Smiling Friends is Painfully Funny

it seems like when none of us were looking they made an entire cinematic universe for big mouth i wonder why you know big mouth that show with all the you know what no if you've made it this far without finding out i'm not gonna be the one to spoil that for you yeah that show's just been renewed for a seventh season with season six releasing later this year and they've commissioned a second season of a spin-off that focuses on all of the more annoying parts of the main show i wonder what that's like can't you just let me watch penis hockey in peace for christ's sake um okay it seems like every network studio and streaming service want desperately to be the ones behind the next big adult animated comedy and can you really blame them i mean when it comes down to it money as a result new shows are being churned out like nobody's business all right guys you don't the shadow shouldn't be falling on the window from the outside looking in the strategy may as well be just green light [ __ ] everything and see what works but if that really is the strategy then of course eventually we're gonna get a show that actually remembers that the secret to comedy is being funny of course though the strategy in real life is going to be a lot more complex than that probably one trend i'm sure we've all noticed in these bad comedies getting greenlit is that they're all pretty formulaic and derivative i mean i'm pretty sure a family guy and rick and morty never existed all of these shows would look completely different because they'd be stealing from something else art style isn't something i tend to touch on very much but i don't really think there's anything better to show the difference between all of these production line shows and today's topic smiling friends yeah in a climate where loads of animated shows coming out are criticized for looking the same as one another smiling friends doesn't even look the same as itself that doesn't make any [ __ ] sense i've clearly gone mad but uh it's true though instead of limiting itself to the same flat unexpressive derivative boring it routinely chooses different art styles to best express the personalities of different characters or the tones of particular jokes like no i wasn't cutting between different shows there those were all clips from smiling friends the main five smiling friends pym charlie glep allen and smormu basically just are their distinctive profile silhouette with a face and shape that matches their personality all filled up in one solid unshaded block color they're all simple easily recognizable and all particularly good at expressing their particular character's typical emotional range their designs are all really well suited not only for their roles within the show but to act as iconography for this show as well it's a really refreshing change from oh hey this kind of feels like they took a background character from family guy but now they're the main character then we have their boss mr boss who's a bit more human in contrast from the simplicity of the protagonists he's drawn with an excruciating level of anatomical detail and is generally used to tell jokes that they're just a bit weird and unsettling we are now far beyond the territory of just flat block colors with only the level of detail needed to express emotion look at the hands on this [ __ ] cutie pie they're just vague hand shapes it's basically just his cute little sausage fingers that distinguish them from his arms mr boss on the other hand has fully drawn fingernails intensely detailed wrinkles and even little hairs on there during close-ups his art style wasn't simply selected to be cohesive with the rest of the show instead attention was given to what his role in the show actually is all of this care and attention has gone into designing a character who seems nice but you probably wouldn't want to touch really that's just the first departure in art style and there really is no departure too big the forest demon from the halloween episode and satan the dark lord of hell are both animated in beautiful stop go animation which has used a great effect to make both of them scarier and much more imposing than they would be if they are animated the same way the smiling friends were this is used to great effect for both characters everything they do with both of them is enhanced by the fact that they're animated in this style with the forest demon for example it allows them to first and foremost play him absolutely straight for genuine horror which like yeah you're not gonna be able to do that with him for these scenes if he looks like this at least not as effectively but we're absolutely not done with the benefits of this art style yet because of course the next thing they do with him is play him for comedy by juxtaposing his previously horrific nature with more mundane scenes so you don't understand i'm literally a force demon from across the bridge a juxtaposition that's enhanced by his still striking visual appearance then the final joke they tell with him involves him getting brutally torn apart in all of his flesh getting eaten which is made more tactile and visceral with this art style thereby increasing the impact of this happening in this episode there are three things they do with this character all of which are enhanced by the art style they choose to portray him with most animated shows even uninspired production line ones will try to design their characters appropriately but this approach facilitates a whole new level of creativity there are occasions where the way a character is animated is the joke on its own and while it may not be laugh out loud funny by itself it's still going to contribute to the overall comedic atmosphere of the episode i personally really enjoy how all of mr frog's movements are lightning fast and this woman's [ __ ] walking animation oh but there must be some just generic uninspired characters in here somewhere right i mean okay there's this guy he looks super [ __ ] generic and would absolutely fit into the background of paradise pd or the foreground but you know he's just a minor side character from one episode and i guess they can't all be winners right what's this what's this guy's role in the show again oh he's the