Too much X Just X: Surreal Humor

This is the most X Just X I have seen in a while. Here is a dump of all of it. I will try to cover the web original stuff.

Anime & Manga

• Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemi don't use this trope - they ARE this trope.
  • Nerima Daikon Brothers has a lot of moments like this, too, which isn't surprising seeing as it's by the same director.
• The funny bits of FLCL
• Bobobobo Bobobo
  • For those not familiar with the series, it takes it Beyond the Impossible.
• Super Milk Chan
• Many of Satou's more delusional moments in Welcome To The NHK.
• Jungle Wa Itsumo Hale Nochi Guu. 'Nuff said.
• Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei is largely made of this trope.

Film

• The entire Monkees film Head, full stop.
• The works of Don Hertzfeldt.

Literature

• Most of Kurt Vonnegut's work that doesn't boil down to Black Comedy, Surreal Horror or Humans Are Bastards is a wonderful example of this trope.

Live-Action TV

• Monty Pythons Flying Circus when it first appeared.
• Most of Conan O'Brien's sketches make use of this trope.
• Tim & Eric
• The Mighty Boosh defines this trope.
• The bulk of Malcolm In The Middle is this trope mixed with Sadist Show and Dysfunction Junction
• The funny episodes of The Xfiles are often like this, particularly the ones written by Darin Morgan.
• The Too Good to Last Quebec comedy sketch show Phylactere Cola was this. Unfortunately, it was such a small niche show that you can barely find any of the sketches on the Internet, let alone the whole show. Damn shame, too, since many sketches were silent or with only a narrator's voiceover.
• Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, as seen in Vic Reeves Big Night Out, The Smell Of Reeves And Mortimer and Shooting Stars
• The Goodies

Music

• They Might Be Giants
• Experimental band One Ring Zero, often compared to TMBG, primarily runs on this.
• Ween has made a career of this. ...And Refuge in Vulgarity.
• Beck's Word Salad Lyrics, sampling, and tape manipulation often adds up to this.
• A lot of Primus, as well as Les Claypool's solo work.
• Frank Zappa, when he wasn't criticizing society, cavorted in this trope.
  • The crux of the biscuit...is the apostrophe.
  • You can't say that!
• Pick any Residents song. Ten bucks says it will be either this or Surreal Horror.
• Renaldo and the Loaf are made of this

New Media

• The internet. The whole Most, but not all, of the internet.
  • Just look at the Memetic Mutation page. Good luck finding anything there that doesn't fit here in some way.
• This is the main appeal of Youtube Poop, as well as a huge percentage of the other videos on that site.
• This Wiki's True Art entry.
• Almost all of Weebl's work qualifies, especially the short, beautifully pointless music videos that took over the internet several years ago.
• The Five Second Films crew are masters of this trope.
• Everything on rathergood.com.
• Plenty of Real Life examples have been captured on You Tube, as well as in Memetic Mutation.
• Egoraptor's The Adventures of Animal Fat

Radio

• The Goon Show. Practically the Ur-Example, at least if you're British.
• This is a staple of [[Firesign Theatre]] material. ("Radio" is the closest fit ....)

Stand-Up Comedy

• Demetri Martin, very often.
• Eugene Mirman, too.
• Hello? Eddie Izzard?
• I see your Eddie Izzard and raise you one Ross Noble.

Web Comics

• Perry Bible Fellowship
• Sweet Bro And Hella Jeff
• Pokey The Penguin
• Mountain Time
• Ctrl Alt Del (Chef Brian)
• Penny Arcade (Twisp and Catsby)
• MS Paint Adventures. Probably more so with Problem Sleuth than Homestuck.
• Axe Cop is this trope in its purest distilled form.

Web Original

• Homestar Runner. Anything that belches forth Sweet Cuppin' Cakes can only be describes as this.

Western Animation

• This Trope + Crowning Music Of Awesome = Adult Swim.
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force
  • Robot Chicken
  • The Brak Show
  • Perfect Hair Forever
  • The only exception is the anime they play, which is usually - but not always - more serious.
• Arguably Family Guy, particularly in the more surreal later episodes.
• Daffy Duck in "Duck Amuck".
• "Porky in Wackyland" and its colorized remake, "Dough for the Do-do."
• A good portion of the Deranged Animation page.
• Spongebob Squarepants after the movie.

Real Life/Other

• Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas. The book, the movie, and the Real Life events all qualify.

Generally, I just dump it on the discussion page and move on. Was there something else?

edited 6th Mar '11 1:26:33 PM by Deboss

Normally I would do that, but the X Just X here is about 90% of the examples.

It happens. I nuked the entire example list on Guilty Pleasures for being not objective examples.

I moved them to the discussion page also. This page really needs help.

Move them back. It's an art style. What do you expect to be described?

Not every trope usage has to have descriptions, for example ususally you can't say much about Bald Woman, on a character page, about Colon Cancer, on a work page, or about Romance Novel on a Romance Novel work page.

edited 6th Mar '11 1:45:44 PM by EternalSeptember

But those are self explanatory, surreal humor isn't.

Sorry ES, but X Just X is not an acceptable way to write examples.

Yes, it is. It's a style. If a comedy's humor is written in this style, you can either tell that it is, or resort to Word Cruft repeating how it uses this stlye all along, or describe the entire plot in detail. The only examples that could stay on the page are because of this, but they are all extremely short stories, or suversions, surprising examples, etc.

edited 6th Mar '11 1:56:23 PM by EternalSeptember

No it is not. Read this that I just wrote.

