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September 14, 2017 - Image 12

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THE DEPARTMENT OF ASTRONOMY ORREN C. MOHLER PRIZE LECTURE

p i e c e
p i e c e

Friday, Sept. 15, 2017

Reception 2 pm

Lecture 2:30

4 pm

Dr. Julianne Dalcanton

Professor, University of Washington
Department of Astronomy

Michigan Union

Pendleton Room, 2nd Floor

530 S. State Street

Ann Arbor, MI 48109

by

Should you require any reasonable accom-
modations please contact Stacy Tiburzi at
734-764-3440, or stibu@umich.edu.

6B — Thursday, September 14, 2017
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Comedy for a Twitter age

The
founders
of
LinkedIn

certainly never envisioned “Being
funny on the internet” as an
acceptable headline for a profile
on their social media platform
— but here we are. People tweet
two-bit one-liners, people get
paid for tweeting two-bit one-
liners, people consider tweeting
two-bit one-liners their day job
— and nowadays for good reason.
Amateur
Twitter
comedienne

Kelly Oxford turned a few years
of tweets into TV pilots bought by
CBS and NBC, as one example. The
paradigm shift in modern humor
that has come thanks to the advent
of social media remains hard to
wrap one’s head around, but trying
to chronicle the ways in which
the art and form of comedy have
adapted is an earnest place where
we can start to understand it all.

With a genesis in countless

hours
of
caffeine-fueled

brainstorming,
Twitter
was

birthed as an alternative, short-
form
communication
tool
for

podcasting startup Odeo. But what
started as a meager sketch of ideas
became significant enough for
employees of Odeo to ditch their
initial aspirations and turn Twitter
into their bonafide dayjob.

And
despite
the
founders’

audacity in making Twitter their
everyday focus, pinning down
the actual purpose of the service
was still a task at hand for them
— co-founder Evan Williams was
interviewed in 2009 saying “[with]
Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was.
They called it a social network,
they called it microblogging, but it
was hard to define, because it didn’t
replace anything. There was this
path of discovery with something
like that, where over time you
figure out what it is.”

Considering Evan’s words, it

starts to get easier to understand
why Twitter has assumed such a
significant space in the realm of

modern entertainment. There’s
some beauty to find in the notion
that the Twitter we know is
fundamental to the culture we live
in, and that the Twitter we knew
is significant to a culture that has
come and gone — all at the hands
of the general populace. Twitter’s
democratization of culture has
forced the service into wearing
many hats in regards to how it
serves the public sphere — from
breaking news, to proselytization,
to citizen advocacy, to (most
importantly)
being
a
fertile

breeding ground for anything
and everything our generation
finds humorous and entertaining
nowadays — and thus, it serves as
the all-encompassing anchor of the
millennial zeitgeist.

Thanks to the character limit

of tweets, messages and jokes had
to be poetically succinct to gain
any traction — and leveling those
constraints on creatives gave birth
to a completely new approach
to joke structure and humor. In
came fleeting phases of memes
and one-liners, all with shelf lives
of no more than a few weeks.
Andy Warhol’s notion of everyone
having their 15 minutes of fame
became an undeniable reality as
people’s eyeballs shifted from HBO
standup specials to their timeline
as a source for their laughs — and in
that process, unconventional stars
were born too.

When a standup comedian is

funny on Twitter, it doesn’t come
as much of a surprise (people
we conventionally find funny
remaining funny on other mediums
isn’t a terribly novel thought). But
what has come as a surprise are the
many amateur personalities that
have used Twitter as an exclusive
medium to cultivate their craft
and comedic brand (despite their
audiences only knowing them
for crass usernames and crudely
drawn cartoon profile pictures,
among other things) — and those
personalities are changing what
it means to be a mainstream
comedian nowadays.

Take Brandon Wardell. If you

don’t know him for his semi-
unintelligible tweets or how he
looks as if someone brought an
anime stock character to real life,
you might (directly or indirectly)
know him for the many memes he
has created or popularized (does
“Dicks out for Harambe” ring a
bell to you?). His rise as a comedian
couldn’t be more different than
the veterans who came before
him, either. Thanks to a small
PR bump after being featured
as an opener on a Bob Odenkirk
stand up tour, Wardell amassed a
following on Twitter for regularly
publishing absurdist humor that
touched at the (pretentious, vapid,
materialistic, etc.) fundamentals
of being a millennial. He performs
on occasion in his current home
of L.A., but his online presence
still remains his bread and butter.
Wardell told Rolling Stone in 2016
“Twitter is ... the purest form of
expression that I have. There’s
something super-visceral about
Twitter. It’s just a lot of like brain
vomit.”

And it’s that reason why Twitter

comedy resonates so well with
today’s population. Comedy used to
be constrained by a set of concrete
conventions regarding structure,
content, delivery and the like —
and to some extent, the legacy of
those constraints still linger. But
the Twitter age has deconstructed
what it means to be “funny” —
and with that, the craft of being a
comedian as well. Comedy as an
art form is still going through its
early stages of transition thanks to
the age of social media, and how we
see personalities like Wardell (and
others) flourish is yet to be clearly
determined, but if there’s one thing
that can be concretely drawn from
these observations, it’s that humor
acts as a common plane for a
culture to find commonality in.

