I call this "jingling the car keys".
When a baby is about to cry, you jingle keys at it so it giggles, claps and forgets why it was sad/scared.
Every time a writer undercuts drama, tragedy or fear with a stupid quip, they're jingling keys at the audience like they're babies.
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Brief humor is also good at cutting lasting tension to "reset" the viewer into a state of relaxedness so the next bit of tension has more impact and isn't just more of the same. Don't get me wrong, Whedon is a hack, but the general concept has merit and shouldn't be derided.
If you do that with every emotional moment then it loses all meaning, nothing can ever be taken seriously because even the characters and writers don't care about it.
Then you damage the story by making each moment emotionally disconnected from the last.
He jingles his penis into an unwilling child's pussy
Ok reddit
Yes, it’s literally exactly what reddit loves.
I just don't understand how he tried to intimidate guys like a foot taller then him by trying to pin them to a wall.
Also he's an elitist nepobaby prick who's never had to earn anything in his life.
What country are you from OP? Since you love edge so much and hate lighthearted stuff, you must be from some troubled place in the second or third world.
https://desuarchive.org/co/search/image/yo7bEn0-2lOp-OrzUKackQ/type/op/
Anytime someone makes this post again, on an anonymous imageboard for the 60 billionth time, complaining about a then wildly successful director working on one of the largest and most successful franchises to ever exist rising towards the peak of its influence at that moment, telling us " no, it is I, Chicken Nuggy Lad who actually understands storytelling and pacing and drama and to stop liking what I, Gary's Stepson Says Is Bad" I laugh. You are truly pathetic.
It's one thing to have an opinion that's just not accepted. It's another thing to keep howling the opinion into the moldy space under the fridge in a foster-for-pay mill for decades while trying to sound like you're smart.
Go touch grass. Talk to a human about something you like. See a therapist.
He's rattled you lmao
>no, spamming the same thread over and over again on Cinemaphile is NOT STUPID
have a nice day, Mooregay
In five minutes based anon will be calm again, but OP will still be moronic
I mean you're not wrong that some people care way to much about this. But Wheadon is still a homosexual with his head firmly up his ass.
And yet the further they moved into that style of writing, the worse the box office got. Now NO ONE sees Marvel movies.
So it's YOU that are arguing against commercial success.
I agree with this only to a degree. Marvel overdoes it. But you gotta have something to have the audience relax for a moment in a dark and serious story sometimes. Can also enable character development. Just don’t overdo it like Marvel does and the tone won’t be adversely affected
I swear his eyes look more black and soulless every time I see him.
It's good to break up tension or it stops being effective. You can only play the sad/scary card for so long before it starts to feel like it's taking itself too seriously. Breaking up moments with a little comic relief helps reset the scene and allows you to continue ramping up the sadness or fear. It doesn't mean you need a dopey character to trod into a room wearing a flower pot as a hat and slip on an ice cube.
Even The Dark Knight had jokes
>When you're so sheltered you don't realize people joke as a stress coping mechanism.
Yea "what is gallows humor" people don't get how humor helps even in the dark.
Oh yeah I remember the last time I got into a street fight and we stopped after each punch to give some stupid joke. It's not like danger is scary for most people, clearly the "humor as a cope" thing is just a constant thing that never stops...
And in this absolutely empty gesture you offer, the flaw remains in the argument when it applies to a screenwriter’s ability to remain consistent in a character and tone without floundering with cheap tricks and piss poor understanding of dramatics. Yes we can laugh in the face horrible things and do so all the time, the problem here is that is all there is in moments where character is revealed. Not through action, no that would be heroic. No, what is chosen in these child’s entertainments are the glib words of a coward afraid of emotional catharsis that anybody with a fricking beating heart misses when the opportunity is sullied. And routinely it is sullied here. Whatever spirit you claim exists in this husk of a “film” or its cretinous brethren has long since left. All that remains is a fortune cookie’s worth of attention to the fricking job
I mean he's not wrong, but people take it like HE thought up the concept of "Comic Relief",
And yes it is kinda "jingling the car keys", but only to releive tension/drama, or to ease down after a intense dark moment. The gayginess isn't the idea behind the quote, it's the idea that Joss Wheadon created Comic Relief.
how did you get the impression that anyone was indicating that Joss Wheadon created comic relief?
