Advertising draws from a populace's assumptions and perpetuates the ideologies that underlie them (Lecture Notes). Dean’s joke mechanism will help us get closer to these underlying ideologies. Our goal is to “bring to the surface one of these deep world views” (Lecture Notes) and question its foundation. We will try to influence common assumptions at the level of desire (persuasion), through the pleasure/pain axis of electracy (Lecture Notes). This axis is important because it is the “key to the idea of persuasion as experience” (Lecture Notes). The factors that condition experience on the pleasure/pain axis are not enough to penetrate through habitus, but they do create a space of reflection for someone to potentially change their mind. The attitude that we will adopt through a conceptual persona to create the conditions for thinking the unthought may originate from the axis of pain (or tragedy, atë), but its delivery is more effective from the comedic point of view because the “comedic character is inglorious but indestructible” (Lecture Notes)—he or she exposes expectations and then overturns them.
The joke mechanism in stand-up comedy requires a set-up, 1st story, a target assumption, a connector, a reinterpretation, a 2nd story, and a punch line.
| SET-UP: | |
| “the setup causes you to expect something” (2). | |
| “words and/or actions used to get the audience to expect something” (4). | |
| 1ST STORY: | |
| “The setup creates a 1st story” (3). | |
| “based on the setup, the 1st story is the detailed scene imagined by the audience of what they expect to be true” (4). | |
| “the 1st story has considerably more detail than the setup” because it “has been built by making assumptions about the information in the set-up” (5). “Every part of a thing you [or your audience] imagine exists—but aren’t directly perceiving—is an assumption” (6). | |
| JOKE MECHANISM | |
| Target Assumption & Reinterpretation: | |
| “The target assumption presents an expected interpretation of” a setup which creates a 1st story; the punch shatters the target assumption to reveal a 2nd story by “presenting an unexpected interpretation of something in the setup which is called reinterpretation (9). | |
| TARGET ASSUMPTION: | |
| An audience hears a setup “and they build a 1st story by making a vast number of assumptions. One of these assumptions will be the target assumption” (7). | |
| “The target assumption is the key assumption upon which the 1st story is built” (7). | |
| “The target assumption is the assumption directly shattered by the punch” (8). | |
| REINTERPRETATION: | |
| “The reinterpretation is the idea upon which the punch’s 2nd story is based” (9). | |
| “The reinterpretation reveals an unexpected interpretation of the thing about which the target assumption is made” (10). | |
| CONNECTOR: | |
| “One thing interpreted in at least two ways” (12). | |
| “Interpreting the connector in one way provides the target assumption, and interpreting it in another supplies the reinterpretation” (12). | |
| “The connector must be only one thing. . . . One connector per joke is all you need” (12). | |
| 2ND STORY: | |
| “the punch surprises us with a 2nd story” (3). | |
| “Based on the punch, the audience imagines a detailed 2nd story that is compatible with the setup, yet is unexpected” (5). | |
| “2nd story is a much more detailed scenario than the punch” (5). | |
| PUNCH: | |
| “the punch reveals a surprise” (2). | |
| “the punch is the words and/or actions used to surprise the audience” (5). | |
| “Based on the punch, the audience imagines a detailed 2nd story that is compatible with the setup, yet is unexpected” (5) | |
Dean's illustration of a whole joke (30):
| This morning I got up and ran five miles. | |
| Setup | |
| 1st Story: He’s a healthy go-getter. Target Assumption: He’s telling the truth. Connector: That he actually ran the five miles. Reinterpretation: He’s lying and didn’t actually run that far at all. 2nd Story: He’s a wealthy guy who hires someone to jog for him. Well, not me personally, I pay a guy to do that for me. | |
| Punch | |
Composing a Routine:
So far, we have been reviewing the readings directed by the CATTt from a subject position. With Dean, the performance of the "routine" will move us into a collective point of view (Lecture Notes). The term "routine" carries with it all of the negative connotations of the rule of law and linguistic practice: the "compulsion to repeat" (Virno 14), rote reactions, stasis, the failure of experience and creativity, katechon, ritual, etc. However, all of these are the impetus for innovation in electracy. Virno outlines the necessary roles of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person in linguistic actions (our first insight into the collective point of view in electracy) and Dean puts them into action in the performance of a routine.
