LITR 4370 TRAGEDY Final Exam Samples 2017 (final exam assignment) Model Answers to Part 1. Finish Genre Definition

Part 1. Finish genre definition and example(s) from Midterms 1 & 2:

Calyssa Rosene

29 April 2017

The Highs and Lows of Laughter

The subject of genre covers an entire realm of entertainment from books to movies and even music, and simplifies them into known categories. If someone were to ask you what your favorite genre was, you could simply reply with comedy, drama, or horror and they would understand your interests. The main focus of this essay is the genre of comedy, and there are different types of comedy broken down into subcategories of genre itself. According to Dr. White, “Genre is a flexible and adaptable term or concept”, and there are tons of different combinations and possibilities of genres. In terms of comedy, there can be high and low comedy, romantic comedy, tragicomedy, and more. We break genres down using categories of genre itself which include the subject/audience genre, the formal genre, and the narrative genre. The first example that comes to mind in terms of comedy is the sitcom The Office, due to its incorporation of different kinds of comedic interests.

We can focus on the subject/audience genre which according to Dr. White is “genre as most people understand it”. This is where the work is labeled into something the audience can easily identify such as horror, chick flicks, romantic comedy, or even drama. If you break down the comedic ingredients of The Office, you have a mix of everything, but the audience would determine more often than not that it’s a sitcom. According to the sitcom term page, a sitcom is “a genre of comedy that features characters sharing the same common environment [i.e., situation], such as a home or workplace, with often humorous dialogue”. There is a mixture of high comedy and low comedy characters. For example, Dwight Schrute, one of the main characters, is an interesting-looking man who tends to be very overdramatic and full of himself, which often causes problems in his life and for his fellow characters. He’s an intellectual person with extremely sharp comebacks making his personality high comedy, but his awkward appearance is more low comedy. Another example is Michael Scott, the boss of the characters of the office. Michael’s appearance is that of a normal individual, and he doesn’t look entirely awkward. His personality however, is very dry humor and he seems to embarrass himself most of the time without realizing he’s said anything wrong. Most of the main characters are considered low comedy characters while many of the secondary characters are high comedy and showcase how ridiculous most of the main characters can be.

Another sitcom that fits along with The Office is a British sitcom titled The IT Crowd, which follows three technological nerds in their daily hectic lives in their workplace, as well as outside of it trying to build social relationships. The main characters of the show are meant to be low comedy types, and unlike The Office, there aren’t even many secondary characters that can offer high comedy support. On the comedy term page it discusses the differences between high and low comedy characters, and according to it the lower type characters are usually “physical rather than intellectual or spiritual, and fleshy and gross rather than refined.” Jen, Moss, and Roy, the main characters of the show, all have this very awkward demeanor about them as well as personalities to match the outward vision. Moss is very comparable to Dwight from The Office in which he is extremely witty and intelligent, but his appearance resembles that of low comedy. Jen and Roy are much like Michael due to their normal appearance but very awkward personalities. It’s normal to see characters like these in sitcoms today versus sitcoms of the 50s and 60s where most of the characters were comedic, but still very refined.

We now look at the formal genre in which how the work is portrayed to the audience. The Office is definitely a narrator-dialogue formal genre, which is when “two or more characters speak with each other while a narrator speaks directly to the audience” (Introduction to Genres handout). The characters all have dialogue to one another in a series of events and scenes that seem too ridiculous even to be fictional. However, the camera also cuts to the characters talking solo into the camera in a “video diary” style directly to the audience about what is happening in their lives and around them, creating a narrator genre and breaking the fourth wall in the series. One event that happens often throughout the video diary cuts in the show is a character named Jim speaking about what pranks he’s setting up for Dwight during the work day. This connects the audience to the characters by making them feel like they are a part of the show and everything happening within it. The sitcom page also describes shows such as The Office as “a comedy series involving the same characters in various day-to-day situations, which are developed as separate stories for each episode.” It keeps the audience hooked because they feel as though they are a part of the madness of each of the character’s lives.

As for The IT Crowd, I believe the formal genre is simply a dialogue genre, because throughout the series there is no character that speaks to the camera and breaks the fourth wall. A dialogue genre is defined as dialogue in which “two or more characters speak directly with each other, which the audience overhears”. All of the show’s conversations take place between the characters, and the audience isn’t included as they are in The Office, but this still doesn’t stop the audience from feeling like they are a part of the daily lives of each character.

The final area to focus on is that of narrative genre, which according to the introduction to genres page on the course site, “refers to the type of story or plot that a work of literature tells or enacts”. In this case, the narrative genre is a form of comedy. According to the Aristotle’s poetics handout, “Comedy is an imitation of characters of a lower type. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. The comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.” In terms of this, the mask or rather the character is ugly and distorted, but this doesn’t signify that the characters is of tragic circumstances or going through something that is detrimental to their health or survival in any way, shape, or form. A good example of a use of the metaphoric mask, is a part of The Office in which Jim Halpert comes to work dressed as the character that sits across from him, Dwight Schrute. Jim then begins to act exactly as Dwight does which frustrates Dwight to the point of complaints. However, the rest of the characters as well as the audience find Jim’s newfound identity hilarious. This is a good example of mistaken or false identity used for low comedy. Many of the main characters wear this metaphorical mask of distorted view, but at the end of the day whatever problems they face come to a halt and they are all reunited in their workplace to reflect on what has happened in their daily lives with the audience. The good thing about shows like The Office and The IT Crowd is the fact that all of the characters are meant to be of a lower type, so there isn’t anyone of a higher prestige to compare them to which creates a sort of normalcy for them throughout the show.

          Like The Office, The IT Crowd is a form of comedy as well when it comes to the narrative genre. In the comedy term page on the course website, there is a section that discusses slapstick or farce comedy, and while The IT Crowd is a sitcom, I have noticed slapstick-style endings. A slapstick comedy includes “comic endings that are “circular” with the beginning: the comic characters simply “run away,” supposedly to continue the comic action elsewhere”. An example of this from The IT Crowd is an episode in which Moss and Roy find themselves trapped in their boss’s office as he is trying to come onto them after being given a drugged beverage, and the episode ends at them screaming trying to escape the office. The next episode continues this “loop” and shows them escaping their fate all while remaining humorous. You see examples of these in shows like The Three Stooges or even old Abbott and Costello shorts. Another thing I’m beginning to notice is that while you can place a certain show, movie or book under a form of comedy, that’s really just going to be an umbrella term for it as a whole because you can still find many forms of comedy within them, even if it’s just a single style of joke. There are so many combinations and possibilities for how an audience can view a comedy, or how a writer can create one. Looking back on my examples of The Office and The IT Crowd, these shows are both comedic, but they are different kinds of comedy. The IT Crowd has a certain slapstick and dry British humor to it, while The Office is very straight-forward and inappropriate humor. It doesn’t matter what kind of humor is involved, as long as it’s there. According to Dr. White, “genre has to be flexible, but it also has to have some kind of continuity to keep the same name or term.”