A Guide to Catching Up | An Alternative Approach to Comedy - Black Books

I think comedy is a superb art.

Comedy attempts to make people laugh, but the difficulty is that laughing is harder to predict than crying. In the past, when we were in a small theater, tragedy was the suffering of the actors, and comedy was the suffering of the screenwriter. It was not until the moment of the performance that I knew that your meme would not work. Not to mention current events, if the performance time is prolonged, if the first and last performances are three months behind, it is not surprising that half of the script is changed. This is why I dedicated some classic plays and movies, such as theater scripts: never Paying the bill, who's afraid of Woolf, and movies: Stephen Chow's full series, Woody Allen's full series, blond stunners, etc., praying for one ten thousandth of the skill is good: how can the audience keep laughing?

Why did the audience laugh?

Why the audience laughs, there are three remedies in the market: Superiority Theory, Incogruity Theory and Relief Theory. First of all, Wikipedia has it, but the purpose of the encyclopedia is to make you not understand, so I will briefly explain:

• Superiority Theory: Let the audience feel that the people in the show are so stupid and that they are awesome, and they can laugh at the people in the show to highlight their likes.
• Incogruity Theory: Breaking the audience's common sense, or putting together things that don't fit together and insisting they make sense.
• Relief Theory: That is, humor is to relieve stress.

I think remedies are remedies after all, and they don't help at all in writing comedy.

comedy as an art form

Last year, my apprentice said he wanted to write a comedy by himself, and he asked me if I could help with it. My first reaction was, how could you find someone like me who has no sense of humor? After half-push and half-down, I gave advice and looked for useful materials, and I found this book in the library: Super Comedy This is written: The Hollywood comedy godfather's screenwriting skills are deciphered . , animation, teaching and consultant, I mention these identities not to add weight, but to say, hey, he has really interacted with the audience in his way, and I also agree with his starting point, comedy is an art form, not just for Funny, can carry the artistic will of the writer , so Dario Fo can make the audience laugh out of the belly in " Never Pay " (1974), and let the audience empathize with inflation, government failure, and social chaos, laughing all the way. For half a century, the author's political intentions have not diminished in the slightest. Although my junior finally gave up on writing the script, we both enjoyed the book.

Another Form of Comedy: Human Folly

Nashan, the protagonist in "Mr. Nashan of Brooklyn", has always wanted to write a book of human folly. If he were a playwright, he would be Dylan Moran, who produced the Black Books series, which entertains people and their Behavior. The protagonist of Black Books - Bernard is a cynical bookstore owner (yes, the owner of Black Books), he... is a bit different from the bookstore owner we imagined. He smokes and drinks in the store, and takes it when he is tired. The broom drives the guests out, and he will also speak bitterly to the pretentious guests. Manny is the second shopkeeper of the bookstore and lives in the bookstore. Fran is a regular customer. The first episode of the season! In the next paragraph, I cite one of my favorite episodes, Fever (the second episode of the second season), and share the subtleties of storytelling in this series and why it has become a comedy textbook. Friends who haven't watched the first season, it's okay to watch this episode directly, Black Books is a unit drama, and the impact will not be too big.

This episode has three storylines, all from the same starting point, the weather is too hot!

• Hot Bernard wants a summer girlfriend
• It's so hot that Manny keeps talking all over the place that something will happen if the temperature reaches 88F (about 31C)
• It's so hot that Fran says she hasn't slept well all week because her suite keeps getting smaller

The story logic of Black Books is very similar to watching a talk show. The stories of stand-up comedy will follow one after another. Many times it sounds like it is just around a theme, there is no clear connection, and even connective words cannot be put in it. Often it is just a After a pause of eight beats, it was only when the ending came to light, that all the full stops were given at once . This method of storytelling is written like this: The Godfather of Hollywood Comedy The starting point of the great deciphering of screenwriting skills is two ends. <Super> hope that playwrights realize that comedy is a kind of drama, which is derived from the actor's method used by the theater. Go out and analyze the characters. Generally, the protagonists of tragedies, plots, and hero films have extraordinary will or abilities, but the protagonist of comedies is a normal person, a little naive, a little optimistic, a little stupid, a little incompetent, but can stumble along the way. It's a smashing success, and it has developed to a happy ending, while <Black Books> is a snarky and eloquent view of life, detailing the stupidity of people one by one. Even by the end of the third season of the album, the protagonist has not improved at all, it can be said What, probably only the useless friend next to me, there is no so-called climax, we are like reading a diary of a lunatic with excellent writing, and the logic of stand-up comedy is what advances the plot.

Back in the episode of Fever, after the three story lines diverged in various ways, they were intertwined in an absurd ending. It was all the weather. The weather was too hot!

• Bernard realized that he was being driven by the heat to chase girls like crazy
• Fran sees the landlord and friends go crazy
• As soon as 88F arrived, Manny danced naked on the street, passers-by said that he had Dave's syndrome (I checked, and he didn't have this disease, I don't know why he was called Dave?)

Of course, the storytelling method of this stand-up comedy, looking back at the three major remedies, is consistent, can explain why people laugh, go back and read some skills in the book <Super>, it is consistent, can prove that heroes see the same thing, but why do people write What about each other's absurdity? Maybe it's just like my former colleague loves the ugly photos of cats in Po's house, probably because he thinks people are cute? !