Lydia and Sol

 Language Challenge #7

• Mayonnaise
  • People who would use it
    • Food of the white diaspora, etc.
  • Sexualized
    • Sticky as glue, tasty as cum
    • Lubricant of ambitious white lovers
  • The thing itself in different language
    • Frosting’s evil twin, BLT grease, etc.
    • Strategies
      • Comparing it to other things that it looks like or feels like
      • Relates it directly to analogies or different, similar, objects
• Your Roommate’s Boyfriend/Girlfriend
  • Jokes that are more general, apply to roommate, “roasts” of the subject
    • Five fingers, always there, husband/wife
  • Jokes that apply to you
    • Yet another vagabond…, obnoxious free-loader
  • Strategies
    • Think about what this person relates to and make fun of them through that lens
    • Capture some characteristic in an unflattering way, “man-couch, etc.)
      • Reduce the person to one thing, one small thing
  • The direction you go will be contingent on the material
    • When you have a word that you could insert a funnier word, here are some lines along which you can think to make it funnier/punch it up
    • How can I make fun of this thing?

Language Challenge #8

• Choose the three responses that seem freshest, most surprising, or unexpected given the expectations set top by the context.
  • 1: That good ole fashioned Italian motor oil
  • 5: Sicilian Lube
  • 10: John Travolta’s Whole Career
    • If you’re in on the joke (Travolta in grease) makes it more fun 
  • Proper nouns help, specificity is funny
• Does fresh and surprising equate to funniness? Are others funnier?
  • Surprise without being totally random
    • Moisturizer is surprising, but too unrelated to be funny
    • John Travolta and Italian motor oil are somewhat related, but surprising enough to get a laugh
    • There needs to be some sort of connection, totally random at every turn isn’t that funny
  • Get to the literal translation
    • Liquid cholesterol is literally what grease is

Text Submissions

Which piece is most successful in crafting a funny character and why?

• Riding Solo: The Oatsy Story
  • Create a character arc, attacking horse wife, etc.
  • Take on historical event from different perspective
  • Familiar anti-hero story, bitter voice, depressed 
  • Subject that we’ve never thought about, bringing something to life
  • Incongruity with horse-ness
    • Acknowledgement of incongruity
  • If there’s some kind of paradox or contradiction, the reader is going to wonder what it is, and pointing it out at the end of the essay gives comic relief
  • Use of voice
    • How do non-human characters speak? Making it slightly unrecognizable is funny in itself
    • Forces reader to speak/read in a different voice than their own
    • Adds to paradox, doesn’t make sense
• Trader Joe’s Parking Lot
  • Giving a character to an inanimate object
    • A parking lit itself is evil, not the people that made it
    • Gets to shopper’s frustrations by personifying the object of anger
  • Lot is addressing us and engaging us directly
    • Narrator is provoking us and combatting us
  • The language is very human and elevated and villainous, and yet we don’t forget that it’s a non-human object
  • Applies villain archetype to non-human object

Both defamiliarize familiar experiences by viewing them through a different angle, creates incongruity

• Hillary Clinton/Elizabeth Warren
  • Suggesting a broader, richer view of character from a smaller picture
    • A more forceful character allows you to extrapolate more
  • Useful exercise to brainstorm more about a character and write those details back in
  • Illogical jumps from what’s been set up in the narrator’s head, which is also illogical
    • Lydia stretched her wrist 🙂
  • How to bring these traits back into the essay
    • Set up joke with being in the Yukon