Process of Creating a Successful Comedy Essay Example

Process of Creating a Successful Comedy Essay Example Process of Creating a Successful Comedy Essay Process of Creating a Successful Comedy Essay Essay Topic: The Taming Of the Shrew Name: Course: Instructor: Date: Process of Creating a Successful Comedy According to White (2006), a comedy is a kind of drama that invokes laughter especially at the actions created by human beings. It includes romantic love and in most cases, involves a successful conclusion. It is important that a comedy hold the view of a comic spirit, linked with both physical and energetic views. In most cases, comedies have the tendency of involving the issues of rebirth and renewal and that is the reason why a good number of comedies have their endings with weddings implying the general union of a couple and the expected reproduction of children (White 45). A successful comedy has to include exaggeration, surprise, repetition, incongruity and sarcasm within it and all these devices may be used in writing different comedies such as situation comedies, romantic, sentimental comedies together with comedies of manners and farce. In order to create a successful comedy involves developing a plot, which is viewed as the main strategy for coming up with an interesting comedy. This could be seen through the plays of comedians Plautus and Shakespeare, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Taming of the Shrew respectively. In this plays the writers demonstrated well-created comedies using plots. For any comedy to succeed, it must have a theme and a plot of the story in order to help the audiences know what the storyline is all about. These steps were taken by writers of the above-mentioned stories to achieve their goals as comedians. In the process of plot writing, there has to be elements such as character, action and feelings of the writer, which reveal the intention of writing a particular play or comedy. For instance, actions could be broken down to show what the characters are doing during the time of the play. For example, the characters could be differentiated by certain signs such as age, wealt h, profession and education among other traits. This is clearly demonstrated in the plays A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Taming of the Shrew by comedians Plautus and Shakespeare where different characters have different traits inclusive of problems, complications, crisis, and climax among others. The problem trait is what leads in starting the play and it introduces the plot. Complication issues are experienced when the characters try to find a solution to a particular problem in the play. The crisis part occurs at the time when a character wants to make a decision concerning the issue at hand. While the climax demonstrates the peak of the play, this is the part where emotions are revealed and it involves making of the final decision among the characters during the play (Rishel 18). A good number of audiences get attracted to romantic comedies and comedies dealing with love issues as they feel connected to the story being shown. For instance, Plautus and Shakespeare have successfully achieved their comedy creat ion through involving love issues in their storyline especially in the end of the play. This could be seen in the Taming of the Shrew comedy, which is a romantic comedy where the mutual roughness of Kate and Petruchio brings out a primal appeal and yet the humor of their relationship is highly sophisticated. In order for the plot to work out during the creation of comedy, any person wishing to create a successful comedy needs to include the process of theme developing. For instance, the theme of social roles on ones happiness is well revealed in the play The Taming of the Shrew. Petruchio`s daughter is portrayed as a very violent girl to people around her because of the lack of happiness that comes as a result of her wicked behavior. This action in the plays shows the use of charisma in attracting attention of the audience to the play because such an action leaves people laughing throughout, which is the major goal of the comedy. Both plays illustrate imitation of the character’s role. For instance, in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum some characters leave the audience perplexed by the confusion created where Hysterium pretends to be Philia at the time when Captain Miles comes to pick up his bride hence leaving the mass confused (Rishel 78). On the other hand, in the play The Taming of the Shrew, imitation of roles is shown through Tranio who pretends to be Lucentio and Lucentio pretending to be a Latin teacher in order to win the love of Bianca. All these imitation actions focus on the particular theme of social role of individual happiness, which is applied by all the writers in the two plays. Therefore, by identifying a clear theme for a comedy, a person is able to create or compose a comedy successfully. The two plays, The Taming of the Shrew and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were written on a solid foundation, that is why Plautus together with Shakespeare involved the use of plots and themes in writing their comedies, and this made them successful. In order to write a successful comedy, there is the need to include the daily occurrences that are more or less related to people’s lives in the play to make it more familiar to the audience. For instance, the event could include a situation experienced by a certain person and others can relate with it and find it a laughing matter; this makes them to see humor in the encounter. The play should be made more interesting by throwing or adding in a few fart jokes for good measures. Some people make it hard for their audience to find a reason to laugh at their comedies because they have failed to understand the play. To avoid this from happening, a comedy writer needs to add in a fart joke because it is universal and at least half of the audience will laugh at a well-placed fart joke. For instance, in the play The Taming of the Shrew, it was funny the way Petruchio dragged quickly the short-tempered Kate to the altar to make her his wife. She herself never imagined it to be possib le. Such actions attract people’s attention and they become even more excited because they desire to know what will happen next. Another process that makes a comedy successful includes making it to be more mechanical. In most cases, people get attracted to humorous events especially when one is emotionally or physically hurt for a certain period. This is because humor is found in situations where people react to a certain event spontaneously and over dramatize things. For example in the play A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum by Plautus, some actions are demonstrated through Pseudolus who jabs a sword at the rear of a soldier and the soldier rubs his rear. The soldier is not hurt but the way he demonstrates such actions creates amusement to the audience who laugh throughout the course of the play. In order to achieve such a mechanic in comedy creation, it is important that an individual joins trainings and attends workshops concerning comedies. This is important because it exposes a person to various and different comedians who are more skilled and knowledgeable in the field of comedy. Therefore, by being exposed to such people, one is able to learn more skills on how to compose a successful comedy. Requesting other skilled comedians to recommend an action performed enables a person to know whether he or she is on the right track of being a successful comedian in the future. Therefore, for anyone to succeed in creating a selling comedy, he or she needs to follow the necessary processes just as discussed in this paper. Rishel, Mary. Writing humor: creativity and the comic mind. New York, NY: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Print. White, Diz. The comedy group book: how to run one! How to get laughs! How to make money. New York, NY: Smith and Kraus Books, 2006. Print.