I mean whenever someone posts a thread with the OP's image or brings up Marvel humor that's usually where it leans on. Or at least what I gleam.
Why would would someone make this thread? I don't care enough about some Hollywood chubby whose claim to fame is Marvel stuff. But clearly some OP wants me to, they want others to.
Why make the thread otherwise?
I'm not a Whedon fan so don't take my word nitpicking as defense of the man himself, but it's kind of like if he said "go outside, go to the beach, go for a hike and have a blast, but for the love of god, wear sunscreen". The assumption wouldn't be that he invented sunscreen. He's just advocating for its use in specific situations. It's not a revolutionary idea, but plenty of people do spend a lot of time outdoors without wearing sunscreen and, to bring it back around, he's alleging that a lot of film makers forget to use comedic relief to break up the tension.
Like any technique, it can be overused or used poorly. However, the post states:
> Every time a writer undercuts drama, tragedy or fear with a stupid quip, they're jingling keys at the audience like they're babies.
> Every time
which is simply not true. If there are specific instances where comedic relief is poorly used, call that out specifically, but to make a blanket statement that it always undercuts a scene is an oversimplification of the issue and creates a bunk set of rules for people who can't think for themselves. (John K did the same shit and we're still being haunted by the ghost of his fricking blog).
You guys aren't wrong but at some point it became formulaic and predictable. The MCU has made at least their version of comic relief tired. It started with jokes being placed in bad areas and quickly became the jiggling key the other anon described.
He used to understand that levity was there to enhance the darkness, not undermine it. Light makes the shadows darker.
He's like people who get way too comfortably at a job, get bored and regress. He never really tried to challenge himself or make something out of his comfort zone.
"Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you."
Making Ray Fischer cry is probably the only based thing he did
>noooo you can't make me say my character's catchphrase this is a serious superhero movie you're racist!!!
The problem isn't having comic relief in an otherwise serious movie. The problem is that Whedon and subsequent MCU writers fricking suck donkey ass at knowing when to put comic relief in and when to let a scene breathe. Comedic timing is something that these idiots have none of.
and how about the mindset that there MUST be comedic relief otherwise a scene is bad? that isnt fricking stupid? this mindset is what leads to stupid cringy jokes every five minutes
Should be "quiping the mood"
>but then for the love of god tell a joke
but i dont want to
does that make my story le BAD?
too EDGY67ME????
cause every story needs quips every five minutes otherwise its TOODARK2ME!!!!
right?
homosexual hack
That shit was so prevalent in lighter hearted movies that people were surprised there wasn't a shitty joke during the panic attack scene in Puss in Boots. The scene played out seriously, even if the next scenes were goofy.
To me it comes off as being afraid to be authentic. Like writers realize they're writing a story about something that from a distance can seem silly and nonsensical and are worried that they'd be laughed at for trying to take what they write seriously. So they hide behind putting a joke at the end of an emotional scene like hiding behind layers of irony to avoid being called cringe.
It's called breaking the tension. You're so full of malice you're misreading the intentions and you're assuming it makes people forget.
You're either trolling or genuinely far up your own ass.
Why else would you space like this?
Reddit spacing is not real, anon
This is not comedic relief. When you have too much levity, the stakes and tension are completely moot. If the characters that are supposed to be seeing a situation as life-or-death can't take something seriously, then there's no reason for an audience to. The only way an audience can have more investment in the stakes of a story is if it's banking off of dramatic irony, but that involves some tact from the writer. Remember that scene in The Shining? The infamous "here's Johnny" scene? Imagine if, instead of just the line at the end when the audience sees his face, we would hear a quip between each chop of his axe. That's that this quip shit is like in narrative form.
The primary motive in movies, tv shows, etc. is to convey a thematic mood that "corrals" viewers towards the director's/author's intended message or desired emotion. The actual real issue with actors and quippy writing nowadays is how very few actors and writers anymore are able to let go of their egos and actually act or write serious dialogue. I genuinely can't remember the last time an actor played a character seriously like Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs or Heath Ledger's Joker. It's why a noticeable amount of sucessful shows and movies over the years often tended to have casts that are classically trained theater actors. In theater, you have to play your character 100% straight, otherwise, you'll ruin the entire live performance. Quips meanwhile, are cheap, overused humor that are equivalent to jump scares in horror. They're too easy to use and low-effort even if they get the desired result. And don't even get me started on how executive suits force writers to use them because they want movies to appeal to the largest amount of people (the lowest common denominator) by not having the audience feel anything uncomfortable too long since modern suits are super risk-adverse nowadays. Quips ruin tension.