ANAY KATYAL

Managing Arts Editor

COURTESY OF MEGAN GANZ

It’s Always Sunny in AA:
Alum Megan Ganz talks
comedy and the art of TV

As a current student in SAC

311 (Screenwriting for TV),
I’m always wondering how,
exactly, people break into the
industry. TV writing would
be, in this writer’s opinion, the
best job ever. But someone’s
done it — and from Michigan,
no less! Megan Ganz is an
alumnus who writes for “The
Last Man on Earth” and is
a producer on “It’s Always
Sunny
In
Philadelphia.”
I

reached out to her to figure out
how, exactly, she pulled it off,
and to learn more about a day
in her life.

Where are you from, and

when did you graduate from
the University of Michigan?

I am from Kalamazoo, but

I was born in Ann Arbor while
my father was finishing up
dental school at the University.
I graduated in 2006.

What activities did you

take part in at Michigan that
helped to start your career
in comedy? Have you always
been interested in working
in comedy?

I wrote for the Michigan

Every Three Weekly which
was a huge help to the start
of my comedy career. Both
Mad Magazine and The Onion
contacted
the
E3W
about

internship opportunities, and
I applied for both and those
were my first two jobs in
comedy. The internship at The
Onion eventually lead to my
first full-time writing job as a
staff writer.

I have been interested in

comedy for as long as I can
remember — since my father
first showed me Marx brothers
movies when I was six years
old. When I was a teenager, my
mother bought me a collection
of Onion articles, and from
that day forward I wanted
to specifically write for The
Onion. But writing for TV
wasn’t a goal of mine until
much later in life.

What was your first job in

the industry? How did you
end up where you are now?

My first internship was at

Mad Magazine during the
summer between my junior
and senior years. They were
the first ones to pay me for a
joke. It was an idea for a fold-
in drawn by Al Jaffee, and
I framed the check (after I
cashed it, of course). After I
graduated, I moved to New
York for an internship at The
Onion. Eventually I was hired
to the writing staff and then
became an editor. During my
time on staff, we wrote a story
about “This American Life,”
which resulted in Ira Glass
doing a piece on The Onion.
Some agents in L.A. heard me
on that “TAL” episode, and
they called me, and that’s how
I got agents. They convinced
me to start writing packets
to try to get hired to a TV
show. After three years with
The Onion, I left for a job

at Demetri Martin’s sketch
show,
“Important
Things

With Demetri Martin.” That
moved me out to L.A. and into
TV writing. At that time I was
a huge fan of “Community,”
which was still in its first
season. I knew Donald Glover
in New York, and I started
watching the show because
he was on it. My agents
submitted me for season two,
and that lead to my first job on
a sitcom. After “Community,”
I went to “Modern Family” for
a few years, then “It’s Always
Sunny in Philadelphia,” and
now I write for “The Last
Man on Earth,” which is what
I’m supposed to be doing
instead of responding to these
questions. (Shhh... don’t tell
my boss.)

Which
shows
do
you

currently work on?

Right now I am writing for

“The Last Man on Earth”
until February, at which point
I’m planning on returning to
“Sunny” for their thirteenth
season.

What’s your favorite part

of the job?

Just writing jokes. It’s not

a big enough part of the job. I
spend most of my time sitting
around a table talking, trying
to come up with storylines or
conflicts between characters.
Very
little
time
is
spent

pitching actual jokes, because
you can’t put icing on a cake
before you bake it.

TV writing/producing is

often described as a dream
job. Have you always found
that to be the case, or are
there any drawbacks?

It is a dream job. That aside,

whoever said, “If you do what
you love, you’ll never work a day
in your life” was a liar. I work
plenty of long, hard days. And
I spent years writing comedy
and not being paid for it. But I

love what I do, so it’s worth the
struggle. When you truly care
about what it is you’re doing,
the lows are pretty low. But the
highs are spectacular. And at
this point I’m not qualified to
do anything else.

Why do you think TV

(and, specifically, scripted
comedy) is seeing such a
creative surge?

Well, the easy answer is

because there used to be three
channels and now there are
hundreds.
You
don’t
even

have to sell a show anymore,
you can just post it online
and people will find it. But
the more complicated answer
might have something to do
with
the
current
political

climate and how much people
want and need to escape from
reality.

What do you see as the

future of comedy on TV?

The future of comedy won’t

be on TV. It will be on the
internet. Gone are the days
when people rush home to see
their favorite show when it
airs. People don’t want to wait,
they want to binge, so I think
shows will have fewer episodes
per season and probably end
after three seasons instead of
nine. But what do I know?

What are your favorite

shows to watch right now?

Oh
boy.
I
watch
way,

way too much TV, even for
someone who works in TV. A
very short list would include
“Veep,”
“Kimmy
Schmidt,”

“Game of Thrones,” “Atlanta,”
“Bob’s Burgers,” “Episodes,”
“Rick and Morty,” “Last Week
Tonight,” “Law and Order:
SVU,” “RuPaul’s Drag Race,”
and “Friday Night Dinner,”
which
is
a
great
British

show I love. That’s not even
counting how many times I’ve
rewatched “30 Rock,” which is
probably too many.

NABEEL CHOLLAMPAT

Senior Arts Editor

TV
NEW MEDIA

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