The Fashion of Haste — of randomness — is a plague across the net. A quick overview of Internet animation will tell you this. It seems like there is one person who makes every single cartoon online; and by now, surely, the joke has worn thin — well, it was never funny in the first place.
Irrelevance seems to have become a substitute for wit — or indeed any form of thinking.
"I don't need to think up any jokes, I'll just make a banana pop his head on screen and say 'I'm a banana'." Etcetera, etcetera.
I may be looking — or not looking, as the case may be — in all the wrong places, but I am yet to find a funny web animation. (Please note I'm excluding those made by already established animators.)
And it's the word that describes this phenomenon that is the worst of all: Random. It makes me shudder every time I hear it.
"How Random," they all say as an egg bounces around in Flash.
This is true, but uncanny in terms of Orange Milkshakes. Truth? I hear you cry. Truth? What about the Monkeys? What about the Chickens? Never fear.
Duck, Duck, Cockatiel
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The move is officially complete, though I'm still living with a few islands
of stuff—the main one located in what agents like to call the "meals area".
Rea...
7 years ago
11 comments:
You fool. The very idea of humour is to apply an unexpected twist to a given situation. Name one good joke where the humour doesn't spring from the fact that you aren't expecting the punchline.
What I meant was there is a difference between randomness and unexpectedness. Bah Humbug. And I'll insult no more.
As do I.
Yes!
Luckily I was refering to internet animation.
Except it's not. Anyway you know what I mean.
Perhaps I need to be more specific. The great thing about the supposedly random humour of Python is that it really isn't. Behind every nonsensical gag lay a great, well-calculated idea. It's not like they wrote the scripts in two minutes and threw everything that popped into their head in it (as it seems these internet animators do). Okay, let me just say that internet animators stink. The End.
Preperation belies randomness. Ok, never mind. I just merely hate the way internet animators approach humour.
2007 says there is a difference between sort of random and completely random. Completely random = banana enters, screen left, says he's a banana repeated times. No one laughs. Whereas sort of random, as some may perceive Python, has the distinction of being treated as it wasn't random. That's why it's so dead-pan. But in the end, the real distinction is probably just the talent of the individuals involved.
Successful comedy, in most, if not all, instances, relies on the audience drawing on their own experience of life, even if it seems utterly absurd. For instance, much of the success of Monty Python can be attributed to their basing their deadpan absurdities in a mundane, everyday environment, often drawing on bureaucracy and conservative news report narration. Without this contrast, it would most likely be insufferable. It's not randomness for the sake of randomness (and I don't call it randomness either way). It's about contrast. Absurd things treated as if they were mundane and so forth.
Most internet animators I've witnessed, on the other hand, seem to think that the key to humour is to make a schizophrenic light show of unlinked images and stupid voices, as if a complete lack of coherence is funny in unto itself. "Why the fuck did that chicken just fly across the screen? How fucking random!" et cetera.
But the key, of course, lies in the talent.
The banana still became wildly popular.
Maybe there's just an element to it you're completely missing? I still enjoy it.
But let us not dissect humour further. That way lies madness.
Agreed.
Rather than taking an analytical stance, I'll just say I don't like the banana thing. I'm not missing something, just not my taste.
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