Virno on the Author, Target, and Audience:
“The first person, Freud says, is the author of the joke; the second is the object or the target of it; the third, ultimately, is its 'audience,’ that is, the neutral spectator who evaluates the witty remark, understanding perfectly the meaning of the remark, and takes pleasure in it” (80)."the disinterested spectator ‘has the decision passed over to him on whether the joke-work has succeeded in its task—as though the self did not feel certain in its judgment on the point’ [ibid: 176]” (81).
“one cannot overlook the contribution of the spectator to the success of the joke. This contribution . . . actually offers the opportunity for formulating an equation which is totally different: joke = praxis. . . . The ‘intruder’ is a point of departure, not a left-over entity” (82).
“The condition of the third person clarifies the meaning of ‘doing something new with words’ in the case of the joke. A ‘doing’ whose reality depends entirely on the presence of outsiders and, in the strongest and most complete sense, upon public action. It is nothing less . . . than a political discourse held in a general assembly that urges towards insurrection against the constituent powers: if enunciated in the absence of witnesses, it is as though this discourse had never occurred” (82).
“The praxis can only occur by means of the ‘third person,’ for the same reasons which, according to Aristotle (See Aristotle, Ethics: 175-177) distinguish this third person from episteme (pure knowledge) and from poiesis (production, doing). If the theoretical reflection eludes the observation of others and renders mute the world of appearances, praxis, instead, always presupposes and revives a public space. . . . [Praxis] is an activity without a product, the result of which coincides entirely with its own performance” (83).
Dean on 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Person Narration:
The three points of view that a stand-up comic can enact in a routine:
- Narrator POV: how you perceive things as a nonparticipant or observer.
- Self POV: how you perceive things as participant.
- Character POV: how you perceive things as someone or something else.
| Narrator POV: | |
| The “comedian is never directly involved in the experience the joke is about, but observes, reports, talks about, or . . . narrates it” (78). | |
| “As long as the comedian relates to the experience within the joke as something being talked about rather than something being reenacted, it’s from the Narrator POV” (79). | |
| Self POV: | |
| The "comedian is involved in the experience, which is acted out as if it’s happening in the present” (79). | |
| This POV establishes a sense of camaraderie between the audience and comedian because the comedian appears to be revealing something about him or herself. | |
| “[W]hen you’re in Self POV you’re participating or reenacting an experience as it is happening” (79). | |
| Character POV: | |
| “Character POV is anyone or anything the comedian can act out as a character. This includes people, impersonations, animals, objects, and concepts such as emotions” (79). | |
| This is the most interesting POV to perform for Dean because "there's a conversation happening that the audience becomes involved in" (80). | |
Rehearsing
In order to perform a joke, Dean emphasizes the importance of interactive rehearsal. He maintains that a joke can only be pulled off successfully if the audience believes that you actually had the experience you are trying to convey. The only way to do this is to rehearse a joke (or series of jokes) many times, while the comedian imagines his or her audience and all the characters of his or her POVs, as if he or she were performing live. This rehearsal technique will result in a convincing act even though the comedian may not have actually experienced the material in his or her jokes; whereas, simply memorizing the lines will result in a flat, unconvincing performance. During rehearsal, Dean suggests that “Critic” (who “is concerned with improving and crafting” (97)) and “Creator” (concerned with “inventing and expressing” (97)) in the comedian “work independently of each other” (98). Dean’s chapter on rehearsing outlines the following additional essential factors to consider during the rehearsal process. For the purposes of our project, we need to re-imagine Dean’s advice using images or ideas from popular culture to take us “from given assumptions to the unexpected, what we would not or do not ‘think’ as a rule” (Ulmer, Email, 6 April 2010).
- “The Mind Remembers in Pictures, Sounds, and Feelings” (100)
- “Sensory Experiences Activate Human Behavior” (101)
- “Words do Not Activate Human Behaviors” (101)
- “Memorizing the Words Is the Worst Type of Rehearsal” (101)
- “Memorizing Experiences Is the Best Type of Rehearsal” (103)
- "Within Every Joke Is an Experience” (104)
- “Whatever State You’re in, the Audience Is in” (105)
- “When You Remember and Communicate Your Material as a Sensory Experience—the Audience Will Enter Your Movie” (105)
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