Tag: comedy

  • media: streams of september

    I have been dabbling in my media consumption. I have half a dozen books on the go and it’s a dead heat to see which one I’ll race ahead and finish first. I’m deep into at least four different video games right now. I’ve got a couple movie-watching missions on the go. And I’ve been tackling my episodic entertainment on the streaming platforms with a scattershot abandon.

    My lack of focus is probably linked to a couple of things happening in my professional life and my inability to sit still for longer than thirty minutes, it seems, lately. I have this overwhelming sense of something that I can’t really describe in other way than as a sort of productivity fomo, a fear of missing out on making or doing something more important than what I am ever doing at that moment, so I can’t sit still and just do much of anything.

    But my neurosis aside, I did manage to push through a couple of series.

    The last couple of weeks I watched:

    streaming: Umbrella Academy, Season 1

    I watched this whole series the first time, start to finish, pretty much as it rolled out.  Each new season release turned into a binge watch with the Kid. Binge watching is not my preference. I think it must be a generational thing. Kids these days! I prefer my suspense to hangout at arbitrary act breaks determined by the commercial nature of broadcast television that forced me once to wait an entire week between episodes. Gah! Alas, there was a part of me that felt like watching it in binge-mode the first time through had my poor old guy brain at a disadvantage and that a slower paced rewatch was in order. I spread my second go at season one out over about six months, which admittedly, might have been a lot slower than the spirit of my long lost self intended.  If you have not partaken of the Umbrella Academy quite yet think of it like a kind of off-brand Marvel superhero-type story blended with a bit of goth style, some retro-alternate-futurism and a dash of dark humour. Oh, and a lot more random death. It was the brainchild of Gerard Way founder of My Chemical Romance and cousin to conspiracy theorist Joe Rogan, which should tell you more than enough about the vibe of this thing.  I watched it first time with a fourteen year old and now she is doing an arts degree in drama and film studies. Correlation or causation, you tell me. The backstory is far too complex to explain, except maybe to say kids with mysterious powers are raised by the world worst parent without access to therapy and what could go wrong? The end of the world could go wrong, that’s what could go wrong. Worth your time, but maybe watch it over a few weeks and neither two days nor six months.

    streaming: Avenue 5, Season 2

    I have a soft spot for comedic science fiction. In fact, did I have the confidence of prose to compose comedic narrative in a science fictional setting it would almost certainly be my genre of choice. I even wrote a series of articles trying to wrap my head around the mechanics of the absurd, thinking (probably vainly) that if I could put some logic to creating the illogical I might have a thread of hope upon which to grasp and thus, perhaps foolishly, try to write some silly sci fi. The conclusion that I ultimately came to was that writing absurdist and funny spec fiction is actually hard—and so much more difficult than writing “big guns in space blow shit up” fiction or “evil robots chase frightened people” stories. The thing is, I grew up on a steady diet of Douglas Adams and Red Dwarf, and I know for my endless efforts of looking for it that good absurdist comedic science fiction pretty much remains a genre with a lot of empty shelf space. Again: because it’s hard to do well. And I mean sure, modern casual science fiction bros like Dennis Taylor or Andy Weir have written great stories that are funny-adjacent, often providing a good belly laugh, but those and other funny-adjacent authors are storytellers who are telling serious stories while acknowledging that sometimes regular people do funny things. People are not generally absurd all the time, is what I’m saying, and neither are their characters. What I’m talking about here are mostly slapstick among the stars humour, buffoonery and chaos and, yeah, absurdity. Avenue 5’s cast was stuffed full of great comedic actors but only earned itself two short and obscure seasons of what turned out to be a cliffhanger serial narrative because—I’d like to think—it was misunderstood. I finally tracked down the second season last week and watched it in the span of twenty-four hours binging, and too watched it with the eye of someone looking for absurdity in space. Anyone looking for a moral or a message would be disappointed of course, but like all great comedy it had heart and that should have earned it a couple more seasons—and not an abrupt cancellation.

  • on writing absurdity

    How does one write for absurdity?  After all, what is the absurd. The unexpectedly humourous. The weird confluence of ideas, people, situations and object that don’t normally belong together? Or more than that, shouldn’t belong together.  Things that clash in their purpose. How does one pull from a rational brain ideas that align with the notion of absurdity, might be the bigger and more important question?

    An example might help.

    That is to say, here I’m sitting at a Starbucks and writing out on the patio. Nothing about that situation is absurd. In fact it is quite mundane. Coffee. Patio table. Sunshine. People gathered and enjoying their drinks. Me with a keyboard.  That is a situation that is in itself complete mundane.

    What would make this situation absurd?  How many elements of it would need to change to create a humourous contrast. Changing something might make it just silly or funny, say. For example, a cafe like this where the barista is a dog is silly. Or  maybe patio where there were preposterously small tables might lean towards the absurd, but it is mostly again just silly and impractical.

    I think there is an aspect of the absurd where the end result of the situation is, yes, important, but also the logic behind how we got to that point that makes it go beyond the silly and drift more into absurdity.  Cause and effect. We see the effect and then are captivated by the odd sort of logic that brought us there.

    So again, back to the silly examples. A barista who is a dog is silly. A barista who is a dog because the dog isn’t really a dog but a shapeshifting robot who is stuck in the form of a dog is kind of strange. A shapeshifting robot barista stuck in the form of a dog because a software update sent out from a megacorporation who misread and misinterpretted a sarcastic customer review and decided by committee that what all customers wanted was baristas who looked liked dogs—that is starting to become absurd.  It’s baked into the explanation.  

    Likewise, a cafe patio with small tables is akward, but if those tables are small because of some middling store manager who beleives that small tables are fashionable and kind of trendy, that’s silly. If the manager is also bad at math and then orders tables that are ridiculously small, to the point that they are essentially barely wide enough to hold a single cup of coffee balanced on the end of a thin table leg and that he has ordered these at great expense and unmasked embarassment but cannot get rid of them because he would need to admit his error, risk losing his job and thinks he would look a worse fool than he already does, so everyone is forced to pretend and justify that these useless tables are deliberate and great—that starts to get absurd.

    Absurdity is an elusive thing, I think.  One of my great role models, Douglas Adams was seemingly great at the absurd, but one immediately assumes that his greatest examples of absurdity were accidents or rolled effortlessly onto the page. In fact, one can kind of tell that he was building absurdity into his everyday experience, picking out weirdness from the mundane by just asking “what if—“

    What if this was slightly and weirdly different, why would that have happened, and what if people tried to pretend it was a completely normal thing to have happened?

  • media review: weird al

    I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

    I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

    Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

    The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

    Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

    It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

    Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.