"Thank you"
"So you agree, you think you're really pretty?"
Mean Girls is a classic high school comedy that I hope everyone in our class has seen, or at least heard about. I think the following clip from Mean Girls highlights the most memorable parts of the film:
There is significance in Mean Girls that goes beyond crude, smart humor and brings an important point to light. This film teaches the negative effects of high school mean girls (something I think everyone deals with at some point or another) effectively solely because it is comedic. No one wants to listen to a basic, boring lecture on why we should all get along and what can happen when we don't. Mean Girls presents these scenarios in an exaggerated and comical way making people want to listen without getting defensive. People so easily can find some kind of negative thing they did in high school in this film, and see how the other person felt.
The reason I wanted to blog about Mean Girls, aside from thinking it's hilarious and being able to quote almost the entire movie, is that I think it is an inventive and important form of comedy. The actual jokes and situations presented are pretty basic. The boys are crude, the girls are dumb, and everyone is stumbling through high school, like in every other high school movie. The difference here is how they use this comedy to make people think about friendships and how they are treating people. Comedy is so important when you are trying to teach someone a lesson like that because the lesson doesn't soak in until they can find an emotional connection to it. The easiest, and most enjoyable emotional connection is laughter. When you're making someone laugh at a certain folly they have, they can recognize their faults without being defensive about their mistakes. For example, if your feet always smell bad, to the point where I can't help but say something, I might make a joke about stinky feet and hint at you instead of bluntly saying, "Hey you smell like a gym sock." This is what Mean Girls does. It's target audience is exactly who are portrayed in the film, and hopefully it gets these viewers talking about actual issues in a meaningful way. I think this is significant because it opens the floor to make a change happen. Maybe a "mean girl" watches this movie, relates, and decides not to bully that "weird" girl in her math class anymore. I might be taking this kind of far, but that's an awesome end goal for a comedy to have.
Mean Girls has aspects relating to all three of the theories we discuss in class. Relief theory is the important, because while you watch the film you get to have the feeling of hitting the bully with a bus. You don't have to actually do it, but you can feel the release near the end of the movie when all the tension has built up and everything finally breaks down. Lots of movies employ this technique, and its super effective. Superiority theory is an obvious one with Mean Girls. You get the see their insecurities from the inside, and therefore we, as viewers, feel superior to the most popular girls in school. Pretty great feeling, huh? Lastly, we have incongruity throughout. This film is always surprising you with a new and odd situation that is totally laughable.
If you haven't, I suggest you add Mean Girls to your Netflix queue. You'll laugh lots, and maybe learn a little about yourself in the process.
Grool.
This is one of my embarrassing film deficiencies. I will attempt to immediately address this deficiency. I think you raise some really great points about how comedy can work to address problems, faults, vices, and follies. We often define satire as comedy that attempts to correct vices and follies (although there are other definitions as well), and that brings up some of the questions we have from the article about Colbert--at what point does comedy that might intend to mock possibly have the opposite effect?
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