When it's light, comedy should also carry gravity

The comedy competition variety show "Annual Comedy Competition" (hereinafter referred to as "Comedy Competition") has just come to a successful end. It is the highest-rated domestic variety show in Douban in 2021, in addition to allowing the audience to enjoy many excellent comedy performances and meet many excellent comedians, it is also constantly broadening and deepening the audience's understanding of comedy.

Previously, the more familiar form of comedy was the sketches and cross-talk often seen on the stage of the party. The main comedy form of "Comedy Competition" is sketch comedy, comic talent, mime, object drama, musical theater, etc.; the performance in the program does not pursue the "trinity", does not pursue the theme of elevation, as long as it can win the audience's laughter, you can win high scores. Therefore, when watching the first few episodes of the show, the audience's biggest impression of the "Comedy Competition" is that it is particularly "new", breaking people's previous dogmas and stereotypes of comedy, and fully liberating the form and content of comedy.

For example, works such as "Strange Neighbor seat on the bus", "Three Dogs Live Room", "Boiled "Three Knots of Righteousness", "Mr. Please Come Out of the Mountain" and other works, it is difficult to say that they have any specific direction and significance, and even in the eyes of some people, these programs are a bit "nonsense". However, they form a self-consistent aura in "Hu Lai", enveloping the audience in it, allowing the audience to forget their troubles and laugh loudly in a short few minutes. And this is exactly in line with the slogan of "no heart, no lungs, double happiness" shouted by the program team.

When the program reaches the middle and late stages, more specifically, when it comes to the "scene race" and "industry race" of the schedule, some viewers may gradually perceive that the program is "yawing". Because some works, no matter what type, no style, must add some "no heart, no lungs" content. "No heart and no lungs" inevitably gives people a misunderstanding, thinking that spilling dog blood is an easy thing, but in fact, the most difficult thing in comedy is to measure, and no heart and no lungs must also have measure. If it is too hot, it becomes self-deprecating; it is too blunt, like deliberately tickling people. Many performances at this stage have a clear tendency of "more nonsense, less measure". To this end, the host of the program, Ma Dong, has introspection and concern: "We often say that form is greater than content, and I think this tendency should not be encouraged." ”

When the "Comedy Competition" was carried out in the middle and late stages, some works once appeared to be "short video comedy", paying more attention to the stimulation of direct giving, fragmentation, and extremely short reflex arcs, while ignoring the integrity, depth and thinking of the works. Comedy seems to be easier, but it has also become a bit "crazy", because the threshold for stimulating the audience to laugh physiologically is getting higher and higher, and comedians can only play more crazy to win the audience laugh.

Most of the works in the program that impressed the author the most were new from form to content. For example, "Laughs, Piolevich!" "With a distinct literary nature, it tells a story that occurred during World War II; "Where Has Time Gone" directly pokes at the pain points of young people in the Internet era, vividly revealing how WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin devour our time; "Ten Years of Gong Under stage" has "crossing elements" and has at least three time and space... They are not only funny, but also in line with many of our traditional cognitions of comedy, such as "comedy is a mirror", "comedy is a light that illuminates the cracks of life", "comedy is a reflection of people's inner contradictions in the era of transformation".

Winner of the industry's most high-profile award, "Laughs, Piolević! Although there are shadows of "The Sorrow of Comedy" and "The University of Laughter", it can convey the danger of laughter, the courage of laughter, the power of laughter, and the confrontation between laughter and violence in a short comedy performance, so that the audience can feel the preciousness of laughter.

The several groups of partners born in the program "not only let the audience feel that comedy creation is a comic art that comes and goes between partners, but also nurtures tacit understanding with seamless cooperation, and sincerely creates and interprets the mission of CP with different styles." Many of the stories created by Jiang Long and Zhang Chi, who won the annual comedy partner championship, revolve around the love of small people. Little people have a sincere love and persistent insistence on a certain art form, but they are subjected to all kinds of hostility and crushing from reality. What is rare is that their love is still very soft and loyal, even full of poetry. Their story seems to be staging Stephen Chow's "The King of Comedy" over and over again, love and trampling, ideal moonlight and reality of the sludge, the more intense the contrast, the more moving the love. Wang Hao and Shi Ce, in the show, constructed a "Hao Shi Into Pairs" universe, which magically conveys the complex level of love, as well as all its subtleties and moving points.

I remember Yu Hewei commenting on a program in the first episode of the show: "Spilling dog blood is very enjoyable, but I think that in the end, you may find that in the formal drama logic, your ability may be more beautiful." "After watching the whole season of the show, perhaps, the audience can better understand Yu Hewei's words, and the understanding of comedy will be more profound." The comedy of spilling dog blood is not necessarily a bad comedy. But if the comedy show is invariably contaminated with the temperament of "spilling dog blood", it is not a good thing for comedy. People's traditional cognition of comedy is the result of decades of development of comedy theory, is the summary of countless experiences, we should be wary of them moving towards rigidity and dogma, but it does not mean that we must go to the opposite side of them in order to reflect the "new" and maverick of comedy. Clever comedies often tell stories about ordinary good people. "Better Comedy" likes to pay attention to the wall encountered by ordinary good people in reality, their persistence, love, dignity, suffering, loneliness, and indomitability, while transmitting laughter, they also bring compassion, warmth and blessing to ordinary people.

Comedy creation should avoid falling into the quagmire of deliberately elevating and the theme first. There is a saying that can be described as vivid: "Some entries are precisely unwise in this regard, loaded with self-inflicted big problems, and finally crush themselves." And all we viewers see is elephants dancing in the cupboard, and the last place is broken. But that doesn't mean that comedy rejects heavy thinking. What the audience wants to see is that comedy, while being light, is always gravitational, with cruelty or poetry extracted from the soil of reality. Zeng Yuli

Source: Liberation Daily