Another great thing about comedy is that it teaches us to love our flaws. But unlike the positive thinking or self-esteem movements, comedy doesn't just teach us to overcome our imperfections--it shows how our flaws are always already our strengths. The worst things about us are already the best things about us, simply in an inverted form. And our bad writing is already our good writing, just in a distorted form. The key task of a writer is to transform the anti-genius of the bad into the the genius of the good. It's like learning to recognize the great things about movies that are so bad they are good.
Here's a few things to ponder today as we free ourselves to "write bad."
Finally, consider the ways that bad writing is not all that different from good writing. What makes bad writing bad often has to do with the attitude of the writer. The writer is not communicating to others, but having an internal dialogue. There is nothing wrong about this. It simply suggests that we need to start having a dialogue with others, rather than giving a monologue. Even though the other person is silent, we should think of all writing as a conversation. The essence of a conversation is to see every statement as serving to bring the other person deeper into the topic, to entrance them, to wow them.
Bad writing is common. Very bad writing is uncommon for the same reason that very good writing is uncommon: it does something impressive. It fails in a way that is spectacular and risky.
For essay three, we will continue to build on the work we have done in the first two papers. We will still focus on rooting the paper in significant details. The majority of the paper will still offer detailed explanations and justifications of your main claim, based in analysis of the specific details of your sources. We will also again use scholarly sources to help build more significant and refutable claims.
While paper three still will use all these same major skills and tools as the last paper, it will aim to further challenge you by asking you to incorporate more sources into your argument. Using one source is relatively simple as you can simply apply its insights to whatever you are analyzing. In using more than one source, however, you must not only explain your relationship to your sources but explain the relationship among the different sources. This creates a significantly more challenging task.
To tackle paper three, you will need not only to understand and apply your sources but quickly to establish how they fit together. This will require offering your own sense of what the consensus on an issue is. Find the three scholarly sources on your topic that seem most authoritative, insightful, and helpful. Look for sources that are cited by other sources and that other scholars consider influential and important to understanding the issue. For this assignment, picking good sources will be just as important as developing a clear, refutable, and significant thesis, and it will be much easier to develop a good thesis with the assistance of good sources.
Establish your own sense of how these all fit together. Then situate your own argument within this conversation. What does the current scholarly consensus seem to agree on? What does it not agree on? What areas have the existing scholars overlooked? Rather than attacking or simply dismissing the existing scholarly consensus, focus on building on it and entering into the conversation it sustains. Look for ways in which you can contribute to the conversation by extending insights in ways that the existing research has not considered. Look for ways in which you can push the conversation into new territory that it has not yet discussed. Situate your own argument in the debates and concepts that the existing scholarship employs. Show how your own argument is significant in light of the existing research.
Once again, you have freedom to write on any topic connected to the class that fits the paper assignment. You can use topics we have talked about in class, or choose your own topic. If you are having trouble getting started, consider the following prompts:
1. Find a work of comedy that there is significant scholarly disagreement about. Provide your own interpretation of the work in light of this research. Focus on identifying key details that can address the issues that other scholars have raised, and explain how your position relates to the existing conversation.
2. Examine a social or political issue that scholars have tried to understanding using comedy. For example, we have talked about the way that political views line up with tastes for different types of comedy. Research this or another topic. Then write an essay showing why it is that comedy allows us to have a better understanding of this issue. What makes comedy a particularly good way of approaching this issue or topic? What does comedy allow us to understand about the issues that we wouldn't understand otherwise?
This essay should be 1500-1700 words long, formatted in the standard Times New Roman 12 point font with 1 inch margins. Include at least three peer-reviewed sources. Bring a rough draft to class Friday, November 1. The final essay is due Friday, November 8, at 5pm.
Here is a sample essay that illustrates some of the writing tips I highlighted the other day. Keep in mind that this is written in the style of a blog post, not a formal essay. As a result, the language it uses is more informal than what I would use in an essay of the type we write for this class. Nonetheless, it works as a model of a few things: 1. subordinating examples to driving the argument forward; 2. using the comedy theories in selective ways to advance your argument, rather than simply running through the list of theories sequentially; 3. getting to your thesis quickly (not in the first sentence, but within a few sentences); 4. using transitions to connect your different points together and back to the central thesis; 5. situating your arguments within a few select pieces of evidence, a few debates, and some key concepts; 6. connecting your points together in a way that drives toward an answer to the "so what?" question.
Here's the essay:
As we all know from improv classes, comedy comes in threes. There's the three theories of comedy. There's the rule of three: including something unusual as the third element in a list or series of "normal" things makes it funnier. And then there's what I'll call the three truisms of comedy analysis:
1. explaining humor kills it
2. comedy = tragedy + time
3. comedy is culturally specific
I think they are malarkey.
