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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   2807 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 17, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I am of the opinion that there is no such thing in fiction as a joke ruining the tone. Every time someone complains that a joke has ruined the tone, they are likely misidentifying a problem. For example, the MCU doesn't have a problem with jokes ruining the tone. The MCU has a problem with characterization. The characters all employ the same kind of snark, regardless of whether it fits their established personality.

In so far as any artistic work has an emotional tone, some things will cohere with that tone and some will clash with it. Certain kinds of joke will cohere with the (perceived intended) emotional tone of an artistic work, others will not. I don't understand your objection.

Could Twelve Angry Men be improved by adding jokes? Perhaps it could. Juror 3 could crack jokes, Juror 7 could, so could Juror 10. But the purpose of the jokes would not be making the audience laugh, but showing how the ambience in the room changes as the movie goes on. Or at the very least, making the audience laugh so they can feel bad about laughing as the movie goes on.

The MCU treats jokes like midwit home cooks treat bacon (or whatever the newest fad is): sprinkle that shit on everything! Bacon makes everything better! You cry and you laugh, or you ponder and you laugh, or you scream and you laugh, or you eat ice cream and you eat bacon, what's not to love? At first, it's novel, especially when done by someone who knows how to combine tastes well. But then everyone jumps on the bandwagon and you realize everything on the menu tastes like bacon. Sushi? Bacon in the rice. Pizza? Bacon in the crust. Milkshake? You guessed it, bacon.

I agree with everything here, except

"You cry and you laugh, or you ponder and you laugh, or you scream and you laugh, or you eat ice cream and you eat bacon, what's not to love"

The problem isn't comedy, it's the repetitive way Marvel inserts comedy.

Jokes can absolutely ruin the tone of a movie. But not all funny movies are ruined by jokes.

People complain about the MCU, and movies that more artlessly attempted to ape it's style, because every time one of those movies approaches any sort of sincere, emotional moment, they feel the need to compulsive neuter it with a joke. Sneering in a very meta way at all the hard work that went into building up a scene and getting the audience invested. It's like the writers are looking you dead in the fucking eye from behind the silver screen going "You like that? You like that you fucking retard? Is this what gets you off? Fuck off and die, trash."

Compare this to a comedy of old like National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. It's a funny movie. It's jam fucking packed with jokes. But the movie also knows when to play it mostly straight and deliver a sincerely heartwarming moment. And it doesn't turn around and make you feel like a fucking idiot for getting invested by having some soulless mouthpiece robotically echo the words of a clinically depressed and overworked Hollywood writer who hates humanity.

Is jokes ruining the tone a common problem with the MCU? The only MCU movie I've seen is Doctor Strange and I had that exact complaint.

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I think it's because everyone is a critic, and very few people are storytellers. Which is to say it is really really hard to craft an emotionally resonant scene that nobody laughs at for being silly and over the top*. It is much much easier - and safer - to make your emotional scene and then deconstruct it, and hide behind the irony if anyone laughs.

*Insecurity is an issue here, it is their doubt in their work which allows the mockery to take hold.

Insecurity is an issue here, it is their doubt in their work which allows the mockery to take hold

Honestly, I just think it's more of the dumbing down of media for an international audience.

"Sincere moment + smash cut to joke" is a very easy joke for most cultures to understand. Hollywood makes a ton of money overseas so there's not as much incentive to craft difficult sincere moments - the reward for them is proportionally smaller than it used to be in the past as more and more distinct cultures have more and more of a vote in the success of movies.

A large amount of creative output is dreck, of course, but man, when you find the good storytellers...it's worth the hunt.

This is an old trope. Mocking-while-being goes back to ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’ and it was perfected in ‘Murder by Death’ (1976). It was a franchisable concept by the time Scream (1996) came around. There is nothing unique or original about the MCU, its only saving grace is that it doesn’t take itself seriously.

It's been a common complaint for a while. Ever since the 1st Iron Man over a decade ago, the MCU films tended to have a somewhat self-aware snarky tone to various extents. It was considered a strength initially, and plenty of the films, including the original Iron Man, used it well, but at some point its constant presence started wear thin on fans, due in part to how they would keep undercutting emotional moments. And again, that happened a while ago, like at least 5 years at this point, and from what I've heard, the MCU has gotten only worse in that regard.

