Video Killed the Radio Star

To set the tone for my thinking, I am including some videos that came to mind as we had our conversations today. I know that some of them may be a little off the beaten path and some may be inappropriate, but I think that they are good ways to continue talking and thinking about our earlier conversations. Even if the videos seem a little off-topic or low-brow, they all are examples of how we can play with genres and conventions in order to complicate our understanding of certain concepts or ideas that we take for granted.

The first video is another funny video from collegehumor.com (you may remember the Grammar Nazi from one of my earlier posts). I thought that this one went along well with our conversation on taking "older" texts or events and making them "new" again.  I still wish Ben would have talked about his work with Romeo.Juliet at UNCC...it was so great! It took the classic tragedy, retained the classic language, and yet put it in the e-world that we live in where Romeo and Juliet stalk each other on Facebook, messages come in on the iPad, and they go to techno raves. While this one isn't nearly as good as that play, it is really funny and it does update an older piece. This one plays with the generic conventions of West Side Story and tells the story of a couple who met online...pretty darn funny (especially if you know West Side Story  or the weirdness that comes from starting to date online). I give you Web Site Story:

The second video that came to mind today is this classic one from Monty Python called "The Argument Clinic." What I love most about this skit and how I think it relates to our discussions is how it satirizes the notion of argument itself or what we think an argument should be. The man comes in expecting to have an argument, or at least the way that he understands an argument to work as "a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition." However, Mr.Vibrating only meets everything he says with contradiction, which is his understanding of argument. It is at the intersection of these two understandings where the absurdity lies and exactly what makes it funny. I think about so many of our language conventions in that way...we all think that we understand what they are, but we each have a different understanding that we assume is "right." Thinking that we all understand things in the same way...that is what is absurd to me.

The third video that came up in my bizarrely-connected mind comes from a series on Funny-or-die.com called Drunk History, which has recently become a series on Comedy Central. The first episode that they made in the web series featured the story of Alexander Hamilton so of course it made me think about Erika's Demo. Although I recognize that you could never show this in class and that there is no inherent or redeeming value, I figured that you all still may want to check it out.

And the last one that I want to show you goes back to the idea of playing with genre conventions AND it goes back to one of our first conversations on Disney princesses (I think that was at orientation). It doesn't really have a deep meaning, but it's really funny and they do a fantastic job of recognizing the genre of The Real Housewives and applying the stories of the princesses. Too funny!