Well, it seems so real I can see it

It struck me today that the 1979 Buzzcocks b-side 'Why Can't I Touch It' is the irrefutable anthem for the museum going experience.

Unfrosted

Unfrosted is a 2024 movie by Jerry Seinfeld about the invention of Pop-Tarts.
Quite unsurprisingly, such a ridiculous premise hasn't resulted in a masterpiece that's adored by critics. The movie has received mostly average to negative reviews, being called shallow and 'junk cinema'. What's odd though is that otherwise more critical and intellectual news outlets, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, gave the movie largely positive reviews. I personally would agree with their assessments, and its certainly one of the more enjoyable film experiences I've had since The Banshees of Inisherin. In all honesty, between Unfrosted and The Banshees of Inisherin, the former is by far the better comedy, as it certainly made me laugh more often.

I think part of this negative audience response can be explained by the simple fact that many audiences are focussed on the story of the movie. After all, that's what you're supposed to pay attention to when you go see a film. If you tell somebody you have seen a movie, the first thing they will ask you is 'what is it about?' The answer to this question that Netflix gives you is that 'in this satirical comedy, two cereal companies compete to invent a new breakfast product'.
But this is wrong. Unfrosted is not a story about the invention of Pop-Tarts. It is a movie that that takes the simple fact that the pop-tart had to be invented as the premise for a number of jokes based on some far reaching conclusions that can be logically reached from that premise.
Because by necessity, Pop-Tarts had to be invented to exist. And while this simple fact historically took place, it's also crazy to think about how some people had to devote their precious time, knowledge and resources to develop such a product. A product that nevertheless became very successful.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Seinfeld states that the origin of the movie was simply 'a joke that was in my act'. Together with Spike Feresten, they expanded that premise into a 90-minute feature, even if Seinfeld had remarked at the time that such a story is 'not a movie' and later commenting 'it's all jokes'.

The premise as outlined before was a joke Seinfeld performed in his '23 Hours to Kill' comedy special, where after talking about breakfast routines in the 1960's, he says this:
'That was breakfast.
And in the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Kellogg's Pop-Tart suddenly appeared out of Battle Creek, Michigan.
Which, as you cereal fans know, is the corporate headquarters of Kellogg's.
And a town I have always wanted to visit, because it seemed like some kind of cereal Silicon Valley. Filled with Breakfast Super Scientists working on frosted, fruit-filled, heatable rectangles, in the same shape as the box it comes in.
And with the same nutrition as the box it comes in.
That was the hard part to achieve.
I don't know how long it took them to invent the Pop-Tart. But they must have come out of that lab like Moses with the two tablets of the 10 Commandments.'

It is this description of Battle Creek, Michigan as cereal Silicon Valley that led Seinfeld to create a movie modelled after The Right Stuff, the 1983 classic about the race to the moon between the USA and the USSR.
Unfrosted is therefore just a film with a loose plot that tries to fit in as many jokes as possible connected to this supposed high stakes race for breakfast supremacy. The film therefore contains less of a plot and consists more of an interconnected series of plot devices that ensure all the jokes the writers could come up with are connected in a logical sequence.

In this sense, the movie is simply a very well crafted piece of cinema. It's no stroke of genius, but straightforward hard work by a number of people who have honed their skills over multiple decades. Everybody involved knows how to make a movie. They know how to get from A to B, and they know where they need to hit their marks to get a laugh.
The Guardian wrote of the movie that it's 'amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks' and this is a very accurate description. If there is such a thing as shop-floor comedy writing, this would be a perfect example. To quote a line from the movie 'Don't worry Thurl, we'll get it, we got the best cereal writers in the business'.

That the pop-tart joke at the heart of this movie is important to Seinfeld is also evident. The pop-tart joke is referenced in the blurb to both his 2020 book 'Is This Anything?' and the aforementioned show '23 Hours to Kill'.
It was also the subject of a 2012 YouTube interview with the New York Times called How to Write a Joke, which Seinfeld starts with the comment that 'you think people will be interested in this, but they're not'. In the interview he says he has already been writing the joke for two years, so it's safe to assume that by the time the movie had come out in 2024, Seinfeld had been ruminating the origins of the pop-tart for nearly fifteen years.
He describes the joke writing process as being similar to song writing, where timing is very important and the biggest laugh has to come at the end. The ending he came up with is the following:
[at the introduction of the pop-tart]
'Why two?
One's not enough,
three is too many,
and they can't go stale,
because they were never fresh to begin with.'
That sequence of words has a great rhythm and carries a clear punch, about which Seinfeld says: 'That took a long time, and I know it sounds like nothing. It is nothing. But in my world [of comedy writing] the wronger some thing feels, the righter it is. So to waste this much time on something this stupid, that felt good to me.'