That said, one MCU work that leaned in heavily to the jokes to positive reception (deservedly, IMHO) was Thor: Ragnarok which was more of a comedy with action and scifi than the other way around. I heard the sequel to that was hurt by the jokes, though.

Personally I just don't think the MCU has very many good emotional moments. The presence of a joke didn't ruin anything, because it already wasn't particularly emotional. Spider-Man: No Way Home had some good moments, and some of the TV series had some emotional scenes, but for the most part the movies are just action-comedies and never do very well at anything more.

Jokes can "ruin the tone" in real life, why wouldn't they be able to in a film script?

I don't think they can. I've never even seen anything funny that makes me entirely cease feeling sad or afraid. At best, it's a spoonful of sugar.

Not every joke (or rather, intended joke) is funny.

If the joke requires some sort of inside knowledge, or it is made with the clear intention of the laughing party being on the part of the viewer, it can break immersion.

I guess I agree with the former, but only in the sense that any dramatic irony can ruin immersion. But if we're talking about the latter, I don't think that's true.

I love Breaking Bad, a critically-respected drama, and the show is full of humor that the characters don't react to. Saul is a comic relief character, yes, but you could make the case that Jesse and Walt are both funnier characters, not to mention Todd. I loved the entire bit in the movie with his maid. I love when he paid his respects to her. That was pitch black dark humor and it was great. But Jesse wasn't laughing.

I found a great deal of the humour in Breaking Bad insufferably broad, to the point that it jarred with the grounded and realistic vibe the show seemed to be going for. It's hard to get emotionally engaged with the characters when half the time they're talking like dumb sitcom characters. One of the many reasons I was underwhelmed by the show and didn't understand the hype.

What, if anything, do you believe can ruin the tone of a film or other work of fiction? More broadly, what role do you believe tone plays in one's enjoyment of a work of fiction, and how do jokes and other parts of a scene influence it?

Tone is a subset of immersion. Tone is feeling what the characters feel, or what you would feel if you were there with the character. I have never experienced a tone break in the written word, but I have experienced it many times in live-action media. It happens when the actor performs in a way that is designed to elicit laughter or some other reaction to the exclusion of what the protagonist would actually be feeling or what I would be feeling if I were with the protagonist. In fact, as I write this, I'm not sure if there really is a difference between tone and immersion.

My favorite emotion that can be elicited from art is ambivalence. I like media that has parts that are funny and parts that are sad, but I love media in which the parts that are funny are the same as the parts that are sad. Tonal confusion is the best tone, and I think it elevates something good to something great. In real life, when something funny happens, it doesn't break your sorrow or terror. If you've ever seen someone have a psychotic break, you'll see what I mean. Those are often both funny and horrifying.

You have a very unconventional definition that your argument rests on that you failed to introduce when you made the argument. To reduce tone to believable characterization, or your immersion based on characterization, you have to ignore most of the ways the word tone is commonly used, which is generally as the entire structured mood in a film, touching on its genre and its "point-of-view", influenced by all aspects of its storytelling, including cinematography, soundtrack, and genre expectations. Imagine the early scenes of a horror movie where everyone is happy. Is the tone a happy cheerful one? Most people would say no, the tone is still horror, or a kind of tension, just by virtue of knowing what's next. Even if people said the tone is happy, just add some tense violins to the score and its now definitely horror no matter what the characters are doing. That's dramatic irony which most people would argue is an important part of tone, but is completely missing from your definition because it is entirely based on what the characters of the movie are feeling/doing.

To reduce it to immersion also robs it of its variations. Tone isn't just on a spectrum of effectiveness. It can be horror, it can be lighthearted, it can be romantic, cynical, and yes, ambivalent. And a break in tone is commonly seen to mean just shifting from one to another, not as an automatic failure. If something "ruins" the tone, people are generally identifying that the movie shifted tones unskillfully, although some people seem to think that shifting whatsoever is unskillful, which I would strongly disagree with.

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