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!-- phundug, Jan 02 2012 [+] <shudder>-- FlyingToaster, Jan 02 2012 I think this is brilliant. Why limit it to sitcoms though? You could have dramas too. Basic Instinct would go down well with Scots. [+]-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jan 02 2012 I will no doubt have to sweep TeeVee producers off my front stoop every morning... [+]-- Grogster, Jan 02 2012 Monty Python is totally welcome! I think it would fit right in, and your parrot's fine, it's just pining for the fjords.-- phundug, Jan 02 2012 Why not Zoidberg?Woop-woop-woop woop
<extra bun if you read that in his voice>-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Jan 02 2012 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.
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. [+]-- Alterother, Jan 02 2012 What a senseless waste of human life!</cleese>-- pertinax, Jan 03 2012 Applause. [+].-- blissmiss, Jan 03 2012 Wow. One of those "How come nobody ever thought of this before?" ideas. Shouldn't it be called "Comedyoke" though?
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.-- doctorremulac3, Jan 03 2012 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 [+]-- AusCan531, Jan 03 2012 (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.-- jutta, Jan 04 2012 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.
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.-- calum, Jan 04 2012 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.-- hippo, Jan 04 2012 What if it worked the other way round? Choose a routine which is notoriously lame and inadvertently make it funny.-- nineteenthly, Jan 04 2012 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).-- calum, Jan 04 2012 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.-- hippo, Jan 04 2012 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.
Some people might even be good at it!
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!
You get a bun from me because it'd work, even though I might not go twice. A lot of folks would.-- BC, Jan 05 2012 // (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. //
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.-- notexactly, Mar 25 2018 You could also have "JokeyYoki" where the person reads jokes.
The delivery would be clarified by the punchline being in bold letters underlined with exclamation points so it's delivered correctly.
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."-- doctorremulac3, Mar 25 2018 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-- Skewed, Mar 25 2018 What I said the other day: scratch that. Ready Player One movie—not book—spoilers below (rest of this anno):
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.
I'm hoping to see them in the inevitable remake in a few years.
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.-- notexactly, Apr 01 2018 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..-- DDRopDeadly, Apr 01 2018 random, halfbakery