Comment to Lead Blog (Ryan)

Before reading this blog post, I had never heard of Key and Peele’s comedy videos. After watching a few of the videos that Ryan included as examples in his blog post, I totally see what he is talking about when he mentions how the superiority theory is used in their videos. The videos were very funny and I think they were a nice contrast to the types of comedy that we have been looking at in class. I feel like most examples of comedy depict incongruity theory that sometimes has a bit of the superiority theory intertwined in it. However, I think that Key and Peele did an excellent job of focusing on the superiority theory and incorporating small elements of absurdity into their skits. For example, in the video about the substitute teach mispronouncing the student’s names it seems absurd that someone would really think that those names were supposed to be pronounced that way, but I think that the sense of superiority that viewer feel over the substitute is greater than the absurdity we detect. Students naturally will already feel superior to substitutes because they know the class rules and schedule, whereas the substitute knows nothing about these things. Our sense of superiority grows even stronger when we realize that the substitute teacher has no idea how to pronounce the rather basic names of the students in the class. Additionally, I think that it is easy for the viewer to feel superior toward Key and Peele during these videos because, like Ryan said, they are acting so clueless during each of the skits. In my opinion, some of the best comedy comes from people acting incompetent and ridiculous. I love these types of videos because I think that they can be very relatable. Everyone has that one person that they know that drives them crazy because no matter what they are doing they are so completely oblivious.