Let's Talk Funny · 2:21am Oct 21st, 2014
I've noticed this for some time, and it only seems more prominent as time goes on:
Comedy. It's one of the most misused tags on the site.
Few of us really understand comedy. I've done a few stories I've called comedy, but I make no real claims about really understanding it. I write what seems funny to me, others sometimes agree, we laugh together. So take everything I am about to say with a grain of salt, I never studied at Wasamatta U.
At it's core, comedy is about the unexpected. The first time any of us saw nyan-cat, it likely got a chuckle. It's weird, but cute. At later times, we might hear the music, or see the image, and remember how it felt to see it for the first time, and still chuckle. Now it's referential humor. We expected it, but it still gets a laugh.
Then we have... random comedy.
Randomness works. It's the reason Monty Python exists. If a character suddenly starts singing about how he wanted to be a lumberjack and inadvertently reveals he likes to dress in drag, that's funny!
But while comedy about the unexpected and referential humor work in the mlp setting, random is harder.
The reason why, in my opinion, is we know these characters. We know how they act, how they live, how they speak. So if we give the characters entirely off the wall character traits, while that's kinda funny because of the randomness... it's not very good comedy.
The next time you see a comedy that seems to be funny not because it's funny, but because 'Holy smokes, Twilight would never do that!' ask yourself, do you want to encourage that type of comedy?
Funny can exist without mangling a character. Skywriter manages it, Xjuggernaughtx does some excellent work, Blueshift... does whatever he does. Shortskirtsandexplosions is an extra-planar being who makes his own rules.
As a fan of so-bad-its-good movies, I'm not saying it's bad to enjoy horrible things. I am just saying let's not cheapen the upvotes we give the people who try by upvoting everything that got a slight giggle out of us.
This. So much this. I wish FimFic had a more thorough review system (a star system or something?). So many amazing fics (you might write a few of them, yourself) deserve so much more than the same single green thumb that some cheap, one-off comedy might get, but that's all there is to give em (aside from, perhaps, a revered spot on a special bookshelf or something, but that's not nearly so public as the up/down ratio).
It's usually the difference between, "Dear Celestia, this is hilarious!" and "I can certainly see why it sounded funny in the author's head when they wrote it, but..."
I really don't think it makes a lot of difference.
I am convinced comedy is the bane of my literary existence. I'm just too straight-laced and serious to write it properly. When I finally get to the point where I need to write that Pinkie story I'm after... well, I'll be happy if it's not terrible.
Because of how serious I am, 'random' humor doesn't appeal to me. At all. The characters have to stay in character. If they're not, I don't laugh, I just get frustrated. I don't downvote anyone, but if I did I'd downvote every story that ever tried to sell the idea that 'stupidly OOC' is quality humor.
of course it's possible to put the characters in a random situation and get some great character driven comedy out of it. I think one of the funniest things I've written is Pinkie doing a really terrible job of convincing Twilight and Dash she suddenly wants to kill herself. I'm also rather proud of the fact it also helps cement the fact Twi has gone completely off the deep end since she doesn't realize Pinkie is faking even after she suggests that Pinkie maybe means the world is full of sin instead of sun.
However at the same time while every story I've published is marked with comedy I fully accept that I might be the only one who ever laughs at even a single joke, but even if they're not funny at least it's the various characters personalities clashing and interacting and not just pure randomness. Though obviously with Pinkie at least some randomness is in character, even though there is more to her than that.
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We used to have stars, but Knighty changed it, citing that the vast majority only used .5 and 5 anyway. I preferred the stars, but if that's true, people like us who'd actually use the nuance are a tiny minority.
2549032 Huh. Well, that's too bad, then.