25 Second Animation - Slapstick Comedy and Visual Humour (OUAN405)

Since I have a short space of time in which to be funny (and I haven't learnt about lip syncing yet) perhaps slapstick comedy and visual humour would be the best route to go down for this project. Cyanide and Happiness do a lot of animated shorts of around 25 seconds, most of which are resolved with visual gags. The rest of the animation is just setup for the gag.

All the below cartoons are funny because they use visual comedy to subvert traditional scenarios. It's like a parody

This one has a unique and EXAGGERATED take on the classic movie scene where a character must cut their friend's rope to save themselves

This one parodies the seriousness of batman

This one subverts the stereotype of the kindly old grandmother who lives in a large fairy-tale mushroom house

All the visual gags in these cartoons play with the audience's expectations, since the best humour stems from the unexpected. This is the premise on which Chuck Jones based a lot of his physical humour. His formula worked consistently. This is partly due to the flawlessness of the animation and the creativity of the set-pieces.

Chuck Jones' physical jokes had two main components - the ASSUMPTION:

The coyote ASSUMES he'll hit the roadrunner with this wrecking ball

And the REALITY:

But then reality happens. The plan goes wrong and roadrunner escapes

This is all super good slapstick. I'm a much bigger fan of Chuck Jones' work that involved characters being more toned down though, conveying emotions through subtle facial expressions. It means that the characters become more like actual characters, rather than simple caricatures with one fixed emotion. It's much more deadpan and makes the visual humour funnier.

I'm not sure why I find this funnier. I think it's because it's good to see a character taking a really absurd situation seriously, and vice versa. Roger Rabbit is funny because he's the only insane character in a film where all the human characters around him are serious. It adds tonal balance or something.

These two work because their personalities bounce off each other well. It wouldn't be as funny if it was just Roger Rabbit hanging out with another cartoon lunatic.

To link this back to physical comedy, visual humour can also work if you have one unrealistic thing and one realistic thing interacting, like a reality TV show star and the office of President of the United States or a gnome and an electrician, which I can include in my animation.

Visual comedy does tend to be more aimed at children, but there's a lot of stuff that older audiences appreciate. I still believe that the short films by Bird Box animation studio have some of the best visual comedy because they're so well timed. The similarities that all the cartoons I've listed have is that the punchlines are well timed and unexpected.