OKAY so I saw this a few days ago and was like “whatever” but then I smashed my phone in a car door, had to clean up some dead baby bunnies in my yard, and have just generally NOT had a good week. I’m fucking spooked and I’m reblogging this twice to get the universe to stop.
i think what is so especially fascinating about the mcelroy brothers and their comedy is the fact that that have essentially made language itself a source a comedy.
what i mean is that often, when you think of a good joke, you often think of the content of the joke - of course, the delivery of a joke is important (you can ruin a perfectly good joke if you say it the wrong way), but overall when someone tells a joke, they put more focus on getting across the absurdity/hilarity of the material of the joke rather than putting emphasis on the words used to say it.
that’s not what the mcelroy brothers do at all, though. they do the exact opposite - with the way they say things, they’re able to transform quite mundane things and scenarios into ridiculous imagery that we can’t help but laugh at.
i’ll just use this line from the MBMBAM TV show pilot as an example - what Griffin is saying here, is, essentially, “I saw a video of a spider molting and I was absolutely terrified”, which, on its own, isn’t really incredibly funny. however, Griffin gives such a brilliant twist in the form of the words “my eyes went to hell”, which is hilarious because, essentially, it’s complete nonsense! your eyes can’t go to hell (and even if they could, you’d expect the rest of your body to follow), and yet, somehow, there’s a beautiful kind of logic to it -you can clearly get a mental image of you looking at something so horrifying that your eyes are instantly banished to the seventh ring of the underworld as a result. another line from the same show is when Travis runs away from a spider in fear, and they state “oh, Travis is going to space”. most people would just reemphasize the event (”oh, there Travis goes” or “he’s running away!”), but by stating he’s going “to space” makes it that much funnier, because, once again, there’s a logic to the absurdity of the words - he’s so terrified he might as well hitch a spaceship and get out of our solar system as fast as he can.
the mcelroy brothers are brilliant at what they do, not only because they can find good-natured humor in ordinary things, but because they have developed a way to use words as another level of comedy - they are infinitely quotable because the way they say things tickles both our minds and our ears. and that, really, is one of the major reasons why their brand of comedy is as popular as it is - the jokes are from the mcelroy brother lexicon, and they’re all the more better for it.
this post is super interesting, and i actually have a couple more points of my own to add using language from the MBMBaM show’s pilot that i think help to emphasise your point of how the brothers use their language AS the joke alongside the jokes themselves. i’ve not articulated it very well, but hey, poooobody’s nerfect!
So about a year ago me and my friend Nathan were walking around the “Pick-a-Part” in Clarksville Tennessee… We were searching for car badges and a spoiler to put on his trashy conversion van. While going through the lot we found what is probably the single greatest car to ever drive on any road in the world.
You are looking at… a Dora the Explorer themed gangster car… I’ve seen spongebob themed cars, Newport themed cars, sports team themed cars, but THIS.
trumps them all.
OH BUT IT GETS SO MUCH BETTER!!!!
You see… there has to be a reason that a car like this…
Would end up in the junkyard… SO me and Nathan did some looking around and tried to figure out why…
I still can’t believe the decals on this…. wait…
HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND!
OH!
OH MY FUCKING GOD!
YES! SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOT SHOT WHILE DRIVING THEIR DORA THE EXPLORER CAR IN CLARKSVILLE TENNESSEE!
And THAT, is the single greatest thing I’ve found in a junkyard to this day.
okay this is totally wild but i RECOGNIZE THIS CAR
and i actually have a picture of it from its functioning days - this is dated 2012 -
