EPISODE 524: BUT DOES MARISKA HARGITAY HAVE TO BE CANCELLED?
Saturday is the Fourth of July, aka "Please Don't Start a Fire in our Neighborhood While We Have to Stay Indoors".
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Everyone’s talking about cancelling TV police shows right now. Even Mariska Hargitay and SVU, which is kind of blowing my mind.
The argument: shows about good cops are smokescreens right now. They function as propaganda. Cops are awesome detectives! Or flawed, but very good definitely not ever shooting people in the face with rubber bullets for no reason people.
It’s compelling. But it’s also true that many TV writers write to an ideal world that we haven’t reached yet, with the hope it helps us get there. Certainly the queer community (Happy Pride!) has benefited enormously from queer characters being depicted on television in ways that are true to their experiences and humanizing, challenging the world to think about queer people different (and telling them they can think about themselves different, too).
Grey’s Anatomy has often been like that, too. It decided to present a hospital as it should be, filled with employees of a hundred different backgrounds and refusing to go the route of “afterschool special” type plays on those differences. Black surgeons, queer surgeons are normal, not Reason for An Important Conversation.
The point of the current critique is that even as Grey’s or SVU might have been bold and hopeful in making the choices they did, they also have been used as convenient lullabies for pink face people like me. Everything is fine, Obama was President.
So can we still have cop shows?
Watching The Wire, I note even as I love that show and the detectives, pretty much none of them come off as altogether great human beings. They cheat on their spouses, they treat children and poor people and addicts like garbage, they lie, they steal. Some of them are almost never more than worst selves either. The lead character is profoundly self-destructive, even as he is great police.
Maybe that’s what it takes to tell a police show today—you have an ensemble that allows for a variety of types of police, and includes those the police interact with, too. Guest of the week victim of a home burglary, no thank you. You have to give us civilians or criminals that are part of the overall tapestry. Everyone gets humanized and also enormously complicated.
Then again, how many cop show do we need? Are there really no other groups we can look to for story? There’s no other stories to tell?
I think I mentioned a couple weeks/months/decades ago – I feel like we need a new term for time; is weeks actually different than months at this point? Is either different than decade? – that one of the things I’ve been doing in earnest of late is watching great TV shows and taking notes on them.
I’m about 80% through The Wire right now. After each episode I write some general notes on things that hit me, techniques I notice and admire, and I give one sentence outlines of every major beat of every major storylines. Which for The Wire is a lot; almost every episode has 7 or 8 stories going.
My point in doing this is to think about how the magicians do their tricks. I’m hoping to share what I learn on a blog or in some articles.
But as I was looking at some of the stuff I’d collected for the newsletter this week, I thought it might be fun to do the same thing with tweets. Below, you’ll find three tweets I think are funny. After each, I walk step by step through how the tweet works.
Does that sound like an insane waste of your time? Basically at this point I’m sort of assuming we’re all kind of losing our minds and just don’t know it.
So, consider this part of my portfolio of crazy.
How To Make a Good Funny Tweet
Tweet One: Another Day of Existing
How Does This Tweet Funny?
We have one image, which is immediately understandable. The joke is right there. That frog is going nowhere, just like us.
But the author also has another layer, the Fleetwood Mac song. And while the words don’t seem to add anything, the rhythm offers its own circular rotation. It’s just the same beat over and over.
It’s also addressed to girls. Why? I have no idea. But it’s better that way. More personal and informal. The lack of caps and punctuation likewise gives it the feeling of a text from a friend.
TAKEAWAYS
Don’t overthink things. A frog on a turntable is enough.
Speaking to the present moment in a creative way sells itself.
Informality has a way of slipping under our defenses and making us more receptive.
Tweet Two: The Masked Man
How Does This Tweet Funny?
It starts with a topic that everyone is talking about, and takes the unexpected position. Yeah, masks are terrible.
Then, it comes up with a list of things that are inconvenient, but have nothing to do with masks, like carrying cases or keeping its charge. The joke is in the ridiculous incongruity that’s created.
It’s worth noting, there’s another possible version of this tweet where instead the tweeter complains about things that are related to masks but are not a big deal. “I hate how smooth against my face.” “I hate that my face has to be decorated.” But where that tweet has a sort of teenager’s pungent sarcasm, saying I hate having to recharge my mask swings instead toward absurdity and silliness. And I think it goes down a little easier as a result. This isn’t a temper tantrum, per se, or a soapbox. It’s got goofiness.
They add an “Ugh” at the end, keeping that “This is how I really feel” vibe. And they end without punctuation, giving it that tossed off internet quality that again adds authenticity and makes the tweet more satisfying.
Normally the end of the tweet is the end of what makes a tweet great, right? But not here. Because in recasting masks in this bizarre world of carrying cases and mouth weights, the writer has taught people a game that they can play too. Make up your dumb stuff about masks, and post that. One guy says he hates that they’re filled with spiders. And so the tweet becomes just the beginning of something bigger and sharable. It’s got virality cooked in.
