week 3 Flashcards
comedy success cycle: preference
Cultural incongruence: Dialogue-dependent romantic comedies are not culturally congruent
enough for global audiences.
Saturation
Comedy over-saturation: In addition to competition from other movie genres, comedy films experience competition from television (i.e., sitcoms). This market
saturation leads to a shorter reach in terms of the percentage of potential audience.
Hedonic motivations for comedy
- Motivational hedonism: describes that human behavior is determined by desires to
increase pleasure and to decrease or avoid pain. - Mood management theory describes that the use of entertainment serves the
regulation of positive mood states. Entertainment serves to:
o Prolong positive moods
o Enhance positive moods
o Diminish negative moods - Mood management theory also includes the notion that excitement is a necessary
- but not sufficient – component of enjoyment. Excitation levels are regulated through
entertainment.
Slapstick
a form of comedy with an emphasis on physical jokes, mostly involving mishaps or interpersonal violence between characters.
Screwball
romantic comedy based on misconceptions. Usually with stubborn, independent women who can match the male counterpart with witty banter.
Mockumentary Style Sitcom
- Camera crew is part of the scene (usually one camera)
- Voyeurism (information only available to the camera crew/audience)
- Makes laugh track implausible
Confessional is a stylistic device borrowed from reality television shows,
consisting of a cutaway to a cast member talking directly to camera.
Confessionals provide narration, exposition, and commentary on ongoing
action within the show.
Sitcom narratives:
- Typical plot: Harmony gets disrupted by selfishness or insensitivity and ends with the restoration of harmony.
- One of the characters usually steps ‘out-of-line’, for instance by acting
arrogant, vain or revolting, thereby opening themselves up to the ridicule other
characters (and the audience). They are eventually brought back to an
acceptable level. - Traditionally, one of the protagonists make some sort of mistake, that character
learns their lesson, and promptly forgets that lesson as they get into trouble
again in the next episode.
Humor theories
Incongruity theory
Humor comes from recognition of incongruity between the presumed relation between a concept in a certain situation and the actual object in relation to a situation. Absurdity, nonsense, and surprise are vital themes in humor covered by this theory.
- Parody: poking at well-known things
- Wordplay: playing with words
- Pure incongruity: surprise based on conceptual violation of expectations
- Absurdity: against logical rules
- Satire: By means of humor (often irony or sarcasm) bring social issues to the
attention, or deliver social or political criticism.
Response: COGNITIVE
Superiority theory
Laughter arises from the triumph one feels when favorably comparing oneself to the
inadequacies or misfortunes of others. Ridicule and making fun of those who deviate
from the norm are typical themes of humor covered by superiority theory.
relevant types of humor:
- Aggressive humor (discrimination)
- Slapstick (physical)
- Self-defeating humor
Response: EMOTIONAL
Relief theory
Humor results from a release of pent-up nervous energy. Laughter is mainly
used to vent nervous energy and to overcome sociocultural inhibitions. Humor is used to release tension.
- Sexually-themed humor: “just a joke” sensitive topics
- Irreverent humor: taboo, vulgar humor.
- coping humor: about sickness, death
Response: PHYSICAL
Scatological Humor
A type of off-colour humour dealing with defecation, diarrhea, constipation, urination, flatulence, vomiting and other bodily functions.
- Second-hand embarrassment is a self-conscious emotion triggered by vicarious public violations of a social norm.
- Empathy is a fundamental prerequisite for vicarious embarrassment experiences.
Comedy movies are usually a one-off.
Spin-offs are somewhat common among sitcom.
Drama vs Tragedy
- Drama is a type of fiction with a serious undertone in which the focus
lies with realistic characters who try to work through emotional problems. - Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering and the terrible
or sorrowful events that befall the protagonist.
Motivation for Drama when Sad
- Social comparison: By seeing the misery of others (downwards social comparison) we realize how good our lives are, which leads to appreciation for these types of entertainment
because they enhance our self-worth. - Eudomania: A sad movie can break our complacent everyday routine, make us realize that
things could be a lot worse, and have us count our blessings. - Alternatively, viewers of sad movies may seek information that can ultimately help
the mournful viewer ‘‘work through’’ his or her negative state
Eudemonic Motivations
- Eudemonic entertainment involves content that is moving, thought-
provoking, or meaningful as it confronts viewers with cognitive and emotional
challenges). - People strive for more in life than merely enjoying safe and healthy
environments that provide pure pleasure. People seek painful and difficult
situations that promise mastery and broadening of perspective. - Eudemonic entertainment can provide insight in oneself and others, an
understanding that is crucial to achieve fulfillment within the possibilities of
one’s character or personality (i.e., self-realization).
