If there is one thing I have exponentially increased my experience with since coming to college, it is comedy. The way I look at people, society, and art have all changed dramatically, and I credit much of it to a better understanding of why we laugh.
One of the best ways to learn about comedy is to watch it. My first semester, one of my favorite professors told my class to ‘expose yourself to as much theatre as you can,’ and I’ve taken every possible opportunity to do so. In my down time, I watch shows by some of my favorite comedians, like 30 Rock with Tina Fey, Parks and Recreation with Amy Poehler, Last Comic Standing, Saturday Night Live, political clips from such comedians as Trevor Noah and Trae Crowder, and as many stand-up Netflix routines as I can. From these, I have learned about where comedy is right now, and what kinds of comedic styles I like best. I have enjoyed plenty of Columbia theatre in the past few years, partly because I can afford the tickets by regularly ushering in exchange for tickets. A few shows have been standouts to my comedic and artistic sensibilities; namely, the sweet and bold comedy in Trustus Theater’s Peter and the Starcatcher, USC’s comedic take on Moliere’s Scapin, USC’s The 39 Steps, the campy-fun Town Theatre’s Nice Work if You Can Get It, and USC’s slightly demented Australian drama-comedy Cosi. Each semester, I’ve generally had a theatre class that required me to write critiques of different shows, which is why I have included one of Scapin above. Whether written down or no, though, I try to think critically about all art that I see; having been exposed to so much the past four years, I am much better at articulating what I like and do not like, and why. Learning by watching has helped guide what types of art I choose to support through my participation. Seeing what people make fun of or hold sacred, what is laughed at and what isn't, whether in a television show or in a play, says a lot about a specific piece of art and the people behind it. Whether we choose to see it or ignore it, comedy is a kind of advocacy, something I didn't fully realize before coming to USC.
In high school, working professionally with the Columbia Children’s Theatre taught me a lot about slapstick, physical comedy, and clean comedy. Besides being in plays, I also took an acting class that turned out to be an improvisational comedy class. I loved it. It was not until junior year of college though that I discovered the improvisational comedy teams at USC. At USC, there are two teams. I realized I knew quite a few of the people on one of them, and on a whim, with less than a day’s consideration, and after almost missing the right room to audition because I had been directed to the wrong room, I tried out, and got in. Toast Improv has been an awesome blessing. With a small and constant group, I was able to let go of my inhibitions and just create. I had not seen improv shows before, and was completely terrified my first show. I like planning and having lines scripted out for me, and I had less experience comedically writing than I do now. It was hard for me to let go and not overthink. After my first semester with Toast, I gained more confidence. I realized the importance of faking confidence until I was, not forcing comedy with gags and letting truth be funny, and not being concerned with being perfect. I hadn’t realized how similar comedy and acting could be; I learned about the power of characterizations, relationships, emotions, and the familiar can make us laugh as well as cry. I learned that laughing was a way to channel terrible emotions into a healthy and cathartic action. When I write, I find I can create a joke rather quickly, which is excellently useful. I also had the opportunity to attend the 2016 North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, where Toast performed, took classes, and watched professional teams from around the country. In January 2017, we went to New York to watch professional improv from Magnet and the Upright Citizen's Brigade.
After my two high school aged sisters, Kate and Hannah, saw a few Toast shows, they started their own improv group. In honor of our hilarious and then-recently late grandpa, they named the group Ahearn Improv. I have helped coach the kids whenever I can, and I teach them new games. I enjoy watching them immensely. They are so funny, and it has been great to see kids losing their grip on normalcy and just having fun. Working with younger people on what they found funny was educational as well. Even with people just ten years younger than I am, comedy changes. I learned that it's important to, for lack of a less nauseating phrase, stay current. If you'd like to make a joke that a group of high schoolers is going to get, make it about Instagram, not MySpace. We find funny what we can personally connect to. Empathy with other people's experiences is important, in that it forges a desire to understand people who are different from us. Finding the common links, the things we can all laugh over, is so healthy and human. It's what theatre should do for us. Some people find it more effectively in a good group cry whilst watching Old Yeller. I find it in a laugh.
In my comedic writing, too, I have found a new way to develop my funny bone. In high school, I wrote a comedic retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses”, and that was great practice. It whetted my appetite to write more. I was also anxious to direct a show, and I was curious about the finer points of pulling off a very low-budget show. I wrote my parody of the classic tale, “The Little Mermaid”, Little Fishmaid, with this general aim in mind. (Look for more details of how Little Fishmaid was produced under Key Insight: Dulce, Utile, et Directing, on this website.)
