Austin Kleon

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MAKE ‘EM LAUGH SOME MORE

MINDMAP OF MAKE 'EM LAUGH (Wiseguys)

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PBS is running a great six-episode series on the past 100 years of American comedy called MAKE ‘EM LAUGH. I did these two mind maps on the fly during the second two episodes on wiseguys and satire/parody.

MINDMAP OF MAKE 'EM LAUGH (Satire and Parody)

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Looking back over the four maps, it strikes me how many times I wrote down the word “truth.” Comedy tells the truth.

You can see my maps of the previous two episodes here.

If you want to link to all four drawings, use this link:

http://www.austinkleon.com/tag/make-em-laugh/

And see all my previous mind maps.

Comments

  1. Unflinching honesty couched in humor was the province of the court jester, at least in popular legend (Lear’s fool comes to mind as my favorite example). I’ve also heard of various beliefs that humor and comedy help us shake off illusions and see things for how they really are — ancient Romans believed laughter could ward off evil spirits, the evil eye, jealousy in the locker room (seriously), etc. And now we have Stephen Colbert with his very useful ‘truthiness’!

    This reminds me that I need to check out Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World…

    PS: I hear that MAD Magazine will be switching to a quarterly format after their upcoming 500th issue, which makes me very sad. They’re taking it with some humor, though: the editor quipped that only every third issue is actually funny anyhow, so they’ll just be printing those!

  3. Hi Austin,

    We’ve caught most of the Make Em Laugh episodes and your mind maps are pretty cool. Then I read your tweet “MAKE EM LAUGH introduced me to Carol Burnett’s hilarious GONE WITH THE WIND parody” and it hit me that my husband and I had seen many of the clips when they were new (or newer), so watching them made us feel nostalgic, while you were discovering new things.

    I’m glad the series tries to give an idea of how edgy those shows seemed when they were new. We lived in South Carolina in the late sixties and Laugh-In was considered so subversive that local SC stations rejected it. We couldn’t watch it until we visited family in Chicago, and seeing what we were missing made us feel cheated.

    You’ve mentioned Heinlein before, so you probably remember the part of Stranger in A Strange Land where Michael Valentine finally figures out what funny means. It always seemed like a piece of the puzzle but just a piece.

    Annie at the Transplantable Rose

  5. Stranger In A Strange Land is a kind of cult classic – the number of people still walking around saying ‘Grok’ fifty years later is amusingly huge! I was early 20’s when I read it. I loved it and the ideas influenced me, but I don’t know what a new young reader would think. Heinlein seems to be an author some people take to heart right away while other people hate his works just as quickly.

    If you want shorter writings to dip into there’s a collection of Heinlein ‘future history’ stories called The Past Through Tomorrow written between 1939-1958, published in 1967, including a couple of novellas. “If This Goes On” shows the US in mid-21st century, no longer a democracy but under religious domination; in “Methuselah’s Children”, set in mid-22nd century, a group of genetically long-lived people are under attack from those with normal life spans. The immortal theme became a constant thread in later books.

    Annie
    Your map shows arrows moving from Sid Caesar to Lawrence Welk as the audience became less sophisticated. Lawrence Welk has been a PBS staple for years, but Sid Caesar only gets occasional mention. How funny is that?

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