dead baby jokes

Only slightly ironically, the idea for this project began as a joke. I think I was discussing Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with my boyfriend one afternoon, and no doubt he or I made some tasteless comment about dead baby jokes, since there is in fact, to my knowledge (since I have yet to finish the book), at least one dead baby in the novel. So I asked him what he thought stand-up comedy would be after the apocalypse, how a post-apocalyptic environment, particularly one in which someone is left basically alone, would affect the parameters of comedy. I didn’t exactly say it like that, of course. It was more along the lines of “Would we still have crappy Seinfeld airplane humor if everyone is dead?” But the concept was born, and it was born out of goofy speculation.

Then I decided I really liked the idea. And pitched it to Kelly and Todd. And since all three of us both have a fond appreciation for the absurd, specifically when it comes to humor, we decided it was rife with possibilities. We found ourselves almost overwhelmed with the possible places we could take it. And, also, could not resist the opportunity to bring Bill Cosby to a new level.

At this point we’re envisioning it as something with a very loose narrative base to it, so loose that I don’t think the apocalypse itself is given too much time to come to the forefront. A lot of the visual element will be a single character on the screen negotiating with his newly decimated surroundings, and doing so largely through an exploration of humor, as it either changes or doesn’t change from our pre-apocalyptic understanding of it. And, of course, it means we get to make Todd grow a beard. Which should be an experiment in and of itself.

In approaching this, I’ve found a couple of different works that seem to speak directly to our intentions (or what we think our intentions are; as Todd so aptly pointed out, these things have a tendency to take on a mind of their own). The first is a video called Flatness 145, done by an artist named Rob James. It’s fairly simple and makes no effort to explain itself, something I think we’re shooting for ourselves, since explaining why anyone would want to figure out comedy after their entire culture has been wiped out may double the length of the video and make it, frankly, way less funny. It consists of a simple group of brief collected images, drawn together with headings at the beginning of each “day,” and a sense of movement that conveys the passage of time through simple tasks. Embedded in these images is something odd but seductive in its simplicity: numerous fruits and vegetables that appear occasionally, breaking up scenes and giving the impression that some sort of vegetative invasion is occurring. There isn’t a whole lot to it, but James is clearly playing around with the absurd imagery usually associated with the B movie genre, and that sort of silliness that does not draw too much attention to itself is basically what we want to convey in our own piece.

The other one is The Allens by artist Erik Bunger. Conceptually, this one is just as simple, but is at the same time more complex in its execution; its inaccessibility is in fact the point of the piece. The entire video is a monologue from Woody Allen in which his original awkward Brooklyn speech is layered over by waves of the same words translated into various languages, to the point that no linguistic thread can be found throughout in one particular language. As Bunger explains it, the languages become nuances of the same personality, like linguistic tics almost, although in some places there is some overlap so comprehension even for a native speaker of one of these languages is compromised. Its pertinence to our project, I think, lies in the fact that something as simple as humor, which can be treated itself as a language of sorts, can be compromised by external forces, in this case a complete breakdown of social and cultural norms. How does one approach satire when there’s nothing left to satirize? This sort of distortion, although in a subtler way, is the focal point of our piece.