Every time reviews pour in for a work by people the work was never really "meant" for are like "it wasn't funny to me" "i dont understand why people thought it was deep" "it was boring" "ew this made me uncomfortable" I think back to being in film school
we (writers) had to do a stage acting and directing class--I think partly as a hazing ritual (stage acting as it turns out is very not at all like film acting) and partly to get a feel for what you are asking of people in the transfer of written word to performance. We were in groups of 3-4 and you had to write short stage scripts and the others would perform and you'd rotate who was writer/director and who was actor
my script was due and i had been sick for a few weeks and in my feverish state wrote a sort of absurdist dark comedy about a couple sorting out their relationship problems while trying to cover up accidental vehicular manslaughter. it was nonsensical and I thought fairly funny, but really i just needed something for the project
now, the issue with the class (one of many) is that we did the cold reads on stage. so the first time my actors get the script is when they must perform it for the class. And they cannot get through their performance without laughing. admittedly ruins the pacing of the story but i'm tickled they think this short is hysterical. when they manage to deliver their lines, the rest of my class laughs too. just not my professor.
this guy is the epitome of film industry cynicism--they should have given him a guest spot on Hacks: ex Disney writer, angry bigoted little man. This guy's entire ethos is to be as marketable as possible. He hated me for being trans (I was also blessed to have him as my academic advisor), he really didn't like queer and trans characters in scripts, and his idea of script criticism in his writing classes was to tear people down because "the real world wont be as nice as me." Cheery dude.
And he did not think my short was funny. He demanded to know why the actors kept laughing. Demanded to know why the audience thought it was funny. Then asked me "is this supposed to be a comedy?" I said, yeah, sorta. I'm not sure what it was supposed to be, honestly. I enjoy the tension when something awful has happened and all you can do is laugh. Not in a Marvel "well THAT just happened" sort of way, but in the sort of moments you have in real life where someone says something so funny at a funeral that you laugh til you cry. Life is weird, death is weird. Being sick for a month with mono and still being expected to deliver on work on a relatively meaningless piece is kind of absurd and funny. So, sure.
My group ended, a few classmates told me quietly that they liked the script. We moved on. A few groups later was a slapstick comedy. Lots of physical gags and hitting each other and rolling around on the stage. Arguably a funny script--I laughed. But when the group finished my professor pointed to the group, singled me out in a class of 50 and went "THAT is a comedy."
And I think of that moment so often. I'm not bothered he didn't like it, I don't care that he found it unfunny. It wasn't work from my soul that stung to be ripped on like other work in his classes. It wasn't my best work, but it clicked with more people than i expected, and for some reason that made my professor so mad.
It wasn't enough to not be his type of comedy, it wasn't enough to just not be much of anything to him, there is no question of taste or humor or vibing with something vs not--it was "not" a comedy at all. It was "bad" because many others found something in it that he didn't.
"This revenge story is yucky" "this movie seems to make (oppressor group) look bad" "the main character isn't punished for their moral lapse so it's bad" "they did something i dont like so they're bad" I can picture his meaty finger pointing "THIS is a comedy"
bruh maybe it just isn't to your taste!
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