Mary Does Comedy

Mary Mack born July 25, [1] is an American comedian, musician, and writer. Mack was born in Minnesota, her parents having grown up in and around Duluth, Minnesota. She was raised near Webster, Wisconsin , and moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota to pursue comedy after some time spent in Nashville, Tennessee for music school and music performance. She currently performs as a comedian and folk humorist.

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Her essays and sketches have been heard on public radio in numerous states. She is married to fellow comedian Tim Harmston. Clearly, stepfather Charlie does not respond in the way expected of him: Laughter is also triggered by a mismatch of a character's psychological disposition and his actions. Throughout a film we can come to understand a character's thoughts, emotions, beliefs and so forth.

This provides the filmmaker with ample opportunity to stage actions that are incongruous with these very properties. There are two slightly different ways of staging characterological incongruity. The first is when a character is performing a task that we know is foreign to his or her persona as when Alvy Singer Woody Allen is forced to drive a car in Los Angeles to try to win back Annie Hall in the movie of the same name.

Clearly, we understand Ted to be the kind of insecure and nervous character who is not a regular and experienced driver. Another type of characterological incongruity occurs when a character acts in a way that is surprisingly different to the way we - given our previous knowledge - expect him to behave. The first big laugh of the scene in fact combines physical incongruity and this latter variant of characterological incongruity. In the first scenes of the film Ted is keen to ingratiate himself with Warren and Warren is surprisingly fond of him.

Therefore we are both surprised to see Warren go amuck on Ted and similarly surprised to see Ted's suddenly - though oddly - hitting Warren on the head during the "fight. Perspectival incongruity does not rely as much on surprise sequential action as it does on perceived or intelligible misunderstanding simultaneous action. In the case of There's Something About Mary we see both Ted's correct understanding of the situation and other characters' incorrect or imprecise understanding of the situation.

This is a well-known sight gag that has its origins in slapstick comedy and before that in the theater. By this definition there are two instances of perspectival incongruity. We see that Ted puts a baseball in his pocket and we see that he really does place it behind Warren's ear. Through careful blocking we also see that Charlie, Sheila and Mary cannot see the baseball because Ted unwittingly blocks their visual access fig. The perspectival incongruity established through the staging of the shot sets up the misunderstandings at play in the response to the fight Charlie: Don't let me open up a can of whup-ass on you".

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I didn't do it. The most effective example of perspectival incongruity is of course the scene in the bathroom fig. The brilliance of this particular case of perspectival incongruity is that Ted also realizes that the situation can be misconstrued when viewed from Sheila and Mary's perspective. In fact, Ted's realization he looks down at his penis only seems to affirm Sheila and Mary's incorrect suspicion fig. When Dirk Eitzen describes the jest of incongruity -resolution theory he argues that from this perspective "the chief pleasure of humor arises from the satisfaction of anticipating and discovering solutions to problems albeit incongruous or surprising solutions, in the case of comedy.

In my experience one is more likely to find these solutions in comedian comedy. Ted is not blessed with such ingenuity. Ted attempts to find incongruous solutions to some of his predicaments but it is exactly the ludicrous and desperate impossibility of those attempts that elicit comic reactions. For instance Ted tries to argue that he wear his shirt over the front so that it covers up his genitalia: This comic strategy here is the same as when stepfather Charlie calls in his wife to help solve Ted's problem: She's a dental hygienist, she'll know exactly what to do" fig. These lines flaunt incongruity and it is precisely because they are not solutions that they are funny.

The five forms of incongruity mentioned above are the primary ones in this particular scene but there are other less prominent examples: One could also argue that the contradistinction of Ted's blissful face and The Carpenters-song Close to You represents a case of incongruity.

Conclusion Certainly there are limits to the explanatory power of superiority, relief and incongruity theory. For instance it is easy to imagine incongruous situations that are not comic, and scenes stirring feelings of superiority without eliciting laughter and alternate forms of relief that do not involve laughter.

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Furthermore, they do not enable us to assess why some scenes are funnier than others. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to lower the stakes and use them to better understand certain compositional principles of film comedy. In other words, I think it is possible to unshackle these theories from absolutist claims: From my perspective the scene in There's Something About Mary is fascinating because it forces one to explore a whole range of analytical procedures. I have mainly focused on comedy as an independent form of expression but of course, one could also consider another contested aspect of comedy theory: Is the comedy of the scene generated by narrative structure or inversely, does it distract or impede the viewer's engagement in narrative?

Mary Mack does comedy the Minnesota way in first of 3 nights at Acme

On the face of it the comedy of the scene takes on a life of its own devoid of obligations to narrative structure but, in fact, the culmination of the scene is also the culmination of the first act the set-up and in terms of the film's narrative arc, this is actually a clever "boy loses girl-scene" where the implications raised by the scene are carried on into the remainder of the film.

The intersection of narratology and genre criticism becomes particularly interesting in this respect and there is much at stake, not only questions of film form but also notions of spectatorship. How many levels of engagement are operative when we watch a film like There's Something About Mary?



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This ability of raising significant critical and theoretical questions often characterizes canonic scenes. In a number of ways - including a remarkably literal one - this scene fully displays what V.



Perkins referred to as the "embarrassing richness of the cinema's aptitudes" , p. Life is Like a Glass of Tea Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, My distinction between projective and empathic participation is not as clear-cut in Raskin's model.

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Murray Smith's categories recognition , alignment and allegiance partially overlap with Raskin's categories. Oxford University Press, He argued that "laughter always arises from nothing other than the suddenly perceived lack of congruence between a concept and the real objects" [], p. Like the two other major theories incongruity theory now comes in many guises and Schopenhauer's particular brand of incongruity between a concept and the real object can be seen as merely one variant.

I prefer the term perspectival incongruity. Carroll argues that Henri Bergson identified it with respect to theater in Laughter Charlie is a little brash and does not have an eye for nuances or other points of view. Newer Post Gregg Allman lived the blues — and was part of this music critic's favorite show.

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