Wasting over a decade on something completely stupid is exactly what this movie has done. It's a ridiculous movie based on an absurd premise that is told through serious, yet buffoonish characters. It's also a movie that is fully aware of how silly it all is and dares to revel in it for the sake of having fun. And for me, this makes it a noteworthy experience.
Because this movie isn't made by some filmmaker who is trying to convince his audience of anything. Jerry Seinfeld is a 70-year old billionaire who has achieved everything one possibly could in show business. This has unsurprisingly earned him a considerable amount of clout in the industry over the years.
And with all this money and industry power, he can think of nothing better to do than to spend more than a decade carefully crafting jokes about a breakfast cereal that was introduced over fifty years ago.
That is an extraordinary feat that deserves to be championed more than it has been.

Nature's Triumph Over Man

 

Inside Out

Between 2016 and 2019 I applied for some residencies with the idea that I would use the available spaces to rehearse and develop a short comedy routine. It was my plan to document these trials of jokes that were performed to an empty room, making it impossible for me to gauge their funniness. The working title of this project was 'Stagefreight: A comedy routine without any laughter' and after a year or two I would say I had about a minute or two of decent jokes. Although in the absence of laughter I of course did not know this for certain.

All the residency applications got rejected and I didn't have the resources to create a full 5-10 minute video on my own in the way I had envisioned it, so all that is left today is a notebook full of jokes and some early screen tests that were used in the proposals. 

My aim with the project was not so much to make a comedic video, but rather a short film that exposes a little bit of the magic behind the curtain. I wanted to show that a performance on stage is very much the end of a long and hidden process, which is inevitably riddled with failure.

 

 

It is now June 2021 and comedian Bo Burnham has just released his latest comedy special. Aptly titled Inside, this special was 'written, edited, shot and directed' by Burnham himself at his house during the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak. 

This is the first time that I've seen anybody else attempt such an endeavour and because of this it immediately grabbed my interest. In this post I will talk a little bit about some things I've noticed while watching this special, but ultimately I don't have a specific point to make about it.

 

 

Inside is roughly divided into three sections. First there is a short introduction to the format of the special, which takes about eleven minutes. There are two songs that are very reminiscent of Burnham's earlier work on stage, as well as some shots of him fiddling with various technical equipment and a short speech that formally introduces the nature of the special: 'Welcome to whatever this is. I've been working for the last couple of months testing this camera and testing these lights and writing, and I've decided to try and make a new special for real. It's not going to be a normal special, because there is no audience and there is no crew. It's just me and my camera, and you and your screen! The way that our lord intended. The whole special will be filmed in this room. And instead of being filmed in a single night, it will be filmed in however long it takes to finish.'

This introduction is followed by about 30 minutes worth of songs and sketches that focus on various aspects of social media. Burnham covers Face-Timing with his mom, Instagram pages of white women, reaction videos, sexting and 'Jeffrey Bezos', amongst other topics.

That section is followed by a short transitional song, marking the beginning of the last 50 minutes of the special. This second half is more introspective and has Burnham focus increasingly on the decline of his own mental health brought on by the inability to socialise and excessive exposure to the internet.

On occasion this general structure is also broken up with short vignettes.

While the bulk of the special is made up of commentary on contemporary society and Burnham's personal issues, I myself have been mostly interested in formal aspects of the special and the solutions that Burnham has found for some of the problems one encounters while creating such a project.

 

For example, there is the matter of chronology.

'Sorry that I look like mess, I booked a haircut but it got rescheduled', sings Burnham in the first song. Presumably he hasn't had a haircut since, as his beard grows longer over the course of the special. 

 

 

While this provides the special with a subliminal sense of cohesion and progression, it does raise some questions about how it was written and produced.

There is a sketch in the middle where Burnham explicitly references his facial hair, pointing out that his beard is shorter in another video because he 'filmed it a couple weeks ago'. This seems to imply that Burnham records the footage seen in the special as soon as he has written it and it is presented to the viewer in (mostly) chronological order. 

Yet this notion is explicitly contradicted by last song that Burnham performs. That song is introduced by a Burnham who is only sporting a minor beard in a blandly lit room as the 'possible ending song, that is not finished yet, test, take; one', before fading into a fully bearded Burnham performing the same song in a much more elaborately lit setting.

 

There is certainly an appeal in portraying the comedian as a single person sitting in a room by himself, giving off the cuff performances of whatever comes into their mind at the time. 'Trying to be funny and stuck in a room. There isn't much more to say about it. Can one be funny when stuck in a room? Being in, trying to get something out of it. Try making faces, try telling jokes, making little sounds', Burnham himself sings in one of the songs.

Yet this image is somewhat of a falsehood. While this set-up allows for much quicker and less elaborate methods than a regular performance of this sort, it still requires planning, iterations and rehearsal to get right. 

