Class blog 3/19/18

In today's class, March 19th, our objective was to be able to articulate how patterns in content develop genre conventions. We revisited the meanings of chaos and cosmos, and made sure we understood the chaos is affiliated with disorder and conflict while cosmos is affiliated with order. We also began discussion on D.H. Monro’s “Theories of Humor”, which was the basis of the three tweets assignment on Google Classroom. The assignment was to craft three tweets, each tweet about one of the three theories presented in the article. The types of humor discussed include the incongruity theory, superiority theory, and relief theory. These tweets were to prove that we had an understanding of the each theory. Our class discussion was primarily based on these three theories, as we got more in depth into the meaning and understanding of them. Here is what I wrote down in my notes during class when discussing these theories:

Superiority: Laughing at the expense of others

→ the misfortune of others

→ expense, emotional (dumped), Physical pain (stairs)

Incongruity: humor derived from subverted expectations

→ Different from what you expect  (music, etc.)

→ Ex.) Two fish are in a tank. One turned to the other and asks do you know how to drive this thing?

Relief: Removing the boundaries of normal conversation (no filter)

→ Dark humor, feelings, political, religion, yo mama

Mr. Rivers also reminded us to stay on track with our movie and book for this Friday's upcoming podcast. These theories of humor can also be applies to our individual/group podcast content, depending on what texts we chose to use. For example, I would be able find and apply the use of the superiority theory in one of my podcast films, Goodfellas. Often times throughout the movie, there are multiple examples of both characters within the show and the audience watching whom would laugh or find humor in the expense or misfortune of others, like when the group of guys around Frankie would laugh at how slow Spider was after Frankie would make fun of him.