Skip to main content

Welcome! Everything is Fine

"The Good Place" is one of my favorite television shows, well, ever! It's characters and constant twists and turns make it unique as well as give the show it's unique brand of humor. Most people would think that a show that's plot is about morality and ethics would be a great comedy, but The Good Place really makes it work.
The scenes chosen are great examples of this humor at it's finest. Jason Mendosa from the first scene you picked, is a great character who, as Elinor says, seems to only know about 20% of what is actually going on around him. His obsession with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and specifically their quarterback (BORTLES) as well as his general dumbness make him the butt of many jokes on the show. Jokes with him usually utilize superiority theory, since the audience is meant to feel superior to Jason because he is acting in a stupid was, as seen in the scene used here.
Janet, the robot (but not a robot) girl (but not a girl) is also a unique character that causes many laughs, including the scene mentioned in the lead blog post. Janet, because of the fact that she knows, well, everything causes many laughs on the show, especially when she describes horrific situations with the same robotic smile on her face. As well, there is incongruity in her character since she does know everything but the humans have to help her learn about relationships, which as a Janet she was never programmed to prepare for.

Comments

  1. UnknownOctober 25, 2018 at 7:34 AM

    I love how Jason expresses total confusion in half of the episodes of The Good Place. I also think the incongruity in Janet is very important to the show because it thickens the plot and ties everything together.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shane HerronOctober 25, 2018 at 7:14 PM

    I guess part of the fun of the show is to see imperfect people in heaven, sort of like a mock heroic scenario in which ordinary people find themselves in fantastic or mythic situations.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Superbad

I've never seen Superbad, but there seems to be a quite obvious connection between it and what Zupancic was saying. It is a coming of age story with many references to sex and phalluses, which directly connects to our most recent reading by Zupancic. In that article, Zupotnic talked about how the phallus is a universal symbol of sex and what people are able to lose. Knowing this, Superbad's use of it as a part of a coming of age story is interesting and is possibly able to show the characters maturing through something as immature as a phallus. As well, it seems to draw into the incongruity theory of humor which is constant throughout the film. In the scene mentioned in the main blog post, one of the characters, who is very obviously underage, attempts to buy alcohol with a fake id and everything that could go wrong goes wrong. the whole scene is built upon the incongruity of this 15-year-old character who looks even younger thinking that he'll be able to get alcohol ...
3 comments
Read more

Lead Blog Post: "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" (links in comments)

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...
4 comments
Read more

Vine

Vines are one of my absolute favorite things on the planet earth. These short videos have made me laugh so many times and it's hard to get tired of them. Vines are great in that way because they are so short, you can watch them over and over and over again and the vine is still hilarious. There are so many great vines, from the classic "fre shava cado" to Judus bring Jesus myrrh, myrrh-dur. All theories of comedy can be found in these tiny videos that took over the internet. Incongruity theory can be found in a lot of vines with twist endings. For example, a vine starts with a teacher asking a kid names Jared to read a question, and he responds "No", which you would expect to be because he doesn't want to, but then in a voice-over, he says "Hi I'm Jared, I'm 19, and I never learned how to f****** read". This subverts the audience's expectations, thus creating a comedic effect. (In writing this, I realized I'm going to be ruining al...
2 comments
Read more