Experimental Comedy
Much of Portnoy’s work is also framed by what he calls Experimental Comedy, or “the injection of the sublime, the blatantly inscrutable, the abstract, the primal, the choreographic, the theoretical, the improbable, the generative, the post-rhythmic, the turbo-stupid, etc., into the frame of stand-up." This has manifested in the operatic stand-up routine of The K Sound (2006), Taipei Women’s Experimental Comedy Club (2010), and Script Opposition in Late-Model Carrot Jokes (2011), a project that investigated the “carrot joke,” a term used in cognitive linguistics to describe a poem-like joke with a high degree of ambiguity, blunt omissions of information and logical faults and inconsistencies. In carrot jokes “incongruities are rarely resolved and just pile on top of each other…Since the ground or ‘script’ is always shifting, the listener keeps trying to determine whether there is an overall story that could explain what the hell is going on.”
Read more about this topic: Soy Bomb
Famous quotes containing the words experimental and/or comedy:
“If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“The actors today really need the whip hand. They’re so lazy. They haven’t got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)