Everyday Canvas

What is Comedy? ---- Trapped in a Show.

Comedy is an art, subjective and with almost no rules. It can’t be learned like a science, and it can’t be overly analyzed. Too much analysis will make the humor disappear. Still, it doesn’t mean that comedy cannot be intelligent.

I laugh when I get the joke. I laugh when I can relate to the situation. I laugh when the incident is familiar or expected and unfamiliar or unexpected with a twist. Comedy depends upon timing and builds on misunderstandings, flawed plans, pun, wordplay or double entendre, mock epic in which something trivial is treated as if important on a grand scale or its opposite, in which important issues are treated as if they are trivial.

Comedy is basically of two kinds: high comedy and low comedy. High comedy depends on intellectual wit, using clever characterization and complex situations. Low comedy uses coarse language, slapstick and farce.

Various types of comedy exist such as parody, slapstick, satire, spoof, sarcasm, irony, farce, black comedy, and disjointed surrealism that weaves something so bizarre that it is thought to be funny, although it never is funny to me.

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Prompt: You are trapped and have to live in your favorite TV Comedy Show. Which one do you choose?

If I were to be trapped in any show it would be either The Bob Newhart Show (1972–1978) or the BBC comedy Series 'Allo 'Allo! (TV Series 1982–1992). Bob Newhart show because I can relate to living with a therapist, and Allo, Allo because it was about a French café owner/cook Rene during the World War II German occupation of France. Both shows were filled with smart quips and funny yet intelligent situations, with little or no slapstick.

Maybe there still are shows like that, but probably because the TV options are so plentiful and I can hardly relate to today’s situational comedy, I have given up watching comedy shows.