Why There's Less Conservatives in Comedy (and More in Radio)

First, why talk radio appeals to conservatives:

liberals and conservatives seemed to have different aesthetic tastes. Conservatives seemed to prefer stories with clear-cut endings. Liberals, on the other hand, had more tolerance for a story like public radio’s Serial, which ends with some uncertainty and ambiguity. 

[...] 

As Young noticed, this is a kind of ambiguity that liberals tend to find more satisfying and culturally familiar than conservatives do. In fact, a study out of Ohio State University found that a surprising number of conservatives who were shown Colbert clips were oblivious to the fact that he was joking. In contrast, conservative talk radio humor tends to rely less on irony than straightforward indignation and hyperbole.

Conservatives often like to shoot straight and explain how things are. Which helps explain why liberals are drawn to comedy and satire:

the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11. “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,”

Conservatives want to "conserve", often skeptical of change. This makes them more loyal to traditional institutions. These, by there nature of being the "establishment", are open to attacks to keep their power in check. The whole article is insightful and I highly recommend it.

Difference Between Humans and Animals, Part XXIX

The Earth Day "are you smarter than a chimpanzee" memory game edition:

The explanation:

This tells Japanese scholar Tetsuro Matsuzawa "that he has an actual picture memory, an eidetic memory. ... He takes a picture with his mind and holds it." Even if he turns away from the screen to do something else, the information stays in Ayumu's head. "You and I," says Matsuzawa, "we cannot do this. ... It is something special for the chimpanzee mind. It is not a matter of training for them. It is their way of seeing the world."

Emcee of TEDxGreenville

For someone who has a TED Talks tag on his blog, this is exciting news!

At last night’s TEDxGreenville salon, a preview party for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Harrison Brookie was introduced as the emcee for this year’s April 11th all-day conference. 

Harrison may be familiar to many as the ring leader of an improv group that’s become quite popular in the last couple of years. Actually, rather than a ring leader, he’s more like a comedy super-hero. By day, Harrison Brookie is a social studies teacher at Southside International Baccalaureate High School. By night, he is the Executive Producer and Artistic Director of Alchemy Comedy Theater. In between all of that fun, he and his wife Traci have a daughter and, depending on when you read this, a new baby boy. 

 Harrison grew up in Greenville and returned home in 2011, after journeying to other locales to master his education and comedic skills, to found the Alchemy Comedy Theater, which produces weekly comedy shows. Those of us who’ve caught him and his cohorts in action on a Friday night at Coffee Underground might agree that, indeed, he’s a master of his art. Come cheer him on as this year’s emcee for TEDxGreenville 2014: Unzipped, Friday, April 11, at The Kroc Center in downtown Greenville. Come early. Registration begins at 8:00 am for what promises to be our most engaging TEDx event ever!

NPR and Improv Meet where Relationships and Comedy Meet

Here is a great discussion from my old stomping grounds in North Carolina. Makes me miss WUNC a good bit. Makes me miss DSI Comedy a great bit.

Slimprov: Two Half Men Make a Full Stage

One of my more fun sets in a while on tape. Two men. 1 scene. 24 minutes.

AlchemyComedy.com

Using the Imaginary to Improve the Real

Fresh off my stint in Chicago for the summer, here's a guest blog I did for Greenville's online magazine Fete:

Teaching comedy improv classes is trying to get complete strangers to act like best friends, mortal enemies, and long lost lovers. The greatest part, is that if you challenge yourself in the pretend world long enough, it will affect your real life. That’s what we are all about at the Alchemy Comedy Theater here in Greenville, SC. Our name, Alchemy, means “the power or process of transforming the common into the special” and that’s we do every week in our classes and on stage. Like the science of attempting to turn metals like lead into gold, improvisation does not produce a tangible product. But like alchemy, whose practices help shape modern chemistry, the art of improvisation can have a profound impact on us off stage. 

The theater started 2 years ago with four founding members, Jason Underwood, Meg Pierson, Ben Burris, and me, Harrison Brookie. Since then we’ve been performing live improv comedy shows and teaching improv classes to the public every week. After our upcoming audition this September, we will number closer to 30 regularly performing and teaching members. Our August Improv 101 sold out at 14 students. We have grown a vibrate theatrical comedy community of not just fellow performers, but a supportive and challenging company of allies. 

