Sonali's Blog

Key & Peele is quite the popular show and has been for many years now. The attraction that the show has gotten ranges from generations too, as in my high school, some teachers would show us videos of them just for the amusement. I believe that the “Substitute Teacher” video is very well known to most people as it is funny in the simplest ways. The teacher keeps pronouncing the simplest names wrong such as Aaron as “a - aron” and Blake as “Balakey”. The teacher becomes very frustrated as the kids keeps correcting him throughout the video, that he is pushed to the point of breaking his own clipboard. I agree that in these skits superiority plays a role here. This theory is portrayed by the audience being able to laugh at this misfortunate session, which in this case is the whole mess of the roll call in class. I also believe that another theory is at play here, and that is incongruity theory. Incongruity theory is presented in these skits because of the idea that in role call, we, i...

In “Dear Committee Members”, Jay Fitger is seen as a witty, sarcastic, easy going guy. He works in the English department as the Professor of Creative Writing and English. The same English department which is up for a few repairs, as he mentions more than once throughout his recommendations. The interesting characteristic that Jay has is that the same man who complains constantly throughout the novel, is the same person who will stick up for his kids and take hours out his day and actually be huddled in the corner of his office in order to write these recommendations. Jay represents incongruity theory as he is constantly stating absurd comments which are not appropriate at all for recommendations. For example on page 40, Jay is writing a recommendation for Professor Ali, but instead of primarily talking about Ali, Jay goes back and forth from paragraph to paragraph and complains all of the problems the English department has. One problem which I found quite amusing was the fact that th...

The Office . No one can deny that the show’s success in something not to be taken likely. I’m sure one time in everyone’s life, they have seen another individual wearing a Dunder Mifflin shirt or heard someone quote a line from the top of their head. And don’t forget all the iconic quotes and moments that the show has blessed our daily lives with, and that we ordinary people can fortunately integrate into our lives. For instance, the guy next to you in class makes an ignorant comment or simply is being his dumb self, then look into the imaginary camera and make the iconic “Jim face”. Or, if there is a fake fire caused by one of your coworkers in your workplace, be like Kevin and don’t try to find safely, but instead, go for the vending machine to grab all the snacks you want. Want to save time because life is just too darn short? Be like Kevin and save time by eradicating all of the unnecessary words. For instance, instead of saying, “I am hungry so I want to go to the dining hall to ...

The new median of comedy was primarily vines back in middle school and in high school. Vines took over everything back in the day. There were vine references being made left and right in classes, car rides, cafeterias etc… Some of the most iconic vines, were of course “I could’ve dropped my croissant”, or “free Shavacado”, or who can forget the guy who’s never been to “oovoo javer”. I found it very interesting on how you went about and played on with the dialect and context of some of the most iconic vines. One of my favorites vines of all time is the one about Zack going to get in trouble for literally just acting or dancing weirdly. In the end, of course he somehow has police swarming him, giving off the attention that his dancing was the real problem, and honestly it was. I really liked the way you phrased and summed up the vines. It made the process of reading through them even more fun because I, as a member of the audience, was able to try to guess the vine before I clicked on th...

John Lippitt speaks upon the variances that occur within the large category of understanding incongruity in terms of what in funny. Lippitt explains that many have studied the subject of humor such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Schopenhauer. The author closely looks at Schopenhauer on his terms of incongruity being the unexpected punchline of a joke. To see this formulation in more recent times, we look at the successful show “The Office”. In the show, Michael Scott, who is played by Steve Carell, has many instances where his dialect is seen to take an unexpected turn, thus having incongruity. For example, in season six Micheal states that, “If I had a gun with two bullets and I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden and Toby, I would shoot Toby twice”. The quotation serves the purpose of incongruity where the punchline in unexpected. This example also the many definitions of incongruity as being “innaporotarie”, “unsuited to their situation”, “absurdity”, etc… There are however cultural bo...