Originally posted 7.01.08
The original paragraph referred to a bunch of stuff that doesn’t make any sense anymore…so I cut it out. I trust that we can all move forward in our lives. And so, we join this blog already in progress:
Episode eight, “You’ll Never See It Coming,” is simple in its own right but deals with what I think is one of the most important aspects of comedy – timing. I know I’ve talked about this before, but I can’t stress it enough. Telling a joke – even the simple act of punching someone in the stomach – is worthless if the timing is off, which is why I stress it so much. The semi-long pause to begin the episode and the snap-quick cut at the end are both examples of what I think are crucial to the timing process. Nothing’s happening, nothing’s happening, and then – boom! – the joke is told and finished without anything left lingering. True, it’s just my interpretation of it, but I think it’s something that works.
I wanted to call this episode “The Punch,” but Larry (and everyone else I talked to, for that matter) didn’t want to give the ending away, which in hindsight was the only way to play this. By calling this episode “You’ll Never See It Coming” you still expect to see something, but just what that something is is still a mystery up until the last second.
Our fake preview for some phantom “next time” finally begins to noticeably break out of its familiar role with this episode (though episode eight’s ending is still one of my favorites), as the joke is maybe a little obvious, but still pretty fun. There are a number of variations of the joke where a man denies his dyslexia by saying “on!”, and this is just another of those, but just to make it completely obvious as to what we were doing, we put the title phrase backwards as well. The best part about this particular sequence, which I think some people might miss, is the fact that Larry actually walks back through the doorway and shuts the door behind him. Again, it’s the timing that makes it work.
Even though this episode registers under a minute in length, a number of people have commented that “You’ll Never See It Coming” is their favorite, or at least it was up until the point where it was the most recent episode on the block. This follows a similar theme with “The Gift” where the humor was almost entirely physical. It also follows the theme where I feel bad because some of the better dialogue-based jokes go under the radar. But those are the sacrifices we make, I suppose.
Franks and Beans 