I decided to write another version of the show, so I set up an English independent study to do that and to begin another kid-friendly show. Having just completed the study under the supervision of the wonderful Dr. Esther Richey, I found that with the new show, Muriel, I completed the other half of what I had wanted to do with Little Fishmaid. Fishmaid was lighthearted, rather romantic, and was nicely whimsical and sarcastic, but essentially conformed to the magical feel of the classic cartoon princesses. I wanted to be a little grittier and politically angled, and less romantic, with Muriel, while still producing a comedy that people could digest and easily laugh with. Considering that kids don’t generally do well with politics or verbosely bald challenges of social constructs, it was a nice exercise to have the opportunity to completely rethink the script, with a different audience in mind. Please feel free to peruse the original version of the script for Muriel above. During the study I also read a couple of books, one on dramaturgy called Ghost Light: An Introductory Handbook for Dramaturgy by Michael M. Chemers, and another on comedy called The Hidden Tools of Comedy by Steve Kaplan. I enjoyed thoroughly Kaplan’s very specific tools on what to do when things aren’t funny in comedic shows and scripts. I learned a lot, and wrote weekly informal summaries of what I read for Dr. Richey; I have attached one of these above under ENGL 399: Comedic Writing Critique.
One of the reasons that comedy means so much to my work as a theatre person is partly because I love participating in comedies. It’s also partly because I find the structure of the comedic play to be extremely effective, for two reasons. (Really three, but I've already talked about empathy.)
First, the ability of a script to be performed by real people makes the structure of scripts very effective in communicating meaning. All of my English classes have been helpful in understanding the underlying structures of what makes literature work, how writers’ atmospheres influence their works, how imagery and wordplay can affect both poetry and prose to create meaning, and generally how writers accomplish and communicate meaning. One of the most useful and thorough classes for this, for me, was English 424: Dramatic Literature. I love plays in large part because one of the most real ways to communicate meaning and achieve understanding is to create solid characters through the words; in many books or in movies, visual images can astound and be very beautiful, but the strong character work that most scripts depend upon makes others listen and empathize. It’s hard to not care about a story when you read dialogue or see people bringing a story to life. Dramatic literature is like an exceptional pop-up book to my mind. In the dramatic literature class, we approached the stories from a variety of angles, including structurally, linguistically, and culturally, and everything involved a good deal of character analysis. I have attached one of my papers from the class above.
Second, I think that comedy can serve as a candy coating to almost any pill. To illustrate, as a playwright, Shakespeare has been one of my favorite comedic teachers. I have been reading his works since middle school, but with a couple of classes on Shakespeare and English literature, I realized how much he had to juggle. He wrote for royalty, which had unique challenges. Especially during the Tudors’ reigns, writers like Shakespeare had to be careful to avoid creating too obvious of parallels between the royalty and political crises they wrote about, and the actual royalty and crises of their times. He had to be edgy and relevant for sales, and mild enough for his benefactors. He was successful in toeing the line because of comedy. In many of his plays, there are clowns that speak truth to the royal powers they serve, and they get away with it because they hide the advice they give through amusements, riddles, and clowning. Touchstone, Dromio, Viola when she plays Sebastian, and more give advice to the royals they serve that the royals don’t want to hear, but they do hear because the advice makes them laugh or is cleverly served. Shakespeare himself assumed this role in many of the forwards, prefaces, or conclusions to his shows. Check out the final speeches of Puck or Prospero if you’d like to see examples. Blindingly talented, pithy, and meaningful as he was, he frequently made sure to abase himself and his comedies especially, as being nothing more than meant for simple enjoyment; he made himself the simple clown, and this allowed him to include controversial ideas and topics in his plays by the score. Please see my paper from English 406 above to see more of my thoughts on this. Today, the same principles of comedy apply. In comedy, one can get away with risque or inflammatory topics like no other genre. In my comedy, the character Muriel was involved in incest, illegal activity, vandalism, and thoughtlessness to the point of cruelty, but because she is a comedic character, she is a sympathetic character that people will still listen to. Comedy involves the people that we are like, while drama involves the people we wish we could be like. I love stretching boundaries and speaking truth to the public through my writing, and the structure of the play helps me to effectively do that.
Comedy has really changed my world, especially through dramatic and performative exploration. I think it’s one of the things I will prioritize to keep in my life and career after college, because of how much it has meant to me the past few years. My personal desire for and cognizance of empathy, created meaning, and diplomacy in art--and learning that I could find all of that in something fun like comedy--have been among the most important results of my education at USC.
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