pushy media industry higher-up who stifles the creativity of people around him to try and play things safe i wonder why of all the characters in the entire show he might be the only one animated in the most generic possible style choosing different art styles for different characters isn't something that would work for a lot of shows take archer for example one of my favorite animated comedies that i would love to make a full video going over the rise and fall of one day just put that on the [ __ ] list the comedy and archer is derived from snappy back and forths between well-established characters yeah do you know where he is yes i'm just screaming his name down the hall to celebrate that fact is that some kind of joke is that it's cold in here it's all about witty exchanges based on the situations that characters find themselves in not only that a great deal of it is based on the regard that certain characters have for those situations archer wake it's me i know it depends on those situations being tangible and understandable so the characters can more convincingly play off of them and for that goal it needs to be animated cohesively smiling friends on the other hand is absurdist the characters may have consistent drives traits and motivations but the world they inhabit is incoherent its style of comedy lends itself to this approach we're viewing an absurd world through the lens of our two understandable main characters so right who the [ __ ] are they then our protagonists are called pim and charlie and they're two members of the smiling friends a charity organization that exists with the purpose of putting smiles on the faces of people who are down in the dumps pym as a character is basically the embodiment of everything i imagine the smiling friends would want to represent he's enthusiastic empathetic and seemingly incapable of pessimism he seems to be really motivated to do the right thing just because it's the right thing to do gosh darn it he seems like the kind of guy who really believes in the smiling friends cause if i knew i might be willing to wage that he originally joined up with them just because he really cares about making sure that all the people around him are doing all right on the other end of the scale we have charlie a rust player this dynamic duo doing their job makes up the format of a typical episode the two will be summoned to the scene of someone who's feeling a wee bit gloomy and will spend the episode trying to figure out how to cheer them up over the course of this charlie will act as a foil to pen counter balancing his enthusiasm with a much more relaxed and chilled out attitude it's not like he never tries to help but to charlie making people smile is much more of a job than a passion these clashing attitudes make up a large amount of the dynamic between the two as they try thing after thing to try and solve a person's problem we get absurdism in the generally accepted format of a procedural pim and charlie will be hanging around in the smiling friends office building before they're summoned to help someone they'll be given a job and then rush off to go and help the person they need to cheer up of course their first attempt can't succeed because then the episode would just end if that kept happening then the series would be really short after three or four failed attempts i'll generally end up lucking out and solving the problem in a stupid way that you wouldn't have expected resolving the episode in a comedic fashion designed to take you by surprise this formula while being a formula still allows for ample creativity the goal of making someone smile is clear and specific enough to easily denote when the story has been resolved but the means to that goal can be basically anything the obvious example is someone who needs to be shown the joys of life by being taken to lots of different wonderful places that's the pilot episode but then beyond that we have things like pim and charlie need to save the career of a celebrity who's been cancelled for trying to eat a journalist fair pim and charlie have to save the love life of a shrimp okay and that's it there are no more episodes that specifically adhere to this formula at least not strictly there are episodes that come close and are still bookended by a character smiling but like the art style the formula isn't something that the show really feels the need to adhere to rigidly less drastic departures from the formula include things like pim and charlie get tangled up on their way to the person they need to help have a whole adventure on their way to her and when they get to her find out that during their adventure they accidentally solved her problem already so i guess we did it right we technically made you smile i guess you did cool in these softer departures the show can use basically any premise it likes and tell any story that it wants to but while still being able to retain the element that a character smiling is a clear indication of the episode's resolution more radical departures include things like they go out for a meal discover the owner of the joint has been murdered and then get roped into solving the murder by the police there's no smile to indicate the ending here but i mean it ends when they solve the [ __ ] murder it's not that hard to figure out so what's the [ __ ] comedy actually like then that seems like something we should touch on at some point well like every other aspect of the show we've covered so far there's no rigid formula of course it has its tropes but a lot of the jokes in the show are just entirely unique take for example the episode frowning friends which introduces a bizarro version of pim and charlie called grim and gnarly they're proprietors of nihilism nihilism i nearly mispronounced that word that maybe seems stupid they're proprietors of nihilism who go around trying to convince everyone that life is meaningless and worthless and that they should just give up genuine believers of this ideology think that nothing even their lives have any value at all but at the end of the episode when mr boss threatens grim with a gun he immediately starts crying and pisses himself this show delivered a criticism of a character's underlying ideology with with piss piss i have a lot of respect