Response to Amal's lead blog

I found it is not that interesting when watching the first part of the video since I did not regard the John as a kid who has not built his own values, but it becomes much more fun when I saw him in the Ellen show. In the first part, all I saw was a child who kept lying to his mom that he did not eat the sprinkles. Although he looks cute, he still should not lie again and again, and he should at least admit he ate it when his mother found evidence. I know that sounds too strict to a child, but I did not realize it when I watch the video. There is a detail veiling the truth that he has not built his moral outlook. Since he can opened his mouth when his mother want him to do so, I felt like he can totally understand what his mother said, therefore, lying should be the intentionally behavior that should be corrected. When thinking about this, he makes me feel like he is not that adorable. However, when I watched his response in the Ellen show, I found out that he answered all the question with "yeah", but he obviously did not understand all the question. Then, I realize he is just a three-year-old child who has a little world for himself, which is called pure and innocent. 

It is hard to find humor if we kept using our adult perspective to interpret his behavior. Lying was not a social acceptable behavior when communicating with others, so it is not easy to get laugh when we treat the little child as a person who have same moral standard with ourselves. He is funny because he is a young kid, who do not know right and wrong and who do not know how serious it will be to become a lier. On the Ellen show, he showed no interest in the conversation of the adults and also did not care the question Ellen asked about his age. In his world, the focus is always candies. We can see his reaction when seeing a mountain of candies showing up and waiting for him. That is the thing he valued in his world, which is simple and pure. That is the most sweet period in every human's life. 

Responses to Connor's Blog

The show is funny because there are always answers that surprised people. Due to the rule of this game, there are two family member that compete each other by guessing the most popular answer of 100 people. The number of same answer in the survey will be showed on board as scores. The family which gets higher total score wins the game. In the game, the family members should think about answers from the perspective of both themselves and other 100 people. The rule itself is like a constriction that prevent people from thinking too far. Therefore, their answers should not be too absurd for others. After understanding the rule, audiences will not simply regard their answers as family member's own opinions. In other words, the game is aim to let people say the answer in other people's eyes. Therefore, this rule kind of reduces the embarrassment of answering awkward questions. There are questions are designed to make people think about something strange and those question are sometimes not proper to ask in the public. People usually will not answer those questions if they only represent for themselves, however, in this show, their answers are supposed to represent more people. Family member will say the repressed ideas in public in this situation. Due to the relief theory, if the answer they answered are the ones that always be repressed in the moral world, people will feel relieve and then laugh.

When watching the audiences struggle with guessing the right answer, we found them funny when they answer the answer too far from the best answer. Since every question have time limit, people will say the idea first came to their mind, which is always surprising and hilarious, even if it will embarrassed themselves. The time limit forces people to say their original ideas. Due to the superiority theory, the more embarrassing those ideas are, the more hilarious audiences will found. In this video clip, when he said gynecologist in the last second, people cannot help to laugh, because this answer is a little bit awkward for a man, but it is not a bad answer for this question. It like he was forced to say something embarrassing and this idea makes people laugh due to relief theory.

Responses to Kendalls' Lead Blog

Physical comedy is also one of my favorite type of comedy, since the purpose is pretty simple which is making fun of people. The funnier those people are, the more successful the show is.

I feel relax when I watch this kind of comedy, because I do not need to feel sympathy. Superiority theory says people feel sudden glory when something bad happened to others. It is true that we can feel happiness when feeling we are much better than others; however, it is also easy to feel pity about them if those people are really poor or in the tough situation. Therefore, I always found when I laugh at others, I have burden on my shoulder that told me to stop. When watching physical comedy, I knew those people are volunteer to this show, which means, although they know they might have a really bad ending, they still want to try it for fun. That shows they do not care loss face, and in some way, I feel like they want to be laughable, because that is the aim of the show. Therefore, when watching people fail in the show, I always laugh so hard without feeling sympathy. Laughing is like a favorable response to this show, and I use laugh to support this show. 

In my opinion, the most hilarious one is the No.9 player, because he is really serious when observing the rotating obstacle. I  think he was trying to keep calm and stay cool even though he knew he would not jump on it successfully. I can see that he was confused by the obstacle but he was still trying to find a right spot just like solving math problem. Then, I laugh harder when he failed.

Moreover, I like it because I can laugh as hard as possible in order to reduce pressure. Due to the relief theory, people laugh to unpack their repressed feelings. In the reality, sometimes we cannot express our true feelings due to our identity or situation. When seeing people have higher position make some dumb mistakes, we usually cannot laugh because it is offensive. When hearing the joke our friends said, we might laugh because we do not want to disappoint them, even if it is not funny. In order to survive in the society, we must control our feelings to become socially acceptable. However, this comedy enables us to laugh sincerely. We can laugh at anyone who failed or struggled in the game without considering punishment or other's feelings. 

Response to Cawood's Lead Blog

I really like these two videos in that they opened up a new route for our topic, which is mimicking. They use human voice lip-sync animal's original voices, and give audiences an unexpected result.

The first scene is the most hilarious one for me. While the black bird saying something like "Dai Dai", he used his wings to cover his face and then remove his wings, which remind me of the game mom played for their kids. When babies have not learn the "object permanence", which is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be observed, moms always put their hands on their faces to pretend they are not there and then remove their hands to bring themselves back, which always make babies happy. Before I saw this video, I thought the game should only played by human, but when the human voice added into the video, I start to believe they were really playing the same game. On the one hand, I was surprised that the human language fit so well in the animal; on the other hand, I found it amazing that animal can maybe talk about same topics with us! Who knows?! That uncertainty is the most interesting part of the videos. We do not know if they really have languages to communicate and we also do not know what are they talking about if they do? Do they talk about the same topic with us? This ambiguity gives us a lot of imagination, and makes audiences curious about the fact. It also makes me realize how little I know about other animal's world, and perhaps their daily life as interesting as mine. Although I knew, in the biological perspective, human is also animal, just like other species on the earth, I still feel like we are superior than others since we have higher intelligences. Therefore, I feel unbelievable when I start to think about animals can also talk while the videos make so many senses.

Moreover, I was impressed by BBC due to their creativity. Everything seems changed completly after conferring meanings to animals' nonsense voices. I saw some of the scenes before, but I never use the human perspective to interpret their behaviors. When I saw the bird cover their face, I will not thought about the game, because I unconsciously separate other animals with human and enlarge the distances between human and other species. Living in the city for most of my life, I hardly have opportunities to really feel the beauty of nature and do not even talk about get in touch with animals. Therefore, I always admire people who can always try to empathy with animals or try to build relationship with other species. I would love to try to understand animals later, just like communicate with people. I am sure I will have more fun in my life in this way and thank Cawood for showing us these videos. I do learn a lot!