FYW- Response to Blog Post #4

After reading your blog post, I looked up an episode of “Who is America” on Youtube and watched it. In the video, Sacha Baron Cohen is interviewing a man by the name of Philip who is pro-gun and so Sacha goes along with it pretending that he is as well. He tells the man “We need to begin pro-gun early and start training children from the age of 3 all the way to age 16.” The man is completely on board of course and goes on to talk about how there was a bill that wanted to prevent four-year old's from using guns and how they immediately shut that down because... well it must just be a crazy thought that four-year old's shouldn’t be allowed to play with guns. Sacha’s response is hilarious because he just pretends it is crazy that they would shut something like that down but obviously we know Sacha wants the guy to think he agrees with everything that he is saying. They both then go on to do a “commercial” where they advertise a puppy pistol for preschoolers. There are different characters they can get to customize their puppy pistol and Philip is totally into showing the children how to use it. He says, “just remember to point puppy pistols mouth right at the middle of the bad man.” (Let’s hope no one tries to take anyone's juice box). Throughout the commercial, they show all the different types of guns that you can decorate with animals and even come up with a rendition of “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” to remind the children what to do. I think that the incongruity and superiority theories of humor could both play a role in this video, but I think the one that sticks out to me the most would be the benign-violation theory of humor for this particular episode because of how they take an awful thing like a school shooting and turn it into a comedic thing that we laugh at as we watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkXeMoBPSDk