Stuff Done Right Episode 1: Comic Relief.

[wingedbeast]

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, so here's my attempt at a blog.

Because we all have things to complain about, particularly when it comes to fiction, my first post will be the start of a series, what I'm going to call Stuff Done Right. The premise is to discuss certain ideas, tropes, story lines that have often been done poorly, aggravatingly, unhealthily, highlighting the parts where they've been done, in my opinion, right. There will be some contrast, so complaints will be had. And, I invite people to disagree with me on these topics.

To start off...

Stuff Done Right Episode 1: Comic Relief.

Examples of comic relief done well include Columbo, Patrick Troughton's and Matt Smith's Doctors (Tom Baker's defies classification), Broadway of Gargoyles, and Sokka from Avatar: The Last Airbender. (By the way, please check out http://amarie24.dreamwidth.org/ for a deconstruction of the A:tLA series.)

I think this poses a good range of comic relief characters done well (and, yes, this means that a main character can be comic relief within their own series). They each have slightly different ways of doing what comic relief does, relieving the tension through comedy. And, they each scale differently on the question of how much they're in on their own joke.

Some make you think them less intelligent, some make you think them less sane, and some make you think that they're smart and sane and just not good at paying attention. But, I think the unifying quality is competence. You cannot deny that any of these characters are completely competent in their strengths that are invaluable for their respective roles.

For instance, let's look at two shots of Broadway from the same episode.



Here we have a big, goofy kid of a character. The context of this shot is that he's watching a movie, so big goofy kid is a good description of Broadway... at times.



This is the same character in the same episode with just a change of context. That's him crushing a future-style gun in one hand while holding the owner of said gun in the other. That isn't unthinking anger on his face, that's knowing anger with a purpose.

To contrast this against comic relief that didn't work we have...



... a character that gets into trouble and gets in the way.

That's a quick (stop laughing, please) jot of my thoughts on the matter. What do you think?

Comments

[alexseanchai]

Sounds intriguing, and makes sense.

(Big images. Plz to be resizing. If you don't know the HTML, doing like <img src="http://weliveagain.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/33.jpg" height=300> will get you a 300px-tall image, without having to bother with downloading and resizing and saving and uploading.)

[wingedbeast]

Thanks for the tip. I just changed to a smaller Jar Jar image. I'll try to work on the other images.

[thornsnbrambles.livejournal.com]

Competence is a good way to look at it. Another way to look at it is depth. Sokka, for example, for all that he's a huge goofball, has layers - things he's serious about, things he worries about, responsibilities he feels. We can connect to him as a person, not just a context-less stream of wacky antics, and it's that personal connection that makes the antics endearing and not annoying.

[wingedbeast]

Certainly worth consideration. Do we have any examples of comic relief characters with the character layers but without the basic competence to whatever grouping focused upon?

Edited: Oh wait, Ace Rimmer. Definitely a point in your favor.

[thornsnbrambles.livejournal.com]

Part of the problem is deciding on which comic relief characters are actually funny. Like, for instance, I was pleasantly surprised by Olaf from Frozen - I HATED him in the previews, but in the actual movie I found him pretty amusing. And I'm not sure you could rightly call him competent, but he was definitely caring and brave and you could relate to him as a person. But I also know that that is far from a universal opinion, lol!

[smurasaki]

I think you and thornsandbrambles are both onto something. Characters do need to be people to work as comic relief, but there's also a level of competence below which it's really hard for the seeing them as people thing to work. (Not saying it can't be done, particularly in comedies, just that it's much, much harder.)

And competence is a tricky thing when it comes to fictional characters. It isn't just what we actually see a character doing, it's how they're portrayed by the story.

*snags a couple more examples from Star Wars*

C-3PO worked okay as comic relief in the original trilogy because his incompetence came from being in the wrong damn situation. He's a protocol droid being dragged around on adventures that don't involve protocol or translation or anything at all he was programmed for. He's perfectly competent at those things on the rare occasions that they come up. But in the prequels, that kind of gets forgotten, and he comes off much worse in them. Because we never see him in his element or anything vaguely related to it.

Then there's Han Solo, who is really the only main character who acts as comic relief (beyond banter). His competence is a lot more questionable than it's presented as. Some of his successes look a hell of a lot like pure luck (finding Luke on Hoth for instance) and some of them are through antics that approach the sort our least favorite CGIed batch of horrible stereotypes got up to (*cough* knocking Boba Fett into the Sarlacc *cough*). But because he's good look and the narrative treats him as a) as a person and b) as competent, he gets away with botching rather a lot of things amusingly without losing either of those things.

So presentation is a big part of it, too.

[wingedbeast]

I'd say it can go both ways.

Ace Rimmer is a character without much competence, but with a lot of depth of character, so that you can really feel sorry for him, despite everything.

Detective Columbo never gets all that much depth of character. He's always just... well... Columbo. But, you know he's good at what he does.

[smurasaki]

*nods* Either way, they need to be more than just comic relief.

And being supposed to care about them is part of it too, at least for me. One of the reasons why Red Dwarf is better than the sum of its parts (at least for someone like me who isn't all that fond of comedy) is that, for all the antics and silliness and...comedy stuff...there were those human moments - you were supposed to care about the characters, no matter how much of a mess they all were.

Failed comic relief tends to miss on all of that: no competence, no depth of character (possibly no character at all), and no sympathy from the narrative. Jar-Jar is a great example of what not to do for exactly that reason. Hell, his only consistent character trait is clumsiness. Everything else comes and goes depending on what the narrative needs to have happen or what bit of slapstick they wanted to toss in.

He doesn't just get in trouble and get in the way, he does so for no reason.

[thornsnbrambles.livejournal.com]

YES YES YES OMG

Jar Jar could have been written sympathetically. He was obviously out of his depth; that could have been portrayed. His fear could have been treated realistically instead of comically exaggerated into "funny" cowardice. He could have had things he cared about, things that drove him despite his incompetence. Or, hell, like C-3PO, there could have been rare moments where we got to see him in his element - surely he must have had SOME area where he could shine.

He could have been just as bumbling and silly and gotten in the way just as much, but if we'd ever been made to care about him as a character, those things could have been endearing - and yes, possibly even FUNNY! - instead of a source of constant irritation.

[wingedbeast]

As usual with bad fiction, it's how close it really comes to being good is what really hurts.

[smurasaki]

Yep. It wouldn't have taken a lot. But it would've meant the writers had to think beyond *insert gag here*.

This is a little bit off-topic, but your comment about "funny" cowardice pointed out a pretty big change between the original movies and the prequels - the main characters are no longer allowed to be afraid and now all fear is funny and dehumanizing. (Probably most disturbing is that we're supposed to laugh at the battle droids' fear while the Jedi cut them to pieces.)

What the hell happened?

[silveradept]

With the exception of Sokka, your example characters are often comic relief as obfuscation of their actual skill. Matt's Doctor, for example, is silly and bumbling, right up until he has all the pieces of his plan in place, at which point he switches over to being serious as the plan happens.

Sokka, on the other hand, is funny because he's clearly outside the level of his competence, but that doesn't deter him at all from trying to maintain control of the situation.

I think the last main type of comic relief is the person who is able to function, but that clearly has a different mental model about the world, and their funny comes from being orthogonal to the rest of the cast's mental models.

So, in trope terms, it's Obfuscating Stupidity, The Wizard of Oz, and the Cloudcuckoolander. Which, I think, are ordered in their difficulty to do right from most difficult to least. Which makes Jar Jar even more of a failure, because he was supposed to be the easiest kind of comedy.

[wingedbeast]

Broadway doesn't intentionally obfuscate his skill either. I was trying to produce a range on that.

SMUYRASAKI brought up C3PO, who would make a good example of someone who's orthogonal (thanks for that word :) ) to the rest of the cast's mental models. As SMUYRASAKI pointed out, C3PO is quite competent in his bailiwick, which just happens to be near the opposite of where he finds himself throughout most of the movies.

[silveradept]

You can reference people by their user names with the <user name="username"> code.

Yes, Threepio is definitely someone who functions well when there's a protocol droid needed, it's just that they don't need a protocol droid all that often.