Attention to negativity
- information that is negatively valenced will have a greater impact on an individual
than positively valenced information of the same type. - Evolutionary psychology explains the attentional advantage of negative cues to
survival. Organisms that were better attuned to pay attention to bad outcomes
would have been more likely to survive threats and, consequently, would have
increased probability of passing along their genes. - Negatively valenced (entertainment) experiences have been shown to be
particularly powerful in securing attention, intense emotional involvement, and
high memorability.
Parasocial processes
(empathy, identification) allow the sharing of characters’ motivational
dispositions, making the events emotionally significant.
Viewers who lost favorite characters on a television soap displayed negative reactions
similar to those experienced after the real dissolution of social relationships.
Musical Cues Affect Emotions
- The film score refers to the music that appears in a film. Often, non-diegetic
music: music that does not specifically exist within the world of the film itself. - Music can be used as an affective primer to influence a viewer’s evaluations
about a character’s emotions, their intentions and our empathy for them. - The lyrics of songs can trigger memories that the listener associates with
sadness, such as themes of regret and lost love.
Appreciation comes from sadness
- Primary emotional responses are often automatic (e.g., sadness, crying)
but users re-evaluate these primary emotions on the basis of goals and
motivations. This meta-level emotional reappraisal can lead to the
appreciation of sadness. - Being attentive to unfolding primary emotions can help the self-realization
process. Sad emotions can inform the user of internalized norms and
values and thereby direct attention to meaningful self-realization.
Effects of eudemonic entertainment
- Use of eudemonic entertainment showed a significant weak longitudinal
effect on meaning in life, suggesting that meaningful and thought-
provoking entertainment can positively influence psychological resilience
and mental health. - Restoring meaning after adversity or critical life events is an important
mechanism that strengthens resilience and mental health through
processes of acceptance or reappraisal.
Motivations for selecting Horror
- Males feel the need to prove to their peers, and ultimately to themselves, that
they are unperturbed, calm and collected in the face of terror. - Mastery over fearful emotions can be enjoyable. Frequent horror movie
watchers can feel satisfaction and pride that they actualized the skill to
withstand intense fear.
Suspense
an emotional process, where information is withheld from the characters
– not the audience.
Suspense is defined as ‘audience members acute, fearful apprehension about
deplorable events that threaten liked protagonists’.
A suspense discourse must contain three elements:
- Uncertainty - An initiating event that could lead to significant, likely negative,
consequences for one of the liked characters in the narrative. - Temporal Aspects - Temporal distance, and additional discourse material between the
initiating event that created the tension and the moment in which the event is resolved. - Anticipation - Actions are constantly evaluated against anticipated negative predictions
as the event unfolds
The unscarry valley
- The uncanny valley effect describes the emotional response to an object’s degree of
resemblance to a human being. - As the appearance of non-humans becoms more human, observers’ emotional response to the object becomes increasingly positive, until it reaches a point where the response becomes strong revulsion. As the appearance continues to become indistinguishable from a human being it approaches human-to-human empathy levels.
No Empathy for Antagonists
- Othering refers to the process whereby negative characteristics are attributed
to other groups of people in order to set them apart as representing those who
are opposite and not deserving of empathy.
Dolf Zillmann’s Horror Enjoyment Theories
Excitation Transfer
Residual physiological arousal can be misattributed to a subsequent stimulus. The
physiological arousal accumulated during exposure (to horror), is linked to positive
cognitions after the happy end, which results in euphoria. More negative affect (e.g., fear,arousal) leads to more reported enjoyment afterwards (Zillmann, 1996)
Snuggle-Theory
Zillmann et al (1986) found that male students enjoyed a horror movie almost twice as
much if a female partner showed distress during the film. Female undergrads enjoyed the film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Thus, gender stereotypical behavior of a partner while watching a horror movie not only increases the appeal of the partner, but also of the movie.
Effects of watching horror
- Temorarrly improved immune system
- More control over real-world fears
- Causes discomfort.
Characteristics of comedy viewers
- Trait: lightheartedness as a personality trait
- State: stress
- State: people with small problems
Why?
* Mood management theory
* Escapism
