Bergson

Postmortem: Comedy and the Moving Image

Ian Bryce Jones1 Comment
prezi_screenshot-comedy_postmortem-header_image
An attempt to capture everything that was written on the chalkboard after class discussion in week 13 of the course. (I can’t promise that this isn’t a glimpse into madness.)

Ian here—

Grades for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fall 2016 semester were due today, and I wanted to take the occasion to do a quick postmortem on “Comedy and the Moving Image,” which I consider to be the most successful course I taught this term—as well as one of my most fun and productive courses ever taught. I’ve posted several lesson plans from this course already throughout the past couple of months. Links to those will be provided below, as I sketch out a skeletal version of the course’s themes, and some of its most interesting surprises.

I put this visual presentation together for our final class meeting. You should feel free to follow along with it … although I admit that, as you can see from the above image, it gets increasingly messy as you click through.

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Lesson Plan: Buster Keaton’s The General

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Ian here—

This is another lesson plan from my “Comedy and the Moving Image” course. It’s from the week immediately following the previously-posted week on Bergson’s Laughter, and it follows up several of those ideas, merging with Bergson with the theories of Keaton’s humor forwarded by Noël Carroll in his book Comedy Incarnate: Buster Keaton, Physical Humor and Bodily Coping.

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Lesson Plan: Henri Bergson’s Theory of Humor

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Ian here—

The following is a lesson plan for a day spent discussing Henri Bergson’s theory of humor in my course “Comedy and the Moving Image.”[i] It’s admittedly unusual, but I found it to be wonderfully productive.

The first third or so of this course was spent discussing some major philosophical theories of humor (Hobbes, Kant, Bergson) and watching silent slapstick comedy shorts. Knowing that devoting a solid block of class to silent cinema came with the danger of alienating students, I also spiced things up by showing a lot of contemporary YouTube videos in class, which kept them engaged. (The “fail video” genre makes a terrific pairing with Hobbes’ theory of humor!) You’ll see some of that back-and-forth in this lesson.

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