Tuesday, September 05, 2006

It is to laugh

In any walk of life, funny rarely equals art. They Might Be Giants will always have their own cultish following, but both the mainstream and the critics are generally dismissive of them. Why? Because they happen to write humorous and lighthearted lyrics. How often do you see a comedic film win the Academy Award? Sitcoms are often relegated to "trashy" status whereas shows like House or Law and Order are considered "must see TV."

The same is true in e-fedding. Comedy characters aren't taken seriously by some in this hobby. Some fedheads won't push them. They won't get their shots to shine for the mere fact that they aspire to make people laugh rather than tell these oh oh OMG SO IMPORTANT serious stories and cut AGGRO INTENZE promos.

To me, that doesn't set well at all. It's not so much that I have a propensity towards handling funny characters. It also isn't so much that a lot of my favorite characters are funny characters. Both of those are true. However, my feelings on this subject are similar on women in e-wrestling. I think the best writers in the hobby should be pushed, not just the best writers in a certain style, with the rider that they're the best writers writing about wrestling. It's not too unreasonable to demand that in a wrestling-centric hobby that people write about wrestling, right? We've had this discussion before though :p

Anyway, the point is, no one should be punished because they don't want to try and be so serious that it hurts. Honestly, while bad comedy is really bad, it's not as annoying as when serious stuff gets really pretentious. I really hate pretentiousness, especially when you get it in the hobby and you have people fawning all over it just because they can't understand it, or because it's long for length's sake, or because someone thinks it's hip and cutting-edge.

Besides, it's WAY harder to write good comedy than it is to write good serious stuff. Well, not really. It's hard to write good anything, but let me put it this way; mediocre comedy comes off really bad. Mediocre serious writing is passable because it's not as painful to read. You can kinda slog through someone's generic intense stuff and not wince because there are people out there, both in real life and in the wrestling business, who actually talk like that and get over. However, most of the time, when comedy falls flat, it really falls flat because a) it's probably written in verbiage that isn't common to every day language and b) it ends up looking like you didn't spend any time thinking about what you were going to say, even if you spend the whole night (which, with humor, is probably why it wasn't funny).

So basically, the risk is greater. Shouldn't people who take that kind of risk be rewarded with the same fruits that everyone else do? It's bullshit that people who write comedy get passed to the side just because they aren't intense all the time. Well here's a newsflash. The Rock, Chris Jericho, Steve Austin, Kurt Angle and Eddy Guerrero weren't super-serious all the time. They had some of the funniest moments and promos in all of wrestling and no one thinks of them as any less of a wrestler because of it.

Now, I'm not advocating that blatant comedy gimmicks be pushed just for the sake of being pushed. I mean, Joey Baggadonuts isn't main event material, and I wouldn't handle him expecting to get a push. But characters like Professor Tremendous, Lowell Dot Com, Joey Melton... characters who make people laugh, who have a way with words that isn't always so serious and intense... they should be rewarded and not punished.

Granted, those characters have gotten accolades within their feds, thanks to openminded fedheads and communities. But within some, ignorance remains. To those folks, I have two words:

Lighten up.

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