Blog 6 -Bridget

 This week we read a lot about different ways to bring humor into our pieces. Reading the excerpts from "And Here's the Kicker" was really interesting because I felt like it gave me insight into what goes into writing comedy. I had never really thought about it as much of an art as it is and so it was cool to see how much thought goes into everything. Something that I took from that piece was the element of surprise. It seemed like many of the skits mentioned by Jack Handey were really made successful by the randomness of them. Endings to skits seemed to work out because they ended in such a surprising way. The article, "How to Write Better Using Humor" gave quicker tips on how to add humor and gave little tips that I had never heard of before. One that really interested me was the use of 'k' and 'g' sounds. I think it's funny that a sound can make a word funnier. It is an interesting phenomenon. I also felt like the tip of using a cliche joke but changing the ending could be helpful in writing. Reading, "We Almost got a Fucking Dog", I felt like I could see a lot of these tips in Irby's writing. I felt like the line "Do ghosts even like Crystal Light?" (181), used the element of surprise because it just came off so random to me and made me laugh. She also used an excessive amount of details at times that added to the story as well as made it funnier, like when she describes the specificity of a Taco Bell bag on her nightstand (183). She also used the tactic of listing things off, starting from normal and ending at crazy, as she describes what it takes to own a dog. Listening to the excerpt being read was very different. There was a lot of different intonations that I didn't pick up on while reading and even the uppercase parts I read differently in my head. Another thing I found interesting about reading out loud was her use of "quote, unquote". She only used this once when a word was in quotation marks. Another time, a word was in quotes and she just read it with a sort of sarcasm in her voice. I felt like both ways of reading added the element of sarcasm and hearing her use both of them was cool. Overall, her piece was very entertaining because it was so out there, random and loud. I like her use of uppercase and quotes. It made the story very dynamic to read and her little tangents made the story really fun too. 

The video "The Problem that Has no Name" was really interesting and scary. I did like it but also hated it and definitely had to cover my eyes a view times. I think it got a very discrete message across, showing the "ideal woman's" chores in such an uncomfortable way. It really made these expectations put on women dark, showing how it affects women in such a negative way. Gay's excerpt from "Bad Feminist" was very insightful. I really liked the list of being friends with women because I hear those things so frequently. They reminded me of moments when my friend talks about her friend who is dating a guy that seems to need to be taught how to be a decent human being. She says that her friend is "doing the Lord's work". It's crazy to me that even other women think it is women's job to teach men how to be decent.