One of the problems with writing a lot of topical comedy (and, in Tonightly, News Revue, the Treason Show, Insult to Injury and other places, I have ended up writing a LOT of topical comedy) is that is very quickly becomes non-topical non-comedy. Or: just words.
I have reams of paper and digital giga-tonnes of files and folders full of sketches that only made sense for a week in 2004. And weren’t particularly good then.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to write a topical song about Tiger Woods. Any minute now we’ll all have forgotten who he is, so I thought I’d pop it up here while we can still remember what it is about (sort of).
Here is ‘Big Cat’:
https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D65335_892065_759638(Of course, one of the joys of topical comedy is that it often doesn’t have to be very good. An audience will laugh from recognition, just because they understand a reference the song is making, or at – as above – a list of knob gags bound together by a simple chord sequence. Maybe I’ll leave the rest of them safely buried on my hard drive…)
Nathaniel Tapley 
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March 6, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Ceri
Yes, that whole “laugh from recognition, just because they understand a reference” is interesting. I remember once seeing a trailer for the (fairly unfunny) Scary Movie while at the cinema, and when one of the characters whispered the line, “I see dead people”, hundreds of people in the audience laughed. They weren’t laughing at the line because it had been used cleverly, in some witty, satirical manner, some way that put a novel comedic spin on a line created famously for a very different situation. No, they were clearly *laughing at the fact that they recognized the line*. It seemed to be a laugh of self-congratulation. Either they were signaling to others that their knowledge of pop culture was commendably solid, or it was akin to the laugh of a baby who achieves something and is thrilled by her own powers.
I think the song thing works from a different mechanism in general (although a topical comedy song can combine the two). It’s a variant of the Anna Kournikova effect: at the height of her fame, Kournikova was often feted as though she were the most beautiful woman in the world. Really, she wasn’t: if she were an unknown model in a room full of others, she wouldn’t stand out particularly. But because the brain had labeled her first and foremost as a tennis player, it awarded her high marks for beauty *by comparison with other tennis players*, but what the conscious mind seemed to take away from that was “she’s beautiful”. Similarly, comedy songs don’t need to be hilarious, they just need to be *much funnier than most songs you hear*. It’s a song – AND it’s kinda funny! Hey, my brain says that this is brilliant! I shall now begin laughing.
March 8, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Nathaniel Tapley
It’s probably even more basic than self-congratulation, a higher-primate response that shows membership of a group. “I understand this. You do, too. Neither of us in an outsider.”
It’s always much easier to get a big audience laughing than a small, scattered audience. This is partly, I suppose, simply numerical, in that if you have more people laughing in slightly different places, it will feel like people laughed more overall; but it’s also social, I think. If people hear people around them laughing they are more likely to laugh themselves, again suggesting a function of group-dynamics. “We all agree this is funny. So we do not have to beat each other to death over e nearby fruit-supply.”
(Of course, it’s also true that a performance which gets more laughter will, on the whole, get better as the performers relax into it. A performance that struggles to raise laughs tends to get worse and more uncomfortable for both the people on stage and the people watching…)