Interesting article by Stephen Armstrong of the Times on the new 'wiki-created' internet sitcom 'Where Are The Joneses?':
'Where Are The Joneses?' has at its core an interesting idea: using 'wiki' technology as a gathering/filtering/collaboration tool for creating new comedy. Their wiki page describes it thusly:
"Welcome to the Where are the Joneses? wiki site. Where are the Joneses? is a daily comedy, shot entirely for the web and it’s very funny. (To see the films go here.) But the best thing about Where are the Joneses? Is that it’s written by the Where are the Joneses? community. It’s written by you!
Join Wikidot and the Joneses community and get involved in these ways:
Ideas - Propose broad outlines for episodes, or even scenes within episodes. Can you think up a scene that makes you laugh? It might get used by our crew.
Scripts – Write for us. Whole scenes or just conversations. Jot it down. Change other people’s stuff and make it better! Get our crew to make it!
Cast - Suggest a new cast member, or comment on ones suggested by others. Do you fancy yourself as a Jones? Why not upload your audition tape to YouTube and create a profile for yourself in the cast section. If we like your tape, you never know, you might be joining Dawn and Ian on the road…."
Yes, it's an interesting idea, (especially for me as am actively involved in cutting-edge comedy with 'Project X' - revealed this Monday!)
But my first reaction to the notion of 'collaborative comedy' is that it's a non-starter; comedy, as in any art form, needs a strong, guiding vision - and using 'crowd sourcing' to write/generate ideas for shows sounds like it would foster bland, disjointed mush. But that's just me - a guy that's put out over 100 hours of podcasts/vidcasts all about me, copiously illustrated with, yes, you guessed it, photos of me. So I'm thinking my obvious narcissism/need for attention is colouring my perspective re: the requirements for centralised voice in comedy.
Let me know what you think - below are some episodes of WATJ - any good?
Where Are The Joneses WikiPage
Where Are the Joneses on YouTube
(Thanks to Caroline Edwards of Sparkle for pointing me to the article)
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.
Posted by: Phil | July 25, 2007 at 03:36 PM
+ the grammar alone in that post above is why you don't let amateurs do this sort of thing.
Posted by: Phil | July 25, 2007 at 03:38 PM
It's an interesting experiment - but so far the results don't seem to be panning out.
Posted by: Jett Loe | July 26, 2007 at 06:00 AM
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".
Posted by: copernicus | July 30, 2007 at 05:56 PM
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.
Posted by: Jett Loe | July 31, 2007 at 04:01 AM
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.
Posted by: copernicus | July 31, 2007 at 08:37 PM
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.
Posted by: Jett Loe | August 01, 2007 at 06:08 AM