"Robot Chicken" and My Second City Education

Today I'm enjoying some of Seth Green and Matt Seinrich's "Robot Chicken" (I'm all over Cartoon Network fare lately). It's making me appreciate some of the critical comedy thinking skills that my classes at Second City are teaching me.

As much as my friends have long enjoyed mocking me for being overthinky, and outlining underlying structure in entertainment rather than "just enjoying it!", it's part of what I do by nature, and it's what I need to do if I want to actually create comedy eventually. I might be starting to really think like a comedy writer now.

"Clash of context" comedy formats that I've identified on "Robot Chicken" Season One, Disk One so far:

• Superheroes and the Real World MTV environment.



• Jesus and the Kill Bill movies.



• American Idol and Night of the Living Dead.



• C-SPAN and MTV's TRL.



• "Blind Date" and the Alien/Predator characters.



• James Bond and Jewish cliches.



• Popeye character "Wimpy" and the "It's a Wonderful Life" formula.

Oh, my god. There's commentary...gotta watch again.