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Comedyoke
You and your friends read from a real sitcom script! | |
This is like a karaoke bar, but much more fun for the audience, because instead of subjecting everyone to yet another bad rendition of "I Got You Babe" or "Love Shack", you and your friends get to perform excerpts of your favorite sitcom episodes and comedy routines!
When called up on stage, you and
your friends are provided with tablet PC's (e.g. iPads) on which the scrolling script is printed. The place has access to the funniest parts of all the scripts from TV comedy shows, such as Seinfeld, Family Guy, The Honeymooners, etc. But you and your friends can read/perform them in any style you want -- that's part of the fun! Feel free to add in a few ad-lib lines if you think you can do it better than the original.
It'll keep the audience guessing, and best of all, even people who can't sing can enjoy doing Comedyoke!
Thank you, and happy new year!
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Annotation:
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I think this is brilliant. Why limit it to sitcoms
though? You could have dramas too. Basic Instinct
would go down well with Scots. [+] |
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I will no doubt have to sweep TeeVee producers off my front stoop every morning... [+] |
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Monty Python is totally welcome! I think it would fit right in, and your parrot's fine, it's just pining for the fjords. |
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Why not Zoidberg? Woop-woop-woop woop |
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<extra bun if you read that in his voice> |
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This would be wonderful for those close friends and
couples who spontaniously quote lines from favorite
movies and TV shows that are, at best, only quasi-relevant
to the situation at hand, then have a self-conradulatory
laugh over how clever and witty they are. People like, for
instance, my wife and I. |
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Come to think of it, we don't actually need the extra
encouragment to venture off on obscure Pythonical
tangents. But it would still be a fun party game. [+] |
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What a senseless waste of human life!</cleese> |
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Wow. One of those "How come nobody ever thought
of this before?" ideas. Shouldn't it be called
"Comedyoke" though? |
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You should also be able to switch on a laughtrack
that would blast through the sound system after the
funny lines or switch it off
and go bareback with only the real audience's
reaction. |
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Good idea. Monty Python is something I only find funny
in the re-telling. Your idea would work well but
preferably only in small doses please [+] |
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(Similar, but not exactly the same) In a fun(*) sci-
fi
book I recently finished listening to, "Ready Player
One"
by Ernest Cline, one of the inventions is a VR
game
where you and maybe some friends play through
an
entire movie. You'd have to know all the lines of
your character. Extra points for delivering them in
the right tone of voice.
(I wouldn't be able to do this with any movie, but I
know a few people who know their favorite movies
well enough to stand a chance.)
--
(*) Especially if you were a teenage geek in the
80ies. |
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I have two issues with this: first: there's a film called Sliding Doors, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Hollywood heart-throb John Hannah, where JH's character has to be shorthanded as "funny". This is ostensibly achieved by having him recite, at various points in the film, much of the dialogue from the Spanish Inquisition sketch. As a result the character played by JH, who is an otherwise pretty engaging presence, comes across as a charmless, braying Rag Week arsehole. This is the effect of reciting someone else's jokes. Performing, or telling, someone else's jokes is a different matter, it is the recitation that kills. |
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The second issue is tied to the first. Because most people are cosmically bad at singing, karaoke is, broadly, a comic exercise (middle-aged hairdressers channelling Olivia Newton-John, dish-faced speech therapists U Can't Touching This etc). Most people, though, have the ability to speak and a fairly large proportion of the target market for this will have at least basic proficiency in reading. What only a very tiny number will have, however, is any sort of comedy performance talent. Which means that attending a comedyoke event will be akin to being trapped in a room with a seeming thousand John Hannahs each dying, slowly, in imperfect time with the scrolling text, dying deaths on their tragically unamusing arses. |
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I agree with [calum]. I saw Eddie Braben, the scriptwriter for Morcambe and Wise, on TV the other night. He recited a couple of his favourite Morcambe and Wise routines and managed to make them completely unfunny, despite the fact that he'd written them and also that these lines had worked brilliantly for Morcambe and Wise. If it didn't work for him, using top-quality material, what hope has anyone else got? If I had to endure someone who thought they were hilariously reciting a Vicky Pollard script I think I'd be trampling people in the rush for the exit. |
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What if it worked the other way round? Choose a
routine which is notoriously lame and inadvertently
make it funny. |
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Well, yeah, I've been doing a jokes remix project for some time (<monotone>"Man walks into a pub ow it was a metal pub"</monotone>), trying to gain traction for the idea that unfunny jokes are (a) still jokes and (b) funny, on the basis that the jokes that I remix are not funny and remixing them will make them funny, even though they remain essentially the same. The hard looks I get from my various audiences tell me that either unfunny jokes are unfunny jokes, no matter how you layer on complexities or that I haven't the comedy talent to make this work (which, on the basis of how funny I find myself, seems inconceivable. To be clear: I'm hilarious). |
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I've done the remixing jokes thing before ("My dog's gone to the West Indies" - "How does he smell?" - "Jamaica!") which tends to get the same reaction. |
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I can see the utter horror that could come of this, but I can also see that a lot of people would be into giving it a shot. |
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Some people might even be good at it! |
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It has a similar charm to Who's Line Is It, Anyway? in that the players could at any moment change the entire tone of the scene. Plus, it puts all those useless memorized lines to use! |
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You get a bun from me because it'd work, even though I might not go twice. A lot of folks would. |
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// (Similar, but not exactly the same) In a fun(*) sci- fi book I recently finished listening to,
"Ready Player One" by Ernest Cline, one of the inventions is a VR game where you and maybe
some friends play through an entire movie. You'd have to know all the lines of your character.
Extra points for delivering them in the right tone of voice.
(I wouldn't be able to do this with any movie, but I know a few people who know their
favorite movies well enough to stand a chance.)
--
(*) Especially if you were a teenage geek in the 80ies. // |
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The Ready Player One movie is coming out this week, and I've been reading/listening to the
book to prepare. This concept is called "Flicksyncs". (And the book came out before this idea
and anno were posted.) I imagine the concept will be in the movie, because it's a pretty
important plot point. I imagine that means that flicksyncs will be a thing IRL soon, because
people will see the movie and want them, and VR gaming is getting to be a big thing. I expect
we will first see a flicksync of Ready Player One, of course. |
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You could also have "JokeyYoki" where the person reads
jokes. |
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The delivery would be clarified by the punchline being in
bold letters underlined with exclamation points so it's
delivered correctly. |
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It would also tell you what to do with your hands when
you say the punchline as in "raise hand over your head
while you yell: "Oh, you're looking for the ophthalmology
department down the hall. This is proctology." |
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Baked for centuries by amateur dramatics societies
everywhere, all you need to be completely identical is a
bar at the opposite end of the hall to the stage & ushers
serving drinks & popcorn, which it would be difficult to claim
hasn't happened many times over in village halls all over ;p |
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What I said the other day: scratch that. Ready Player One
movienot bookspoilers below (rest of this anno): |
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There are no flicksyncs in the movie. In fact, there's no
most of what happened in the book in the movie, and
there's no most of what happened in the movie in the
book. |
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I'm hoping to see them in the inevitable remake in a few
years. |
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Perhaps one of the reasons they didn't include flicksyncs
was that they didn't want to create demand when the
technology wasn't fully ready. |
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My kids do this occasionslly.. they come out with some
amazing line which I assume is original and which also
happens to fit the situation hilariously. I start to have hope
for their intellectual future. Then I realise they are just
quoting from a movie randomly and also they were
completely unaware of what was going on around them: no
causal connection. But I live in hope.. |
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