Julia's Comedic Blog

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show I came across randomly one day a few years back, and I had no idea what to expect from it. The show follows a girl named Rebecca, who at the beginning of the show is a troubled lawyer who is up for a cushy promotion at a law firm in New York when she runs into her old boyfriend from summer camp years ago, Josh Chan. When she runs into him, he talks about his hometown in California and tells Rebecca about how amazing and happy a place it is, and that day, Rebecca, who is extremely unhappy in her job and life in general, turns down the promotion and moves promptly to West Covina. Oh, and did I mention that this show is also a musical that has won Emmys for its score? The first song I'm focusing on is "Face Your Fears", sung by the character Paula, who is one of Rebecca's first and closest friends in West Covina, to Rebecca who is nervous about hosting a house warming party because her last party was a total disaster. This song starts o...

I had never seen this movie before but I knew of the director Taika Waititi for his direction and acting in Thor Ragnarok. Watching this film was a hilariously absurd look into the world of vampires in New Zeland who live ridiculously larger than life lives, even for vampires. It was hard to know exactly what was coming with this film, but it ended up being another reason to love Waititi's cleverness and humor in filmmaking. I agree that incongruity was present throughout the film, and this can be shown in the first scene, where one of the Vampires is going around trying to get the other vampires to come to a flat meeting and to do their chores around the house, which is not something you would expect a vampire to do. One reason that I think that this comedy works so well is that it takes vampires, which are creatures that are supposed to be scary and puts them in situations that show how funny their predicament would be in the modern world. Another hilarious scene is when the gro...

"The Office" is a hilarious show full of incongruous moments. The example used in this paper of the opening scene of the episode "Stress Relief" is an excellent example of the classic crazy humor of the office, where every character and situation is exaggerated and always results in hilarity, especially in the characters of Dwight, who is the one who causes a fire in the office because noon paid attention to his safety presentation, and Micheal, who is seen in this scene yelling at everyone to "STAY CALM", and then proceed to throw a projector out of a window. It would now be expected for people to do this kind of things, so seeing it play out is hilarious and incongruous. "The Office" often knows how to make the exceedingly awkward and chaotic hilarious through the use of incongruity and relief humor. Many times while a character is doing something incongruous, such as Micheal making one of his infamous "that's what she said" joke...

Many historians and philosophers throughout history and today have tried to explain what makes something funny. One of the most influential of these theories is the theory of incongruity, which is humor where two contrasting ideas that are not expected to happen together happen together. This subversion of thought can be seen constantly in comedy, however, many throughout the years have been trying to explain what makes some types of incongruity to be funny but other types to be just awkward. I believe that Kant's theory on incongruity is the most persuasive argument in this essay. The idea that incongruity is when expectation is built and the subverted is the best way to describe the theory of incongruity because it is that subversion of expectation that makes incongruity funny. However, Kant's theory is not universal to all incongruity humor. Bain, however, counters this point by talking about when incongruity and subverted expectations lead to other emotions than humor, su...