In class today Mr. Rivers welcomed the class back from the weekend and introduced the lesson for today. We are still learning about comedy and the three main forms, incongruity, relief, and superiority theories but going a little deeper. Today we specifically looked at the conventions of the comedy genre by describing the genre of comedy more specifically. The class broke comedy down into sub-genres which included things like, mockumentary, romantic comedy, sitcoms (situational comedy), and parody, etc. After we broke comedy down a little more we then watched two clips of sitcoms, Everybody Loves Raymond, and Oh Louie. While watching these clips we were asked to look at what are the conventions (ex. character, plot, style, comedy) of this genre, and what theme does the text develope about those conventions? The Everybody Loves Raymond clips that we watched consisted of the character Raymond thinking that he could make a simple dinner, then setting the kitchen on fire and has a difficult time putting it out until his wife comes and saves the day. While the Oh Louie episode took a different interpretation on a sitcom by not following the same setup to make a comedy. Once we were done watching the clips the class had a discussion about what we found so if the different conventions that we found were canned laughter, middle-class family that the audience can relate to, the man that can’t do anything right/the wife that has to fix everything, and a classic three wall set. The class ended while we were watching the second clip of Oh Louie and we are picking up tomorrow with the question “is this still a sitcom?” the reason for this being because it generally follows the same conventions but a little differently.
I found the lesson today really interesting because you don’t realize that every sitcom, specifically, follows the same comedic formula, while staying in context.
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