In scenes like the one from the Hangover, the line between something being funny and cruel is a little fuzzy, and it varies from person to person. A person's tolerance for this kind of thing has a lot to do with their place in life or how they were brought up. But what I think is a pretty universal dividing line is the point at which someone being stupid and inflicting pain on themselves becomes something more permanent. Watching someone hurt themselves is funny, but watching someone cripple themselves is cringe inducing. In this scene, the audience knows the characters are all safe. There’s still too much time left in the movie to lose any more characters. Tasers can certainly cause some long term damage but these people likely aren’t at any real risk.
This line between stupidity leading to momentary pain and enduring pain is why I genuinely cannot watch the show tosh.0. There was a video of a guy who fell and his bones were sticking out of his shins. Some people(or sadists if you will) might like seeing things taken that far. Others might just laugh because they don’t know what else to do, in shock. The average person though, isn’t going to enjoy someone getting maimed. That’s why the show has its niche carved out on Comedy Central. Compare this to a show like America’s Funniest Home Videos, where people hurting themselves is limited to people falling, getting dropped, or hit in much less harmful ways. They’re going to have a bruise, but no long term trauma. It could even be a relatability thing to some people. You think, “I’ve done that. Thank goodness there wasn’t a camera then.” You laugh, and you see them laughing at themselves from the audience. It's more good natured. Its more universal allowing to have stayed on the air since 1990, though it has suffered a recent drop in it’s syndication with the rise of the Internet and insufferability of Tom Bergeron. On a related note, it is still on and for some reason Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is the host, which might itself be a lesson on the incongruity theory.
I think what works in that scene is less the violence itself, and more the entire scenario. There was so much wrong with that scene if you compare it to how things work in the real world. 1) They brought a bunch of strange men into a school with children, specifically three men who had just been caught for a crime. 2) They Tasered them in front of a bunch of children which could very easily have led to some scarring and distrust towards the police. 3) They then allowed the kids to use the Taser. Luckily they didn’t pick a kid who would try and Taser a classmate. The incongruity between this scenario and the real world is funny in its own way. Whether or not something is funny to someone can vary, but also so can why it is funny to them.
Well, thank you for letting me know that AFHV is still on the air--I genuinely did not know it! And Carlton? Maybe they are counting on the fact that at this point their core marketing strategy is to appeal to 90s nostalgia.
ReplyDeleteYes, I think permanent injury, or serious damage, is a truly important line in comedy. Some people, of course, do find the real injuries funny, or at least they laugh at them. But this brings up the question of whether they are just engaging in mean laughter. The article for today also brings up the question of the benign violation theory, and seems to suggest that maybe there's something about it that explains the differences in comedy preference by politics. Maybe the question of whether you find non-benign comedy, or mean laughter, funny is also a political question in part.