Hey Mr. Thompson

Sarcasm is a use of language that we encounter on a daily basis. It is used to amuse as well as critique, which can be seen in As You Like It by William Shakespeare. As You Like It is a comedy and so the sarcasm is used to make the audience laugh and to make them feel like they understand more than the characters that are confronted with the sarcastic comments. Sarcasm is a form of connecting with the audience and to make them empathize with the characters. Shakespeare also uses characters to convey the character’s feelings, for example when Orlando conveys his hidden feelings to Oliver, asking him if he “Shall keep [his] hogs and eat husks with them?”. He’s being sarcastic because he is so bitter that he can’t even stay serious about the situation. It shows that he is not of the kind to whine about the fact that he hasn’t been given what he was promised. Love is ridiculed by Touchstone when he wants to marry Audrey just for fun, being married by an unserious priest so that he can leave her whenever he wants. Touchstone also constantly comments on society. The fact that he is a fool allows him to say and do whatever he wants, which makes some characters like Jaques in Act 2: “When I did hear the motley fool thus moral on the time my lungs began to crow like chanticleer, that fools should be so deep contemplative, and I did laugh sans intermission an hour by his dial. A noble fool!”. Sarcasm nowadays is used mostly to mock and amuse the audience and as we mentioned when talking about comedy, sarcasm makes us laugh. 

As You Wish

The Globe theatre performance of As You Like It by William Shakespeare was impressive. I can only imagine what it must be like to stand in that audience and I can’t wait to go and see Much Ado About Nothing there in 10 days. What made the performance so special were partly the amazing actors. While reading the play I didn’t understand half of what it was saying but with the tone of the actor’s voices and their movements and facial expressions were really fun to watch. They incorporated the elements of Shakespearian theatre such as minimalistic sets and realistic characters in a way that I didn’t think was possible. The interaction with the audience was equally well done as the actors walked into the audience and even pointed at some people when talking about a woman or a boy. In theatre language this is called breaking the forth wall, the forth wall being the invisible barrier between the audience and the actors. It’s a way of making the audience feel like they’re part of something, a practice that is very Brechtian.  What I found interesting was that the director chose to change up some scenes like Act 1 scene 2 with the second part of Act 1 scene 1, and to combine two characters into one such as Amiens and the First Lord in Act 2. This makes sense because it facilitates the understanding of the flow of the story and it’s also smart to always let the same person be the singer and entertainer like Amiens and the First Lord. The costumes were an attraction in itself, especially Rosalind’s and Celia’s dresses in Act 1. All of the costumes were perfectly well adapted to the characters and I felt like it helped the audience to understand the characters a little better.

Rescue Me

The first Act of ‘As You Like It’ by William Shakespeare, reveals a reoccurring theme of love. As can be observed in the modern times as well, Shakespeare addressed the problems of how easy one thinks to be fallen in love and how foolish we are to believe in love of first sight. The first time when Rosalind sees Orlando, she’s already fallen for him, even though they don’t know anything about each other.

Rosalind notices him for the first time when he defeats Charles the wrestler, which reminds of the never ending theory that ‘women just want to be rescued’. This theory is still well known these days as can be seen in one of the episodes of the successful TV-series Sex and the City for example. It seems as though each of us ladies has deep down a desire to be rescued from her everyday life and by a man so magical that he could fit right into one of ‘The brothers Grimm’ fairytales. Women have been influenced by all these fairytales where the prince comes on a white horse and saves the princess from her evil stepmother or a 100-year sleep and only then the princess has her happy ending, an allusion that has been following and haunting women since way before Shakespeare’s time. This is exactly what happens when Rosalind sees Orlando wrestle Charles: she imagines him to be her prince charming.

Separated from her dad who is in exile, she is vulnerable and needs a man to protect her. When she learns that Orlando is the son of Sir Rowland de Bois, she is pleased in her choice of man because she knows that her father appreciated and respected Sir Rowland de Bois a lot. The fact that she thinks of her father immediately after falling in love with someone she has just met, could reveal certain ‘daddy issues’ as she might miss the masculine authority by her side. This explains her foolish revolt against her uncle who doesn’t approve of Orlando because he did not worship his father: she feels empowered by her feelings and the link she found between her love and her father, who is banished himself, and therefore isn’t scared by the decision of her uncle to banish her too.

Celia on the other hand doesn’t believe in love as much as her cousin. When asked what she thinks of falling in love, she answers:  ”Marry, I prithee do, to make sport withal: but love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.”, which means that she thinks that only the sport of love is worthwhile. She represents a different type of women: the type that has rejected the image of a prince charming and thinks that she is the man in the relationship. In a romantic comedy she would be categorized as the girl who is emotionally unavailable and needs someone originally like her, to change her mind and in the end find the love of her life anyways. 

We are Family

Dance in the Dark

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-ZAYxALgb8

Above is the link of the video... enjoy!

Most of the people I know, like to laugh. But what do they laugh about? And why do they laugh?

‘Jake and Amir’ is a good example of what I love to laugh about. Jake and Amir are both characters that are stereotypes. Jake is this sarcastic and straight forward guy. He is harsh in the way he talks to his best friend Amir and he doesn’t mind hurting him (even though that doesn’t work). Amir is an awkward guy who always says things that seem out of place and he’s constantly trying to be funny. There are some classic situations in this episode that viewers can relate to: writing a bucket list with things that are completely ridiculous, like ‘eating a cock sandwich… it better be free because I’m eating a cock sandwich after all’ and having a  bad relationship with your father (in this case the situation is of course… ridiculed!). Like Ian Johnston wrote in his introductory lecture to his “English 366: Studies in Shakespeare” : comedy is all about disorder. What breaks out of the norm, makes us laugh. What Amir says is confusing because he says things that have nothing to do with the situation, like “ever heard of ‘I was car sick’?!”, but because they’re confusing, they seem funny. Amir definitely seems like the funnier one to me because of the way he acts. He asks Jake if he can help him look over his bucket list, but he immediately gets distracted whenever Jake tries to help him. He also brings in a little bit of a dark humor when he talks about burning down a small library… not looking back… just giving it a glance… turn around and fully behold, he’s earned this and finally even take a picture to ‘tweet’ it because he deserved it. I honestly can’t stop laughing when I watch that part, which also has to do with the way he moves while Jake reads his words out. Another moment of dark humor is when he says that he wants to climb the Eiffel tower and then punch French women in the face until their moustaches fall off. Then he tells Jake to erase that part because he has already done it. Absurdism is brought in when Amir tells his dad, who is on the phone, that he’ll soon feel bad because he’s going to cry, except he doesn’t succeed in crying on demand. ‘Jake and Amir’ is one of my favorite things to watch when I feel like laughing, but really it only consists of ridiculing people and making dark jokes.