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« Letter to America - Chapter 67 - Belfast Welcomes You | Main | Study: Iraqis May Experience Sadness When Friends, Relatives Die »

July 25, 2007

Comments

Phil

I like the spirit of the idea, I think it is a flawed one.

I think they tried to do this with a book - write a collaborative novel, or something like that (someone correct me if I'm wrong)?

What happened was, you had lots of "one-upsmanship", meaning lots of people who thought they were smarter, funnier, etc go in and edit or erase someone else's input, thereby stirring the pot and causing it to devolve into bickering and egotism and the like.

There would be more potential with short skits or comedy segments like this, but I would think ultimately the creators of the show will have to ultimately hone or craft the script ideas or story ideas themselves to keep it inline with their own vision, as you say.

I'm a fan of disjointed nonsense myself, and it actually seems right up my alley - but I agree with you the creator has to maintain some kind of control for quality of content and consistency.

Phil

+ the grammar alone in that post above is why you don't let amateurs do this sort of thing.

Jett Loe

It's an interesting experiment - but so far the results don't seem to be panning out.

copernicus

Ze Frank bin thar, dun dat. I remember him making the point that the project was taken over by a mass desire to play a bit rough with their puppet.

The "comedy" above suffers from a desire to be outré and present us with grotesques. If the audience isn't laughing, it's because they're too square.

It's much harder to write the Muppet Show or Bilko where you don't have access to the (admittedly hilarious) word "fuck".

Jett Loe

Pretty harsh with the "comedy" in quotes there - but yes, what you would call the grotesque I'd refer to as 'mugging' - I was with the second video for a while until the appearance of the 'French Portrait Artist'.

Is 'WATJ' just a more structured form of the improv night where they call out for suggestions from the audience?...sponsored by Ford.

copernicus

I know what you mean. I tried to go along with it too, but in the end it doesn't feel like the situations are character driven, which is essential even if the situation is surreal.

These situations just feel like someone is trying to push the boat out in terms of what it's acceptable to laugh at. So we get blindness and incest jokes, which would be fine if they were funny. But they're not, because they don't have any context in believable characters (or characters about whom we can happily suspend our disbelief) and they have nothing to say about the absurdity of the human condition. They're just being used to beat us over the head with the message that the writers are daring and oh so motherfunkin cleva, innit.

Hey man, if it bends, it's funny.

The quotation marks were a bit cruel admittedly. But it is alleged comedy.

Jett Loe

Well of course that's the thing re: 'believable characters' - if the show is 'written/inspired/created??' by a group of individuals who have no contact with one another there's no central spring for a character - just jokes pegged onto 2-d conceptions of character - the actors do the best.

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