FYW Blog Week 12: Lead Blog - The Hangover


The Hangover movies are some of my favorite comedies out there. The situations in which the characters find themselves are absurd and hilarious, never failing to provide humor for the audience. For a multitude of reasons, The Hangover movies have garnered a large fan base. One of the main reasons is that they utilized the incongruity theory, and others, to make it so funny. Like most movie series, the first movie is probably the best out of the three, yet all three are full of funny content. Alan Garner, played by Zach Galifianakis, is ultimately what makes the movie as funny as it is, because just about everything he does is funny in some way. His eccentric behavior is never ending throughout the three movies. Alan is also the reason things go wrong in each of the movies. In the first two, he drugs his friends, and in the third they get caught up in problems because of Leslie Chow, an international criminal with whom Alan became friends in the first movie.
One of my favorite scenes of all three of The Hangover movies, as seen in the top link, happens after they find a random baby in their hotel suite, and somehow Alan ends up being the one who carries him around. After naming the baby Carlos, it becomes clear why Alan should not be the one in charge of the baby, as he can be seen making the baby make obscene gestures. This scene, and many others throughout all three of the movies, can best be described by the incongruity theory. The humor is usually from something absurd and unexpected, like how they found a random baby or just about any other scene from the links I provided. The superiority theory is also very relevant though, especially in regards to Alan. He is always doing something so stupid, awkward or childish, leaving the viewers with no choice but to feel superior to him. In most of the funniest scenes, Alan is doing something absurd and incongruous, and as a result of the incongruity, the viewer feels superior to him. The fusion of the two theories happening at the same time is one of the reasons these movies are so funny, as they appeal to two different types of humor. On top of those two theories, the benign violation theory is also fitting in regards to Alan as well. He seems to me to be an embodiment of the theory, as he is benign in some ways, yet he is almost always violating too. In many ways Alan fits the benign part because he is often acting childlike and naive. On the other hand though, the plot of the movies would not be nearly the same if it weren’t for all of his violations. Overall, The Hangover movies are some of the funniest movies produced in fairly recent years, and that is in large part due to their utilization of the theories of humor we have learned about in class.

Comments

  1. Shane HerronNovember 14, 2018 at 9:54 AM

    This is strange, but although I feel like I have seen the first movie, I honestly cannot remember it at all. It's like I blacked out or something. I'm not even kidding about this. I wonder if I just simply got a bit too into the plot, or if I really just actually haven't seen it. IN any case, how do you describe the interactions between the three main characters?

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