Let's take the first truism: explaining humor kills it. The problem with this assertion is that, as with anything involving comedy, context is so crucial that it is difficult to say that anything isn't funny in all situations. A classic comedian trick is to explain a joke whenever they believe that the audience didn't fully get it and that they were owed a bigger laugh. One might object: well this is just the exception that proves the rule. You aren't explaining something that is funny in this case; you are explaining something that isn't funny, which makes it funny. But that's not true, because the joke could have gotten a bit of a laugh in the first instance. The point of explaining the humor is not just to do the opposite of what a comedian is normally supposed to do. That's certainly part of the fun, but doesn't totally explain it all. The real purpose of this exercise is to actually point out the fun of the joke. The same holds true for footnotes that explain jokes in works of literature: they often make it possible to laugh at a joke that wouldn't have gotten a laugh otherwise. In all of these cases, the joke is being explained in advance, and if anything it increases rather than decreases the humor.
As with truism one, the problem with truism two is that it underestimates the way that comedy allows us to take a cold, analytic attitude toward the world. Truism one assumes that comedy cannot take place in an environment where critical thought occurs. However, I think that comedy and critical distance have a similarity. When someone cites truism two, that comedy is tragedy plus time, I always call to mind another truism about comedy, one that I think is more accurate: tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you fall down a well and die. The point of this saying is, of course, that there is some selfishness in comedy. "It's funny cause I don't know him," to quote Homer Simpson laughing at a video of people getting injured. This is the essential truth behind superiority theory: if we feel above something, it is easier to laugh at it.
I think, however, the more important insight here is really one about tragedy: tragedy is the original genre of "first world problems." Everything seems tragic when you have no perspective. The smallest little things take on world-historical importance. The attitude of comedy is a different one. Of course, this is not to knock Hamlet as a play about a selfish little brat. But isn't Hamlet kind of a selfish little brat? His tragedy is that he gets too caught up in his own personal drama. Tragedy depicts someone in the grips of some personal crisis and shows how these tiny things can destroy a person. We feel the classic tragic emotions, terror and pity, not laughter, when we see someone going through this ordeal.
At the same time, there is a proximity between tragedy and comedy because both depict "tragic" things. The difference is one of attitude. The tragic person can never take tragic pleasure in his or her situation. It seems overwhelming and suffocating. It is tragedy that actually requires distance from the tragic situation, not comedy. Tragedy depicts someone being overwhelmed and consumed by misfortune. You could even argue that tragedy is the response to a situation we adopt when laughter is not possible but we still require some relief. If the person suffering cannot demonstrate resolve, then we cannot laugh, but we can mirror the pain. The point of this is to provide solidarity and perhaps, the beginning of a new attitude. It is not unlike how a caring parent will mirror the misfortune of a child: if the kid spills something and is embarrassed, then a parent will spill something too in order to create a sense of shared adversity. It is at this point that tears turn to laughter. This is why many funerals feature as much laughter as they do crying. Tragedy, I would argue, is a precursor to comedy, one that seeks to restore a sense of safety and solidarity to an unsafe and lonely situation.
In the case of tragedy proper in a work of art, we do not feel the sense of total relief because we cannot witness the other person "snapping out of it" and finding relief in our shared solidarity. Tragedy, then, is a later, more artificial, more inorganic reaction to the world that is predicated on the distance of viewership and the situation of the theater. There is nothing wrong with this, of course, but it is necessary to remember that the notion of a "pure" sadness is really a somewhat unnatural condition. It isolates and develops one moment of the cycle of morning and sadness. Comedy, by contrast, looks at the total situation. It depicts resilience and rebellion in the face of tragic situations. With comedy, the most horrifying indignities and misfortunes can be funny. This is the essential truth behind comedy and its refusal to give in to the laws of reality. It says: my dad died this morning, my grandma died this afternoon, but on the plus side I just found twenty dollars! who wants pizza?!
The role of tragedy is not to cancel this laughter but to restore a note of seriousness into its levity. It is easy for comedy to turn into an unwillingness to face up to problems and to avoid facing unpleasant feelings. Tragedy prevents comedy from becoming a defense. It forces the comic attitude to confront and feel deep pain before it returns to its carefree attitude. It returns a note of vulnerability and reflectiveness to the comic universe, but I would contend that it is still very much part of the larger comic universe, rather than comedy being a respite from a larger and essentially tragic universe.
Tragedy and comedy have a close relationship, but no one would claim that tragedy is culturally specific. For whatever reason, however, they claim that comedy is culturally specific. Why is this? The same subjects are the fodder for both comedy and tragedy: sex and death. The difference is not the material, but the attitude toward the material. This is the problem with the third truism: it begins with a very limited notion of comedy, one that excludes most of its typical subjects. It is not surprising, then, that it would find the result that it was looking for. Comedy is a form of resilience and resistance, and there is no better example of this than its refusal to comply with the rules we establish for it.
And just like that, I blew up all the conventional wisdom ...