>moron spams this thread 100 times just to spam these canned replies
Then refute them. If you've seen them wo many times there must be just as many common counter arguments.
Those are comedic relief moments borm out of genuine character interaction. That's not the same as inserting jokes and quips during dramatic moments to prevent your audience from feeling anything. Or in the case of games like Forspoken and Marvel movies, constantly acknowledging how stupid something is with the character making fun of it.
The humour in these films stems from insecurity with regards to the source material. This same insecurity leads to the writers forcing themselves to fill any silence with quips and make sure that they make fun of something before the audience does so that they remain in control. They are afraid to let a moment breathe, without satire, for fear of making an audience uncomfortable.
In fact the humour in Marvel films is very obviously wish-fulfilment on the part of the viewer by way of the writer. The jokes do not come naturally from the character, but are rather the jokes that a passive third-party observer would make about the situation if he believed himself to be 'witty'.
We already had a term for that. It’s called comic relief. You are relieving the tension with a little comedy. Normal people like this and respond positively to it, it’s a pretty standard writing technique.
>babies like this and that makes it bad
Did you also stop sleeping under a blanket, eating food, and breathing just because babies do those things?
Yes
I mean, it worked for a while until people started hating capes again.
I think the better angle here is not that dark shit SHOULD "tell a joke", it's that a writer shouldn't be AFRAID to tell a joke if it fits. If you can't fit a bit of lightness in there, then skip it and try again later, don't just force it in like some shit Marvel movie.
Some writers just doomNgloom the shit out of everything and it gets dull for there to be no breaks between the tension, just a constant onslaught of literally nothing but dark shit, and even if a scene COULD fit a little humor in there, even dark humor, the writer just grimaces, kills that character off, then has the MC spiral into depression and say "what is this all for? Who am I???" for the hundredth time while the personification of death (the concept, not the Grim Reaper) prowls the city and beheads an orphan.
This kind of stuff is made worse when you've got explicitly sillier, less-serious characters like the Flash or the Joker getting shoehorned into serious plots, and Flash loses all his snark and quips, or Joker loses all his "funny" and just kills people with real, regular guns, like, not even a purple and green gun he calls "The Punchline", just a gun.
God I miss when Joker actually had some comedy mixed in and wasn't just cutting his face open/off while beating the BatFamily with crowbars or his dick.
IMO, the Joker should always have some kind of joke mixed in, some silly bit to show he mixes comedy and crime together.
Have him rob a bank, but pie the guards with regular-ass pies to confuse them and use a giant magnet to steal their guns, which he tosses to his goons. Have him take over a game show on live TV and run the show 100% normally, interjecting with legit jokes, then banana peel the winner as they grab their check so he can run off with it.
Threaten to blow up a bank with a giant cartoon bomb, only to acid-flower his way into the vault while everyone's pissing themselves. (The bomb isn't real.)
It never worked well unless you were a consoomer drone.
Hey man, don't blame me, my last two MCU movies were Iron Man 1 and GotG 1, and I didn't like IM1 that much because the movie clearly didn't have the budget to let Tony Stark have a working suit for longer than five minutes at any given time.
this but with fma
It was really bad in episode 1 where characters would graphically die while Ed would do chibi bullshit but later down the line they were able to space out the comedy better
Took till like 30 episodes honestly, but the ending makes up for it
This is correct if you mean to tell a joke in a subsequent scene after the dramatic and serious moment, and wrong if you mean to make a shitty quip right after something serious has happened. It's really that simple. No point to argue about it so much.
>AZquotes
What is that, AZnude?
Christ, you don't know how humans work, do you? People find humour in pretty much every situation. It's how we cope with shit. There are soldiers in the frozen trenches of Ukraine right now that are joking around while actively taking fire. There are people at funerals telling jokes. There are people on their deathbeds still finding it in themselves to laugh it up. If you think yourself above them, you're either lying or a sociopath.
>People find humour in pretty much every situation.
Not any more, we don't. That's istophobic now, don't you know.