We have all watched Vines and laughed at people’s pain because we think it’s funny, because it is. But have you ever thought about the actual pain and outcome of some of the things we see? Whether its physical pain or emotional pain we find a sense of humor in it even if we’re the ones IN pain. We know now, that laughing at one’s pains and mistakes is a very accurate representation of our societies humor.
In the Vines, there are several different types of humor shown. In multiple you see the theory of superiority commonly used. The clip of the little girl falling off the swing and rolling, and then it switching to the Wii game and she’s now rolling down a bowling alley lane and knocks all the pins down, KILLED ME. To be real though, I felt guilty for laughing, because that poor girl was just trying to enjoy her time on the playground and went for a tumble instead. We all know that she was bawling her eyes out after. We’ve all been there though. Whether we’ve seen with our own eyes someone get hurt, we laugh, or even if it’s yourself being hurt.
Through the internet, our society is blind to the pain that people endure in half the clips/films we’ve seen. I’m one of those people too. If you’ve ever seen the show Ridiculousness, you know where I’m coming from. The whole show is based on short clips of people doing some extremely dumb stuff and ending up in an extraordinary amount of pain. We find it funny obviously, because personally I just think they’re flat out idiots for trying the stunts they pull. I say all of this to say that, we’ve become prone to the amount of painful funny videos out there, that we forget to wonder is that person okay?
I think you are right that this kind of humor pushes the limits of the "benign violation" theory, which is sort of a combo of relief and incongruity theory. We have to feel relief, not worry, and it has to be at something unexpected. But as we start to laugh at people getting hurt, are we really doing this?
ReplyDeleteReading your post made me realize that we do laugh at people getting hurt quite a bit and sometimes without even truly realizing it. We are so focusing on the humor of the video that we don't realize that the people could have, or probably did, get injured in the making of it. Or maybe its just that as a society that is how we have learned to react in these situations. What is worse, not realizing someone is getting hurt, or realizing it and just laughing anyway?
ReplyDeleteI really like how you interpreted people laughing at a little girl falling off a swing, because it made me question why we think it's okay to do that, and why even though we know she was crying after falling, we still laugh. I really like how everyone in class all watched the same short clips but all had EXTREMELY different perspectives on the material.
ReplyDeleteYou brought a really good point about how we laugh at others pain. I have never looked at Vine in that perspective. Another example could be the waffle house fight vine where the people are fighting but no one seems to care to stop them. The man would rather film for comedy then help someone from getting hurt.
ReplyDeleteThe bowling vine kills me too! It's just so unexpected, which is explained by incongruity theory. I agree that we don't look enough at the behind the scenes of vines and all of the pain that occurs "back stage".
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