Comedy Blog Post- Kayla Beebout

The Importance of Being Earnest is full of every type of humor, and I personally think it was all done well.  However, if I had to choose a scene that amused me the most, it would be the classic muffin scene.  This scene includes satire, comedy of manners, and physical humor; aspects of both “low” and “high” comedy.  Algernon and Jack have just been exposed as frauds to their fiancées, and Algernon begins eating Jack’s muffins to console himself.  When Jack berates Algernon for calmly eating muffins after what they just went through, Algernon responds that he “can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner” because “the butter would probably get on [his] cuffs” (pg 67).  This satirizes the lack of emotion men were expected to have at the time, in order to keep up their appearances.  The comedy of manners comes in when Jack expresses his wish to eat some of the muffins.  Algernon tells him to eat tea-cake instead, but Jack responds that he doesn’t like tea-cake.  Algernon then exclaims that he shouldn’t be serving things he doesn’t like to his guests, which Wilde used to criticize the habit the upper class had of acting generous while really just getting rid of things they didn’t like in the first place (like clothes or food).  The physical humor is, of course, the way the two men fight over the muffins, taking the plate from each other and acting, yet again, like children bickering over a toy.

The YouTube channel “How It Should Have Ended” creates very clever videos critiquing the most popular films in Hollywood.  Many of these films have plot points that seem very convenient, or that fall apart with a bit of thought.  For example, in “How Thor the Dark World Should Have Ended,” they point out the absurdity in Thor believing his brother Loki was dead, after he had just displayed his powers of illusion pretending his hand had been cut off.  This satirizes the superficiality in our culture as seen in mass media: our entertainment no longer has to abide by logic or reason, it merely has to keep the plot moving.  If the characters had done the logical thing and checked to see whether Loki was really dead or not, there wouldn’t have been a plot for the next movie.  In “How The Battle of the Five Armies Should Have Ended,” they satirized the shallowness of Tauriel’s love for Kili.  She insists her love was real, but when asked what his last name was, she can only respond with “the Dwarf?  Kili… the Dwarf?”  This can also be seen to satirize the trend in modern culture of creating romances that have no substantiality to them.  Check out the link below to enjoy parodies of your favorite movies:

https://www.youtube.com/user/HISHEdotcom