One of the vignettes ends with Burnham moving a monitor that is attached to the camera. He thereby inadvertently knocks over the tripod the camera is standing on, catching it right before it hits the ground.

While I certainly believe that this was at least in part inspired by a real accident, the exact execution that ended up in the film seems pre-arranged to me. It appears somewhat unnatural that when Burnham yanks on the cable, he briefly looks over to the falling camera, before looking back to the monitor and reacting surprised that the camera is falling. It's of course possible that in his preoccupation he didn't register the camera falling, but something seems off to me.

I likewise have some considerations about a number of the confessional speeches in the second half of the film. It takes time and mental effort to set up a camera, create a halfway decent composition and light a scene. So even if one was genuinely upset while starting to create such a set-up, some of the emotion must have subsided from the mental effort that has been exerted elsewhere to focus on these technical aspects. What we are thus seeing is always somewhat of an re-enactment. This doesn't make it any less truthful, but within the meta-narrative of such a comedy special, it does raise questions about what is and isn't meant to be a 'joke'.

In fact, the general idea that this special could've been made by anyone with a recording device in their attic is a bit of subterfuge. Inside doesn't rely on the presentation of Burnham as an everyman, but it certainly helps to sell the show. 'A new comedy special shot and performed by Bo Burnham, alone, over the course of the past year' is how Inside is described by its distributor. This conveniently ignores the fact that there are at least 14 people credited for work on the special and that the tools available to Burnham are a far cry from your average home video. The cost of the various cameras, lenses, lights, microphones, musical instruments, laptops, monitors, headsets, tripods and projectors I've seen in the film add up to at least €20.000. 

Admittedly, these numbers are extremely small for an international production with this kind of scope and reach, but it's nevertheless quite a lot to come up with for any individual who simply wishes to recreate such an undertaking.

 

It's no mean feat to transform the idea of someone 'trying to be funny while stuck in a room' into a watchable special that's engaging for an hour and a half and you unquestionably need to do more than merely pointing a camera at someone who 'tries making faces and tries telling jokes'. 

One method by which Burnham achieves this is the elaborate lighting effects that are obviously influenced by his previous experience from performing in theatres.

 

While not all of these effects are highly original, every single one of them is effective and adds to the specific mood that is set during each song. The first of such effects, with Burnham turning on a bright, narrow head mounted lamp before tilting his head towards a spinning disco ball on the ceiling masterfully illustrates the lyrics to the song he's singing: 'I'm sorry I was gone, but look, I made you some content'. He's literally distracting us with something shiny under the guise of giving us 'content', before ending the song 14 seconds later.

More generally it's also worth noting that only two songs shown in the first quarter of the film are lit by natural light coming in through a window. For the rest of the film these fragments of daylight are only reserved for speeches. All other songs are lit using studio lighting, which further heightens the artifice of their performance and this in turn creates a sharper distinction between the Bo Burnham who talks and reflects and the Bo Burnham who performs songs as his creative work.

There is also the simple fact to consider that this kind of special requires a certain kind of comedy. To perform a 90 minute continuous monologue to an empty room is perhaps a bit too strange and no amount of clever lighting could overcome that. Writing and playing songs is however a perfectly legitimate thing to do on your own. 

Furthermore, a song is something that can easily be carried along by an audience in the performer's absence. Getting the precise comedic timing right when retelling a joke is not an easy feat, but singing along to a song that's stuck in your head is something we all can relate to. The subjects Burnham chose to discuss are also likely relatable to a large part of his audience. Songs about the perils of FaceTiming with family members or how his 'stupid friends are having stupid children' will resonate with his audience in a way that will make them spread his work and their ideas on their own accord.

While this will give Inside an importance outside of the little room it was recorded in, I also believe its subject matter is ultimately its weakest point. Despite much of the raving critical response focusing on the poignancy of Burnham's commentary, it is actually this accurate assessment of the zeitgeist that almost guarantees that Inside will be irrelevant in a number of years. When George Carlin makes a joke in 1965 about protest signs that read 'Let's get out of Vietnam! Let's get out of the UN! Let's get out of traffic!', the punchline still works today because what the first two signs are protesting isn't relevant to the joke. 

Burnham in contrast parodies many ideas present in society and himself that are extremely relatable today, but as many of the ideas directly relate to present-day technology and an unprecedented pandemic, that will never be able to stand the test of time. Which is regrettable, because the form he has found to make these statements is sufficiently crisp and unique to fool a lot of critics into thinking that the content is as well.

Overall I thus have to say that Inside is an interesting experiment that is a clear break with the norm of what a comedy special is supposed to be. It's also a very successful experiment and I genuinely hope it allows for more of such investigations into the methods by which one can make jokes. 

