more effective than funny lines. What makes it great is how anyone can understand it. You don't need to catch every word or know the context in order to find it funny. Sometimes there are jokes that are based on famous people and often times they go right over the viewer's head because that famous people might not be someone they even know. Visual comedy though is different. It's been around since the silent black and white films and you can usually understand it by just looking.
Visual Comedy is usually created when a prop and character interact with each other. The prop is there to prevent the character from doing whatever they need to do.
Here is an examples:
Shopping trip
Who knew a simple shopping trip can be this amusing or funny?
Naked Gun series relies heavily in either visual comedy or comedy where your expectations are turned around like in this case:
It's fluffy
Dropping something on your toe and trying not to scream in pain and doing something funny while in pain, is better than dropping something on your toe and exclaiming "I dropped it! It hurts so much! So much!" while jumping around.
The point is, comedy shouldn't be over complicated. Don't add useless lines in there cause on paper it might sound funny. The visuals are often times more powerful than text and your audience is smart enough to see rather than hear.
Here is a really great video on visual comedy for those interested:
https://digg.com/video/visual-comedy-film
I wanted to write about visual comedy because it seems a lot of films now a days do not use it. The comedy in films often is from funny things the character says rather than what happens. Which is a shame because visual comedy is often more effective than funny lines. What makes it great is how anyone can understand it. You don't need to catch every word or know the context in order to find it funny. Sometimes there are jokes that are based on famous people and often times they go right over the viewer's head because that famous people might not be someone they even know. Visual comedy though is different. It's been around since the silent black and white films and you can usually understand it by just looking.
Visual Comedy is usually created when a prop and character interact with each other. The prop is there to prevent the character from doing whatever they need to do.
Here is an examples:
Shopping trip
Who knew a simple shopping trip can be this amusing or funny?
Naked Gun series relies heavily in either visual comedy or comedy where your expectations are turned around like in this case:
It's fluffy
Dropping something on your toe and trying not to scream in pain and doing something funny while in pain, is better than dropping something on your toe and exclaiming "I dropped it! It hurts so much! So much!" while jumping around.
The point is, comedy shouldn't be over complicated. Don't add useless lines in there cause on paper it might sound funny. The visuals are often times more powerful than text and your audience is smart enough to see rather than hear.
Here is a really great video on visual comedy for those interested:
https://digg.com/video/visual-comedy-film
I commented already but it doesn't show here so here I go again. Delete this, if there's double comments. So, this was an interesting to read, and the videos were great too. I also agree with you that films do not use visual comedy that much nowadays. At least not in Naked Gun way. Naked Gun just takes it to another level. Also, I suggest to change the font at the start of the blog post. White font and white background doesn't mix well together.
ReplyDeleteThanks Jirko I have a lot of trouble with blogger and text color it seems. Thanks for pointing it out it's now been fixed :)
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