thehappinessmachine:
i think what is so especially fascinating about the mcelroy brothers and their comedy is the fact that that have essentially made language itself a source a comedy.
what i mean is that often, when you think of a good joke, you often think of the content of the joke - of course, the delivery of a joke is important (you can ruin a perfectly good joke if you say it the wrong way), but overall when someone tells a joke, they put more focus on getting across the absurdity/hilarity of the material of the joke rather than putting emphasis on the words used to say it.
that’s not what the mcelroy brothers do at all, though. they do the exact opposite - with the way they say things, they’re able to transform quite mundane things and scenarios into ridiculous imagery that we can’t help but laugh at.
i’ll just use this line from the MBMBAM TV show pilot as an example - what Griffin is saying here, is, essentially, “I saw a video of a spider molting and I was absolutely terrified”, which, on its own, isn’t really incredibly funny. however, Griffin gives such a brilliant twist in the form of the words “my eyes went to hell”, which is hilarious because, essentially, it’s complete nonsense! your eyes can’t go to hell (and even if they could, you’d expect the rest of your body to follow), and yet, somehow, there’s a beautiful kind of logic to it -you can clearly get a mental image of you looking at something so horrifying that your eyes are instantly banished to the seventh ring of the underworld as a result. another line from the same show is when Travis runs away from a spider in fear, and they state “oh, Travis is going to space”. most people would just reemphasize the event (”oh, there Travis goes” or “he’s running away!”), but by stating he’s going “to space” makes it that much funnier, because, once again, there’s a logic to the absurdity of the words - he’s so terrified he might as well hitch a spaceship and get out of our solar system as fast as he can.
the mcelroy brothers are brilliant at what they do, not only because they can find good-natured humor in ordinary things, but because they have developed a way to use words as another level of comedy - they are infinitely quotable because the way they say things tickles both our minds and our ears. and that, really, is one of the major reasons why their brand of comedy is as popular as it is - the jokes are from the mcelroy brother lexicon, and they’re all the more better for it.