Free, or at least discount, association

[scarfman]

We saw the Fright Night remake the last day it was in the theaters. I saw the original in the 80s. I don't usually go in for horror, but I seem to recall context of recommendation by a friend since passed away who was a film student. Then we went to see the new one because David Tennant is in it. (Also it was nice to see Anton Yelchin can pronounce a V when he wants to.)

There was a fifteen or twenty minute sequence in the second act that made me very uncomfortable. It had nothing to do with horror special effects, of which there was a not inappropriate amount. I'm speaking of the sequence when Yelchin is the only person (left) who knows that Colin Farrell is a vampire, and is either afraid to tell people or is disbelieved when he does; even when he goes to Tennant who is a Vegas stage magician whose schtick is vampire lore and who has encountered vampires before but initially doesn't admit it.

I have an aversion to stories or scenes when only the protagonist knows something fantastic and s/he is either trying to hide it or to show it and everyone around thinks s/he's not sane. I was surprised at how intensely uncomfortable I was made by those twenty minutes of that film. I'm sure it's a convention of horror films and this may be why I don't go in for them. However, it's also a trope in comedy. I think of it as "nightmare comedy".

The epitome, the acme if you will, of nightmare comedy is the Looney Tunes cartoon One Froggy Evening, in which a construction worker discovers a time capsule containing a frog that performs song and dance routines, except when anyone but the construction worker is looking.

Another example of nightmare comedy is the Tom Cruise film Risky Business. This isn't a case so much of the protagonist knowing more that everyone else than of simply everything going wrong for the protagonist that can go wrong, but it presses the same buttons for me.

The reason these two films stick in my mind as examples of the nightmare comedy trope is that they're favorites of billroper, who loves the trope. After I noticed this about him, I noticed most of the personal stories he tells are couched as this trope. The only example of that which I actually recall now (not having lived in the same city as he for a coupla decades now) is a tale of his first cat, Smudge.

He once described an occasion in which he was scooping Smudge's catpan. Smudge looked on with apparent confusion that her territory marker was being obliterated. Once he was done, the cat stepped in and, so to speak, reasserted herself. He only patiently waited till she was done and then scooped that up to discard with what he'd already collected.

And that's why to this day I think of billroper when I clean a catpan.

Comments

[billroper]

I can't find it on the Internet right now, but I recall seeing a quote that I think was by Jack London that said, "Adventure is someone having a bad time, far away from where you are."

My corollary to that was, "So is comedy."

So, yes, one of my favorite ways of doing a comic sketch -- especially a parody of source material where the characters are familiar -- is to take a basically sane protagonist and keep piling on with stupid things happening around him while trying to keep everyone in character.

SpaceTime's Star Trek:TNG sketch had Captain Picard encountering the K (apparently a relative of Q) who was out to give the ship a makeover. Add an attack by several Romulan vessels and you've got a recipe for comedy -- along with a built-in solution.

Our "lost" musical episode of Babylon 5, "A Late Delivery From Broadway", found Captain Sheridan dealing with a Shadow virus that caused humans to uncontrollably break into song. Of course, Sheridan hadn't yet succumbed to the virus -- he just suffered. A lot, from the moment that Garibaldi and Ivanova danced across the stage singing "Overture, Curtain, Lights" and Sheridan was subsequently informed by Garibaldi that this was the traditional opening for a Warner Brothers show -- because the man has a poster of Daffy Duck on his wall, so obviously he knows. :)

[scarfman]

I'm reminded by your quotation(s) of this one from Mel Brooks' 2000 Year Old Man:

Tragedy is if I cut my finger. I cry, I run around, I check into Mount Sinai for a day and a half.

Comedy is if you walk into an open sewer and die.

The premise you're defending is true, but that's not all there is to comedy. When I drew this cartoon, I thought of a quote from Bill Watterson (that I can no longer find on the internet) that nice people can't be funny:

I'm pretty sure this is funny, is funny because the character is a nice guy, and is not funny at the expense of someone far away having a bad time.

[billroper]

That's certainly fair. And there's more than one kind of comedy...

[sidhekin.livejournal.com]

... "not funny at the expense of someone far away having a bad time"?

Yeah, more like "funny to the benefit of someone far away having a bad time". :)

[finnyb.livejournal.com]

I like the sound of that musical episode.

[janusfiles.livejournal.com]

I recently watched several versions of "This Is It" on YouTube, and I noticed something that I never had before. You know the part where Bugs and Daffy toss their canes into the air? There is a slight "thwap" sound when they catch the canes.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

So David Tenant is Roddy McDowall?

[scarfman]

Exactly.

[purpleranger.livejournal.com]

Hmmm . . . in that case, I would like to see him go up against Christian Bale -- decked out in a brown leather suit, of course.

[trinalin.livejournal.com]

My first thought with "protagonist knows something fantastic" and isn't believed - Big Bird & Mr. Snuffleupagus. I was so glad when Bird & Snuffie were proved right all along!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, they resolved that because the Children's Television Workshop realized that Having All The Adults Say You're Imagining Things is Nightmare Comedy for a little kid.

[pedanther]

Ah, thank you. I think I'll give Fright Night a miss.

I still haven't come up with a description of my particular aversion I'm satisfied with, but my latest attempt (coincidentally, I was thinking about it just this morning) is "Character does something character thought was perfectly reasonable, and discovers that everybody now thinks they're nuts". This covers both cases where the character is actually wrong and cases where the character is the only person who's right.

Asking me to laugh at it makes it even worse. (It's traditional for Doctor Who fans to have stories about alien monsters making them want to hide behind the sofa when they were children. I don't think I have any of those, but there was this episode of "I Love Lucy" where they're all putting on a play, and the whole script gets re-written just before the performance but nobody tells Ricky...)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Okay, if there's not one already, Nightmare Comedy needs a TV Tropes entry.

[scarfman]

That would be two I inspired, wouldn't it? Didn't you or somebody respond to my observation that there was no Panicky Expectant Father page by creating one? And I don't even do anything there. Well, I'm registered, but that was just to correct the spelling of my name on the AKOTAS page. Prolly don't remember my login now.

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

It was me who launched Panicky Expectany Father. I also created the AKOTAS page, so apologies for spelling your name wrong.

I think Kafka Komedy covers what we're discussing here.