• Marshmallow People is about two marshmallow people. As if that wasn't weird enough, they ride on a flying otter to go visit triangle man.

That is how you explain Surreal Humor.

edited 6th Mar '11 1:58:52 PM by nuclearneo577

This is one of those shorts I was talking about. It' 1:42 minute long, of course you can describe how it is surreal, but only because you can write down the entire plot.

With longer works, that would look like describing a generic Romance Novel's generic plot points to prove that it is romantic. D'uh, it's obvious, that's it's genre.

If something is listed under Surreal Humor, that is because surreal humor is it's genre.

edited 6th Mar '11 2:12:19 PM by EternalSeptember

It doesn't appear to be set up as a genre though.

Maybe genre is not the right term, but it's still something like this, something that goes all along the work. Unless it's a non-surreal work that used one rare surreal scene, there is not much to note about the fact that a whole story was written that way.

Like... Cel Shading. You don't start describing how cel shaded XIII is all along, only that in The Iron Giant, the giant alone is cel shaded

I'm mostly agreeing with Eternal here, it's not as if links aren't right there with a much fuller description. Describing The Mighty Boosh in a sentence or two...

Having to point out specific examples for every entry is a bit much to ask, particularly when a lot of those state quite clearly that surreal humor isn't just something that occurs once and then is never spoken of again, but a major part of the basis of the work. They're telling you, "This is where surreal comedy happens".

Reworking things to read more like a genre page, rather than, "This one time, something wacky happened..." might be a better fix than removing all the examples that don't spell out what, "That one time" is.

Some things can get away with X Just X. This can not, as it is easy to explain.

Ok, explain Robot Chicken in a sentence or two(and if it's that easy, wouldn't it make more sense to just fix the examples?).

I don't think it's easy at all, not in any meaningful way. "A sketch show, where surreal things frequently happen." Otherwise you're just trying to isolate individual instances, which I think would be an even greater failure in saying anything about a show with this kind of basis.

While you are at it, also explain how our True Art page uses Surreal Humor.

What's wrong with isolating individual instances? "Frequently used in The Alice And Bob Show; for example..."

^^ It doesn't; it's got a whole bunch of people who stay camped on it, thinking that "random shit" is the same thing as "surreal humor". And you know very well that "this other page is also screwed up" is no defense at all.

Saying "Robot Chicken. Just Robot Chicken." as an example on the surreal humor page tells anyone who doesn't already know what Robot Chicken is not a damn thing thing about Robot Chicken or surreal humor, except that someone thinks it's an example.

edited 6th Mar '11 3:19:31 PM by Madrugada

It takes away focus from the fact that it's constantly used. It's like writing on XIII:

• Cel Shading: It was frequently used through the game, for example in this scene.

Cel Shading wasn't "freqently used", it is a technique that was applied to thee entirety of the game. Just like Surreal Humor.

Our True Art page doesn't frequently us esurreal humor, for example in the page quote". It is based on surreal humor, just as many of the work examples are.

edited 6th Mar '11 3:23:01 PM by EternalSeptember

Except it's not used throughout the work that way. Robot Chicken, for instance, also does parodies.

Rewrite that to be "used throughout the game, go here for an example of the style" and it's a way better example than just "used throughout the game" (especially if "here" is a link to a page on the wiki, so it doesn't get broken) — people can actually make a judgement about what the style is, whether it's an appropriate example, and so on.

Similarly, "used throughout the True Art page, e.g., in the page quote" is meaningless, but "used throughout the True Art page; for example, the page quotes range from Homer (author of the Iliad) to Homer (the Simpsons character) and have nothing to do with each other" means people know what you're talking about. Which is your goal in writing the example in the first place, right?

edited 6th Mar '11 3:36:43 PM by Micah

These examples would still feel incredibly forced. Cel Shading, and Surreal Humor, are self-explanatory ways to create a work with. If you already know what the term means, giving a random sample from it is like describing a horrific scene to prove why a story is a horror, or naming a scene in which the Pink Haired Girl had pink hair, to demonstrate how pink her hair is.

I think, the main problem is that the X Just X page was written with plot-related tropes in mind, but it doesn't mention that, and it sounds like it applies to all tropes.

Of course you have to explain how a show's Big Damn Heroes scene turned out, and who participated in it, who got saved, from who, etc. but there is also a long list of genres, visuals, art styles, Title Tropes, flat character's single Character As Device, etc. where you simply can't, or it would sound like it was written for morons, by morons.

edited 6th Mar '11 4:43:40 PM by EternalSeptember

Pink Haired Girl is self explanatory but still requires you to name the character. Surreal Humor is not self explanatory. We are writing for people who do not know about the trope not for people who already know it.

Joining the chorus, I dislike X Just X. All other things aside, this wiki is supposed to be both informative and amusing, and inside jokes aren't too funny for the majority of outsiders.

I give you that there are times where X Just X indeed is appropriate (like with most of the Title Tropes), but most of the time the examples listed like this come off as lazy, boring and expendable. I want to know the hows and whys. In the case of Surreal Humor, the why is given (for the lulz), so at least give the how. No surreal work is like the other.

(In the case of Cel Shading, "how" is self evident (except for those wacky experiments) and "why" is almost always as well.)

edited 6th Mar '11 9:24:32 PM by peccantis