2/19/19 - Comedies and Dodgeball

Today's class started off with a do now to take an AP Research student's civics education survey for her research paper that focuses on the state of civics education. If you haven't already taken the survey, please try to do so by Friday to help Grace Musilli from High Point.

After that, we reviewed the structure of a comedy, which focuses on chaos and cosmos. Chaos focuses on the problems or stress of the story, mainly centered on several common conflict types (person vs person, person vs self, person vs environment, etc.) and highlights something about the protagonist's world that is out of order. Cosmos focuses on the resolution of a chaos, and will normally celebrate life to some capacity. Another good way to look at it is that it solidifies a new status quo for the protagonist.

To practice identifying chaos and cosmos, we rewatched the last 4 minutes of Wall-E as a class, and evaluated the major cosmos and the chaos they resolved from earlier in the film. For example, the last scene in the film focuses on the humans leaving the Axiom and starting to grow new plants on Earth, celebrating a new hope of life and resolving the chaos of a dead earth that the viewers are introduced to in the very first scene in the film. Also, Eva and Wall-E's relationship is solidified after Wall-E regains his memory after Auto's attempt to crush him and the emergency repairs Eva does, which solves the chaos that is introduced when Eva lands on Earth and constantly rejects Wall-E.

Following that example, we shifted to our new film, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story. The assignment attached to it, found on Classroom, is split into two parts. The structural aspect focuses on identifying three chaoses in the film and their cosmos, and identifying how they are resolved. This is supposed to be a short explanation, so be specific. Along with this, we must use these connections to find a theme to the text. For the content aspect, we must use the Bingo chart (we do have to match a bingo, so make a line) to identify 5 assorted examples of our three different humor theories (not five each, five total based on the chart). This is all due next week, to make sure that we watch the film instead of missing key parts to write something down.

Understanding humor theory can greatly benefit us in our daily lives in things like public speaking. If we understand how to make an audience laugh in an appropriate manner, we can help relieve tensions we may hold while presenting by adding a well timed joke, overall helping us give better presentations.