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Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Canned Laughter, Emoticons and the French In case you didn't pick up the Sydney Morning Herald the other day, columnist David Dale wrote a funny piece about canned laughter, and was nice enough to quote from my section in the Know-it-All on this very important topic. I wrote about the Golden Age of canned laughter, which occurred during 19th century France. This was when every theater owner hired claques -- audience plants whose job it was to whip the real audience into a frenzy. And the brilliant innovation the French came up with was specialization. Each claque member had his or her own important job to perform: There were the rieurs, who laughed loudly during comedies. There were the bisseurs, who shouted for encores. There were the commissaires, who would elbow their neighbors and say, "This is the good part." And my favorite of all, the 'pluereuses,' women who were paid good francs to weep at the sad parts of tragedies. I love this idea. I'm not sure why the networks never thought of canned crying. David Dale says that Aussies are even less tolerant of canned laughter than us Yanks. I can't say for sure whether he's right. But I do know canned laughter seems strangely vestigial nowadays. I can't watch Seinfeld anymore because of the laugh track. It feels like I'm watching something from another era, like Kukla, Fran and Ollie. On the other hand, the textual equivalent of canned laughter seems to be going strong. Emoticons. Am I crazy, or have they gone from hopelessly dorky to kind of cool? If not cool, then at least socially acceptable. Here's my prediction: Emoticons will soon go Hollywood. I predict celebrity emoticons. You'll be able to end your sentences with a head shot of Ray Liotta doing his evil laugh from Goodfellas. Or you could end a sad sentence with a shot of the native American crying in the 80s PSA about pollution. Does this already exist and I'm hopelessly behind the curve? ;)
posted by A.J. Jacobs at 9:58 PM
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3 Comments:
I somehow think of emoticon users as 1980s Prince fans who are longing for a comeback of songs like "I Would Die 4U." Pretty cheesy, overly sappy and badly dressed. Like my friend Tammi from high school who dotted her "I" with a flower/heart/smile face. I bet she still uses emoticons with reckless abandon.
Eileen
It's "pleureuses" not "pluereuses."
It seems to me that form of what you're describing about the infusion of emoticons is already developing. You could consider the profile faces/pictures that come alongside most internet comment sections (like this, Facebook and Myspace wall posts, and www.xanga.com) a reflection of the authors' general demeanors. Youtube goes farther to allow video responses, which in effect is a form of virtual emotion display... Hmm ok maybe that's stretching it :)
Anyway, as a writer for a magazine, you could start that celebrity emoticon evolution yourself. Slip it in there after every quote and see what happens!
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