Hmm, yesterday’s post strikes me as a little bit dry and, well, boring. I’ll try and make this one more interesting. Though I won’t promise anything.
Let’s talk about awkward comedies. There has been a trend in recent years towards more realistically written and shot comedies (The Office being the genre’s seminal and still in my opinion greatest example) where we are encouraged to laugh at the characters’ awkward and embarrassing predicaments.
A classic example is from the first episode of season two of The Office, where David Brent uses the welcome meeting for the new staff from Swindon as a chance to show off his comedy skills:
Many people I’ve spoken to site that scene as a major reason why they don’t like The Office. Or, if they enjoyed season one, why season two for them went too far with the ‘cringe-factor’. I personally find it hilarious and I’ve been trying to work out why that might be; why does a scene which others can barely watch due to the discomfort it induces in them become one of my favourite scenes in modern comedy?
For a start there’s the contrast between Brent’s over-confidence and arrogance in the lead up to the show meeting and the train-wreck of his actual routine . There’s a wry pleasure in seeing someone’s arrogant pride become their downfall – we observe that they had it coming, and it, in a way, serves them right. In real life this is often, and rightly, a guilty pleasure – laughing at other people’s misfortune[1] – but in fiction we can with clear conscience indulge in a bit of schadenfreude knowing no one’s ego has actually been wounded.
There’s also the fact that Brent’s downfall is so over-the-top, so complete, that most people can say to themselves ‘I might have been in some embarrassing situations, but never as bad as that!’. It’s a common feature of Gervais and Merchant’s writing – running with an idea far longer than anyone would in real life. In Extras, there are frequently scenes where Andy or Maggie make a slip up in conversation and say the wrong thing, accidentally or unwittingly. We’ve all been there. But where in real life one would normally appologise, have a quick laugh and move on (or just ignore it and pretend it didn’t happen. But still just move on with the conversation), in Extras they continue digging themselves into a hole trying to undo the dammage, but of course making it far, far worse:
I think that’s where a lot of the humour from this style of comedy comes from. If you’re watching a traditional sitcom then the whole setup is already so absurd and unreal that to get a laugh requires turning that notch up even higher – think of Basil Faulty; John Cleese’s performance is at it’s ground state so over-the-top that he needs to shout EVEN LOUDER and move his arms around EVEN WIDER as the episode progresses and the situations intensify.
In The Office, by contrast, the ground state is so close to normality it is very easy to mistake it at casual glance with a documentary, and so the writers and actors only need to add a small amount of caricature, push it just a bit far over the line of reality, for it to be funny.
I read somewhere that most humour is the release of realising that what appears to be something serious or scary is actually just benign and you were actually worried over something harmless. I believe that what goes on in my head when I see, for example, the famous ‘Brent dance’ scene and David starts his horrendous ‘dance’ is an initial feeling of empathic horror with the other characters – ‘Oh god, that would be awful to watch. Where do you look, what can you say?’ – but that is almost immediately replaced by a feeling of relief when my brain realises that it’s not really happening and I’m not really there. This relief is what causes me to laugh.
Hmm, I’m always crap at coming up with conclusions. I just sort of type what comes into my head. Then get bored. Then try to wrap it up. And fail. In any case I’ve tried to convey some of why I find The Office and its ilk hilarious and I would like to think it’s changed some people’s opinions, though in reality you probably hate it more than ever now I’ve made you sit through two clips. Oh well.
Till tomorrow, I hope.
Mark
- ‘Happiness at the misfortune of others. That is German!’ – Avenue Q, Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx [↩]