Humor & Code
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For a while now I have been gearing up to start research on a topic that is very near and dear to my heart: Humor & Code. This preparation has manifested in a class at the Parsons Design & Technology program in the Spring of 2010. Here is a rough draft of the course description. Feedback is welcome.
Course Description
The premise of this class is that, like television, film, audio, and other traditional media, software can be a very effective medium for humor, which, in turn, can be a powerful tool for activism, editorial, and hilarious jokes. Beyond simply rendering our CG, hosting our Flash animations, or providing a target for nerd jokes, the computer can be exploited for its strengths (interactivity, procedurality, logic, networkability) to achieve the funny.
We will explore what makes good humor in traditional media by looking at several comedy styles such as absurdism, prop humor, sketch comedy, improv, and black comedy, with special attention to parody and satire. We will also look at some software artists who have already struck software comedy gold, including Cory Archangel, Max Goldberg (“YTMND”), Ze Frank, and Evan Roth. We will apply the ideas of game theorists and other prominent software gurus such as Ian Bogost, Chris Crawford, and Tim Berners-Lee to the styles of comedians such as Tim and Eric, Andy Kaufman, Yakov Smirnov, Douglas Adams, Stephen Colbert, Mr. Show, the Wondershowzen team, and Eric Fensler to produce funny software. The final independent projects will be shown at a New York comedy club. All of the example code will be provided in openFrameworks, but you may also work in Processing or Flash.
Prerequisite: you must be experienced with either oF, Processing/Java, or ActionScript.
Learning objectives:
- To attempt to define humor in the context of software
- To answer the question: Are there such things as funny algorithms?
- To explore tropes and mechanisms frequently used in software – not just games, but software art and plain old software – that can be used to achieve a humorous effect
- To invent the field of software comedy in the same way that there are comedy writers, actors, and even singers
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