paper revision

I have a papaer draft need to be revised based on the comments from my professor.

Mingjun Yan English1110: Draft of Primary Source Analysis 1/29/2018

Please simply revise this paper based on the instructor feedback

The primary source is Gideon’s Kitchen. Please watch it before revising this paper.

Instructor feedback: Mingjun Yan, this is a good start. You note how the sketch uses misdirection and irony, but you could talk more about parody still. This sketch parodies reality TV––how sensational it is, how it relies on these cheap sort of cliff hangers. It takes these conventions and makes them absurd, which in turn makes us laugh at the conventions. For writing about parody, look at how it mimics its source. Think about Hell’s Kitchen and Gordon Ramsey’s persona, and look at how this sketch plays around with the show’s set up. Great work––keep writing!

Lauren Cook (cook.1112) , Feb 8 at 5:30pm

Your primary source is not too short. You can change it if you are uncomfortable with it, but Key and Peele sketches work well.

Having seen Key and Peele’s Black Ice, I found it super enjoyable for me to watch their sketches. This weekend I came across another fantastic piece of work created by Key and Peele called Gideon’s Kitchen. In Gideon’s Kitchen, a chief makes compliments of his apprentice’s dish the same time as belittling it through artful arrangements of words.

At the beginning, the apprentice acted by Peele served a dish of cake to the chief acted by Key, with his nervous face and gingerly action. After Key tried the cake he said: “unbelievable” which is a neutral word and which makes me, as audience, look forward to what he is going to say. “I had a huge problem with this dish,” said the chief together with a suddenly intensified background music and Peele’s popped eyes. “that you had to make it for me sooner.” The chief continuous, with a lively music and Peele’s relieved face and words. However, the chief added, “because if you had done that I could know how good you are at cooking food that’s bad.” The thunder-like music comes back again. “I said bad, I mean Michael Jackson Bad”, the chief said, followed with Peele’s uncertainly happy face. This is the first punchline to me which made me laugh as well as the next one: “You know he looks really really bad at the end of his life.” Same patterns went on, a bad comment followed a good comment: “get off the shelf, because you should be working in the finest restaurant in the world.” Starting at this point, I think the comedians exaggerated the situation to show the art of the word to the audience. A small funny point here is Peele’s reaction to this compliment, which is his saying “Thank you chief” with a supercilious look, which also, in my opinion, brings the exaggeration down to earth since that’s exactly one will do if being given too much ridiculous comments from others. These ingenious controls kind of cater the theme of contrasting as well as the primary fun-generating function. Back to the sketch, the chief continuous, “that’s not any world that I live in.” What’s funny is that the last thing the Key performed, “In conclusion, aiiiiii…” with a gesture of “just-so-so”, “it’s hard to tell its good or not”.

As far as I am concerned, what makes this sketch appealing is that, first of all, it could set off heated discussions from the audience. I see plenty of creative comments such as “This is terrible…terribly good!”, “[K]eeye and [P]eele sucks…and by sucks I mean they suck the sadness of my life.” By making this small piece of “praise or belittle” sitcom, the comedians successfully focused the attention of the audience onto the beauty of words, the art of expression and the source of humor. The same word can carry out totally different massages if being craftily facilitated, and everyone, not only the artists, but also the ordinary could make funs of the game of words. Another trick that endows the sketch popularity is that proper background music companied with the whole performance. This trick is common but crucial in exaggerating contrasts, therefore leading to stronger audience reflections.