However, it will undoubtedly be curious to look back on it in a number of years and experience how it appears to us with the benefit of hindsight. Whatever we might think of Inside then, it won't be what we think of it today.

Is This Anything?

In October 2020, comedian Jerry Seinfeld published a book titled 'Is This Anything?'. In this book he has collected most of the jokes he has written down and archived from a career that spans five decades.

This book is an intriguing document to me, as it is rare that a comedian's output is published in such a manner. The effectiveness of comedic material often depends heavily on the delivery by the performer and the context of its presentation. Audiovisual recordings of polished, rehearsed and tried performances are therefore the common and natural way to distribute a comedian's work. Put flatly on a page like this, a joke seems more like a memorandum than something to be widely circulated.

In that sense this book is analogous to an exhibition catalogue. In a catalogue there are also reproductions of the work, together with some short introduction and some factual information. This method of derivative distribution is not a way to enjoy the material in the way it's meant to be enjoyed, but rather a way by which the work can be analysed and ruminated upon after the fact.

Although Seinfeld himself has stated on numerous occasions that comedy is difficult to pin down, I noticed that many of his jokes constitute of a circumvention of common logic.

I have a working hypothesis that a joke, or perhaps anything that's considered funny, is the introduction of an idea within a logical construct that is compatible with that construct, but nevertheless has an unexpected outcome.

The jokes of Jerry Seinfeld certainly nearly always adhere to this principle and some of his jokes are in fact nothing more than a drawn-out logical statement. Take for example this early joke from the 1980's:

'

I have a leather jacket that got ruined because it got wet.

Suede jacket.

I was out in the rain.

Ruined.

Why?

Why does water ruin leather?

Aren't cows outside a lot of the time?

When it rains do they go up to the farm house,

"Hey, let us in, we're all wearing leather out here!"

"Is it suede?"

"Suede?

I am suede.

I've been living suede every day of my life!" 

'

The premise is of course that suede gets 'ruined' by rain, while another thing that is 'made of suede', the cow, is able to endure the rain without being 'ruined'. Whether you think that is funny or not, what is presented here is a simple incongruity of suede as a concept that applies to clothing, which is meant to look and feel a certain way, and the skin of a cow, which is what suede is made of, and how both those things can be 'ruined'. For clothing this would mean a diminishing of aesthetic appeal, while for the cow it would mean sickness or death.

This thread of pointing out apparent logical fallacies in everyday situations runs throughout Seinfeld's career and can thus likewise be found in jokes from his latest stand-up show:

'

The Donut Hole.

What a pathetic snack choice that is.

It doesn't even make any metaphysical sense.

You cannot sell people a hole.

A hole does not exist.

It is the absence of whatever is around it.

If it was really Donut Holes, the bag would be empty.

The only thing you could do,

is take what they are calling Donut Holes but are not.

They are Donut Plugs.

And you could shove the plugs into the holes,

but that would eliminate the plug, the hole and the donut.

'

 

Due to the sheer abundance of jokes in the world I can't claim that all comedy works this way, but certainly the jokes of some highly-rated comedians do. 

Mitch Hedberg is a comedian who never achieved mainstream recognition before he passed away in 2005. Nevertheless, his repertoire of self-contained logical statements continues to receive much praise from his colleagues.

'I'm against picketing but I do not how to show it', is one of Hedberg's more well-remembered jokes. It is a joke that is ultimately an example of contradictory self-reference, which is a domain of logic that has been considered by philosophers from Epimenides to Bertrand Russell and beyond. 

Hedberg also highlights other common logical constructs and fallacies, such as circular reasoning: 'I've got a belt on that holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up my belt. What the fuck is really going on down there? Who is the real hero?'

But it's not just analytical one-liners that seemingly adhere to the principle of unexpected logical outcomes. Steve Martin, whose physical 'absurdist' comedy made him one of the most famous comedians of the seventies, describes one of his opening jokes in his engagingly written autobiography: 'I would sing "I can see clearly now" and walk into the mike'.

 

Of course I can't analyse every joke in the world, but having a solid logical framework to refer to is likely a necessary, yet not sufficient, condition for the existence of a joke. Which gives indication that 'a joke' is different from 'that which invokes laughter'. An impersonation will likely invoke laughter in an audience, yet this is clearly less of a 'joke' than the deliberately bad and flat impressions that Andy Kaufman performs as his foreign man character, after which he surprises the audience with a remarkably energetic impression of Elvis Presley. 

Conversely it is also true that just because I didn't laugh at many of Jerry Seinfeld's jokes when I read them in his book, that doesn't mean that they aren't jokes. 

 

All of this has been studied in far greater depth by many others, but as these ideas easily cross the boundaries between the two fields, it's nevertheless good to place these observations within the context of an art blog.