TAKEAWAYS
Taking an absurd position is more fun than being sarcastic, and can still offer the same social commentary.
Lists of silly things are always so much fun.
Think of your tweet as teaching a game that others can play.
Tweet Three: The Video Masterpiece
How Does This Tweet Funny?
This tweet is only 39 seconds long, but it is chock full of stuff. So buckle up.
We begins with this guy having a strange, ambiguous look about him. Is he a serial killer or a comedian? I don’t know. It’s a little uncomfortable! So I laugh!
He stares directly into the camera the whole time, and stays almost entirely in the same posture. Like his look, that gives the video an uncanny quality, a something is not quite right. Which makes us more engaged.
The fundamental content move is this simple: take something familiar and render it strange. You know that song you love? Let’s reenact it with garbage in my house.
Once that premise is set, he plays with that idea, giving us ever more silly things to make music from – a Broken Nintendo; Mario and Bowser smooching.
Then he changes it up, veering from the strange to the absolutely ordinary – hitting a couch with a pillow. And suddenly the labels he’s been giving everything without us really noticing them because the visuals themselves are so engaging become themselves the source of humor. Why would you label “Couch”? We know from couch. That’s silly.
Now that we’re paying attention to the goofiness of the labels, he leans into them, first assigning sounds labels, which is kind of goofy, then giving us the crazy “MEOW” label…twice
He ends the sound effects bit on “toilet”. Which works really well, because the word toilet is never not going to get our attention, and also never not going to seem out of place in a music video. Nice going, Toilet!
With all the pieces in place, he sets up what seems to be the final major joke of the piece. And he does it without seeming to signal anything; he’s just looking at a drawing of a smiley face. He even takes us back to the toilet for a second.
Then suddenly the smiley face becomes an animated version of his face, and he looks at us as if to say, Do you get it now? Do you see where we’re going? But of course we don’t, because he has held back from giving us any real hints.
Cue his self-animation and suddenly here we are in a riff on the 80s A-Ha music video “Take On Me”, which has absolutely nothing to do with the song he was recreating, yet now that he’s playing it, the melody does so naturally lead into this, it fits. And the video hits deep pleasure centers in any Gen X or maybe Millennial kid who grew up loving the original. So much of the engagement of the short in fact is built not around comedy but around targeted Gen X nostalgia; we have Mulder and Scully from the X-Files standing in the background of him in his living room; the ancient Nintendo console; the figures kissing are from an early 90s video game.
That should be the end of the joke. But it’s not. He’s written into the animation a couple comments that flash for just a moment. You literally have to stop and go back if you want to read them (which is a great way to get people to rewatch your video). The first comment is just a funny riff on the author’s own laziness, him in effect sharing an inside joke with us.
The other, though, the last statement, is not a joke at all, or at least not a ha ha funny one: “You are not immune to propaganda”. The incongruity here is like whiplash. What is he talking about? This is a video about plastic toys smooching. To understand, we literally have to go back through the video.
And when we do, we discover that he’s been playing a whole different kind of joke on us. He’s just given us 40 seconds of dumb things making sounds and a toilet, and we’ve let him lead us through it all to his real point because it was funny, creative and nostalgic. We are in other words all proof of that final statement; he manipulated us for 40 seconds to get us to his message. And that joke has been hiding there in the plain sight from the beginning. What is on the poster behind him, the poster that was itself so popular for so many years—"I Want to Believe.”
Yeah, we do. Joke’s on us.
TAKEAWAYS
Making music with silly objects is just inherently delightful. See: Jimmy Fallon and the Roots. Put another way, incongruity=engagement.
Crazy intuitive leaps can be big wins. Going from The Weeknd to A-Ha makes no logical or narrative sense. It’s just a gut thing. But we actually like it more because it’s so unexpected.
A joke can be so much more satisfying when there are layers of humor that you don’t notice at first. So layer your jokes. And if you can hold back one element until the very end, you can turn a great joke into something kind of profound.
Was this fun or a nightmare?
Is there any difference? :)
The Movie Sign We All Need Right Now
Kind of random end to things tonight. I thought I might have some things to say about Pride. But I guess maybe I already did that…
I say Mass every Sunday on my Facebook page, and given that today is Pride I decided to preach about it and do kind of a singalong. It was a lot of fun (here’s a link, if you’re interested).
Amongst all the many terrible events of the last four months, having to shelter at home has also been this strange opportunity to see gaps in what I do and try to do some things differently. Saying a Mass for Pride has definitely been one of those unexpected blessings.
Early in Our Long Day Inside, I watched the second season of Shrill (which I highly recommend). The second episode ends at this queer dance party/coffee house, and at the very end this singer who we’ve never seen before played by Peter Smith steps up and sings a Beach Boys song. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to it and also rewatched it.
May it bring you joy.
Thank you Peter!