🎭 01 Cry Until You Laugh

"Cry Until you Laugh" This is an open work session. You will be addressing how comedians can incorporate personal adversity into their work.

• PART 1: “Support or challenge this claim: Comedians use their humor in order to deal with their own personal pain?” You'll have 10 minutes to write about this and then we will discuss together as a class.

• PART 2: As a class, brainstorm a list of difficult or challenging situations that you have confronted in your lives (e.g., being cut from a sports team, failing a class in school, online harassment, the illness of a relative). These will be written on the Zoom white board.

• PART 3: Now divide into groups of two or three, and each group will choose a scenarios from the class list out of which to develop a comedic sketch. This sketch can be produced as a comic strip, an animation, a performance, a video story, a written story or in some other form

• PART 4: Ask yourselves: What about this situation might be humorous from an outsider’s perspective? -What aspects of this scenario might be too uncomfortable to enact, for both the actors and the audience? -How can you realistically portray this event while at the same time revealing the inherent humor in it? -What surreal occurrences, exaggerated characters, or funny plot twists might be added to avoid dealing with the scenario in a way that will make the audience uncomfortable?

• PART 5: Be prepared to share your comedic sketch in class next week. If it is a time-based, the sketch should not exceed 5 minutes.

ALL FILES SHOULD BE COPIED INTO YOUR STUDENT FOLDER ON THE CLASS GOOGLE DRIVE HERE.