Friday, January 23, 2009

KRASKY VOSTOKA GROUP



I think I'm missing the humor in this. It's very well timed and choreographed, but it doesn't strike me as particularly funny.

Is there some cultural element to this that I not getting?

5 comments:

Peppo the Clown said...

A good example of non clowns dressed up and made up as clowns... Great acrobats, but not clowns. First "Les Mikos", now these guys... What happened to russian clowns lately?. Karandash and Nikulin must be turning in their graves...

Anonymous said...

Pat, you seem to be not getting a lot of things latley

BAMBOUK said...

Well, let's imagine that a bunch of us are sitting in a room trying to construct an act for our skills. We have good acro, combat and object manipulation skills, and are trying to create something 'new'.

I can understand how moving in that direction could be overwhelming and keep me blinded to other opportunities to create comedy, or spare a moment to share or connect emotionally with the audience.

Jackie Chan realized that for his style of film fighting, the humor was in the reaction to the pain. He took it further by continuing to act the pain as he continued to fight. Perhaps dropping something like this in to the act would make all the difference. Even a clear status would be another element to help us get closer to their characters...

My two cents. I didn't laugh either. But I did enjoy watching it.

Anonymous said...

not as funny as neal skoy and super steves karate gag those guys are the true masters of comedy

Anonymous said...

I'm impressed by the preparation that went into this but I see two problems.

First, there's no reaction time. The crowd is implicitly asked to admire the nonstop choreography rather than being given space to respond to any bit. Notice that the two times the action did pause, the audience tried applauding. We tend to think of zany comedy as nonstop but the best stuff usually pauses periodically during the mayhem.

Second, there's no structure. It's a string of bits without a clear beginning (conflict), middle (attempts to win or resolve the conflict), and end (blow-off), one clearly flowing from the beginning and middle. This is a problem many American gags have.