BagelProv

A friend sent me a link to this article from Sunday’s New York Times. (Go to bugmenot.com for an existing logon id and password for nytimes.com in order to see the third page of the article.)

For me the most interesting part of the article was in this discussion of finding the game of a scene.

An analysis of game played out in Mr. Delaney’s classroom after the students read through a script about a relentlessly peppy office worker who insists on seeing the bright side of life, however horrible her experiences. “When I was 10,” she says, “my father took my ear, held it to a stove and burned it. He died in a car wreck later, but joke’s on him because I turned out awesome!”

The scene’s game was not the woman’s suffering, but her absurd refusal to acknowledge her unhappiness. The script seemed to run into trouble, however, when the woman revealed that she had been raped; the problem, Mr. Delaney said, was that the revelation came in the midst of a series of jokes. “I don’t think we can treat that as a joke,” he said, “or the audience will resent you.”

I don’t actually find this particularly insightful regarding finding the game in a scene. I did, however, find it interesting to think about how to approach often-taboo subjects like rape and abuse. Anything from the mundane to the outrageous can be the content of the scene, but the humor, the insight, or the commentary come from how characters react to that content, not the content itself.

I’m probably not going to ever make rape funny because people don’t want rape to be funny and they’re not comfortable letting it be funny (not that making people laugh or keeping them comfortable is the ultimate goal.) However responses and reactions to an object and how I express who I am through an object can be funny (or insightful, or satirical or many other things.)