Blog 1/20/09

Sam Braver
1/20/2009
In the Comedy Writing Secrets book, chapter one gave me a good introduction on what this book is all about. It was able to show me that this book was going to be very helpful in the near future with my comedic writing. I also appreciate all of the quotes that are included in the reading from famous comedians because the quotes can relate to the reading so well. The readings from this book will help our class in a huge way with our comedic writings because most of us have probably never been involved with this kind of writing. From the reading, I felt that the writers of Comedy Writing Secrets were disappointed that humorist writings are not as popular today because people want to tell the jokes, not write them. I can definitely understand where the writers are coming from because everyone wants to take credit for their own work. But what these writers don’t realize is that most great comedians today did this work early on in their careers and eventually they got enough credit for their writings to become big stars. By just reading this first chapter, I can start to tell that this book will be very important in helping us all become better comedic writers.
In the Laughing Matters Book, the essay by Henri Bergson was a very interesting one. Bergson uses this essay to mainly talk about why certain things to the average person are so funny. He gives certain scenarios throughout everyday life such as a man falling while walking and tells us why they are so appealing to us. Bergson is right though because most every human being would laugh at a scenario such as this. It is natural for us to laugh at things that seem funny to us whereas they aren’t so funny to the people that these things happen to. Personally, I did not like this reading though because it was tough to follow. The reading itself was not humor, because the writer was just talking about it as if it were something normal.
The essay Relaxing the Rules of Reading by Robin Hemley is about comedic stories Hemley has experienced in his years. I really like how every story he wrote about, he was able to break it down for us so that we could understand so easily. My favorite story is the one about the girl that told her professor she was a Vandal. It’s such a clever thing for someone to write about because I would never think about writing something like that. Hemley hits all of the different scenarios and types of stories that you can think of writing in his essay. It’s good for our class to see all of these different types of stories because it will help us figure out certain ideas for us to write about. I know that most of the time, my greatest trouble is not finding something to write about. If I have a certain scenario, I am generally pretty good at being able to write a great deal about it. Hemley shows me that it is easy to find scenarios because all you have to do is think of things that happen in your everyday life.