Our shows are funny, but humor is only as good as the truth it gets at. In improvisation, we are striving for authenticity, because nothing else on stage is. It’s you and your teammates. No set. No script. No net. I spent five weeks this summer learning and performing in Chicago’s iO theater, the birthplace of long form, play-like, improv comedy. I had the pleasure of getting a workshop with the founder of the theater Charna Halpern who quoted her co-creator Del Close as saying “If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that on stage.” If you create together, it brings you together. The great part about improvisation, is everyone, the performers and the audience, are creating together. 

The Alchemy Comedy Theater performs every Friday night in the theater at Coffee Underground and have another Introduction to Improv Scene Work class starting Tuesday, September 30th. 

Click here to see Alchemy Comedy videos in each issue of Fête Magazine!

Birthday Wishes for a Proper Family Narrative

As is often the case every couple years on my birthday I take a self diagnostic and write a "Birthday Wishes for" post. Whether it was Happy Parenting in 2008, Political Perspective in 2010, or Empathy in 2011, the exercise has become a neat anti-New Year's Resolution (check my post history to see how those have worked out). This year, nothing seems more relevant than a simple wish for a happy family. From the NYT:

“There was a lot of research at the time into the dissipation of the family,” he told me at his home in suburban Atlanta. “But we were more interested in what families could do to counteract those forces.”

Around that time, Dr. Duke’s wife, Sara, a psychologist who works with children with learning disabilities, noticed something about her students.

“The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges,” she said.

The uniqueness of the answer is concealed in just how simple "knowing" was measured:

Her husband was intrigued, and along with a colleague, Robyn Fivush, set out to test her hypothesis. They developed a measure called the “Do You Know?” scale that asked children to answer 20 questions.

Examples included: Do you know where your grandparents grew up? Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school? Do you know where your parents met? Do you know an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family? Do you know the story of your birth?

Dr. Duke and Dr. Fivush asked those questions of four dozen families in the summer of 2001, and taped several of their dinner table conversations. They then compared the children’s results to a battery of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached an overwhelming conclusion. The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.

Loyal blog readers may be thinking, but what about that whole Life's Not a Story, It's a Mess quarter-life epiphany. I am certainly still weary of creating overarching life patterns where none exist, but that doesn't mean we can't create some general narrative:

Psychologists have found that every family has a unifying narrative, he explained, and those narratives take one of three shapes.

First, the ascending family narrative: “Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ...” [sound famialiar? -HB]

Second is the descending narrative: “Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.”

“The most healthful narrative,” Dr. Duke continued, “is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: ‘Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family.’ ”

It's not about creating a false story that leaves out the gritty details. It's about creating an inter-generational understanding of the world. This seems to be the strength of long lasting institutions (think the military or the Catholic Church). In fact, one of the big realities of Biblical wisdom is having a God's eye view of history. This just seems like a healthy step in the right direction.

It also works for institutions like businesses. Which is why at our most recent State of the Theater meeting, in which we added several new members to Alchemy, I took a few minutes to put where we are going in context of where we have been.

This has also given me the idea of creating a new end of the year project for my US History courses. Every year we create a large timeline going around the room labeled by pictures of the presidents a graphic organizers of every topic. After exams this year I plan on assigning students to investigate their own family heritage and narrative and label our giant timeline with the names and stories. I look forward to completing it myself.

Improv Show with 30 Rock's Scott Adsit

The folks at the Charleston Comedy Festival were kind enough to ask me to perform in their All Star shows this year. Here's a clip:

Doritos Crash the Super Bowl Ad Contest

A local video production company and I recently entered the annual Doritos contest and made it to the top 40 videos. Go here to vote for my video entitled "Triple Play".

Top 5 Thoughts on Kids and Money

While going through my email recently I came across some thoughts from my brother-in-law on kids and money. My response was my top 5 thoughts on kids and money (earlier):

1) There are chores you have to do because you are a part of the family. There are extra chores you can do to earn money (I think I might let my kids bid against each other on these).
2) During the summer they can do extra work for you/neighbors/businesses.
3) The older they get the longer their pay periods are.
4) Buy a piggy bank that can only be cracked open. Anything they add to savings we will match dollar for dollar (like my own retirement account). Encourage them to keep a ledger of what has gone in so they can have an estimate of when/if they want to crack it open.
5) I'd like them to tithe, so pay day is church day so they can take their "first fruits" to church that day. I'd also like to encourage them to give money away. I'm not quite sure what the kid equivalent of a tax deduction is.