for that it has meaning it provides observational commentary and it does it in the least dignified possible way for the person that's criticizing every aspect here is working in favor of this joke are there any other jokes like this in the show well not really there are plenty of well-delivered jokes and plenty of observational jokes it's not formulaic though of course there are some patterns that are clear in some of the jokes just like there are some patterns that are clear in some of the formulas of some of the episodes ultimately though this isn't a show that just falls back on its own tropes it's always keeping things incredibly fresh it has tropes and patterns within its writing but just enough to maintain cohesion you want things to feel fresh but at the same time you don't want every episode to feel like you're watching a totally different show to that end smiling friends strikes a perfect balance so what are some of the more common patterns within the comedy well one thing the show loves to do a lot is provide very real conversations between pem and charlie you can just feel me working my way up towards the renaissance man joke can't you but it contrasts these realistic conversations with the absurd world that the characters are in they're talking about stuff that's totally bizarre and out there but they're talking about it like real people talk about real things i am sure that all of us have experienced a conversation like this at some point in our lives can we watch something else it's about to get really good it's about to get really good trust me but what are they watching i don't [ __ ] know man this [ __ ] that's never hidden from the audience by the way like i just did by cropping the frame there in fact this shot is the first shot in the scene that's the first thing that's established is that this is what they're watching they're talking about it like real [ __ ] people for some reason though after that charlie gets distracted from the um by allen who understandably is voicing concerns about his cheese my precious piece of cheese has gone missing i mean i don't know i've uh i haven't seen your piece of cheese and pim gets disappointed because charlie just missed what is as far as he's concerned the best bit ah you missed it what the character did a spin it was like a cool spin it was the whole reason i was showing it to you but yeah it was it was just kind of cool now i didn't personally find that conversation hugely hilarious or anything but comedies are rarely focused on having you in absolute hysterics within the first 10 seconds of the first episode the comedic stylings aren't absent either though here we don't have one individual line or moment that's supposed to be the punchline to the joke instead we have a more general atmosphere that's built up and up with every line a juxtaposition between the absurdity of what's happening and how realistically the characters are reacting to it beyond establishing tone we're also establishing character as everyone in the scene has their attitudes on full display here pimperwan is clearly disappointed that charlie missed the cool spin the whole reason i was showing it to you but yeah but this clearly isn't the kind of thing that he feels comfortable being pushy or assertive about it it was just kind of cool okay charlie on the other hand isn't really invested in the situation with his first few lines in the show we're already learning that he's not the kind of guy who naturally goes out of his way to make other people happy if he was he might offer to skip back and watch the spin or apologize or something instead he's just sort of chilling out and not that interested in engaging with his surroundings and finally alan he just wants this [ __ ] cheese this scene may not be absolutely knocking you out of your socks but it's working on multiple levels to do multiple things it's establishing both tone and character and considering those are two of the most important aspects of the show they both absolutely belong in the opening scene the comedic style here also isn't based on individual jokes instead each line builds on the previous to achieve a cumulative effect this is something that smiling friends does quite a lot yeah i was just reading about how the uh the results were coming in town the renaissance man joke is the prime example of how the show manages to combine the relatable with the absolutely bizarre who are they who's the renaissance man the break room seems pretty dead and charlie decides to make conversation by just sharing what it is that he's reading tim engaging in that conversation asks a follow-up question which charlie not actually having read that much can't answer oh it just says it just says here that the renaissance better coming in town and look it by the looks of it it's like super soon tim naturally assumes that charlie knows more than he actually does but who are there enemies i don't know who they are when charlie was just thinking out loud while scrolling through his phone look i'll just tell you what i'm reading here man that's all i know you know as much as i know i'm just reading off this thing it says that says the renaissance winner coming in town really soon it's just a well-developed conversation between two characters making misconceptions for reasons that we the audience can clearly understand without it being so obvious that the characters within the scene should know themselves which can be a really difficult balance to strike so far the comedy is basically just observational essentially hey don't you relate to this situation but of course the episode is gonna build on it after this brief exchange the episode just gets on with its story by introducing grim and gnarly because this is the same episode i was just talking about before after the smiling friends win and get grim to smile smiling feels good and he turns into justin roiland for some reason this happens this is a beautiful ending some random [ __ ] dudes show up on horseback and shoot grim and gnarly with a bow and arrow and charlie immediately assumes oh they must be the renaissance man what just happened oh the rest of us men came into town finally i i literally told you the beginning the renaissance men were coming to town he didn't believe me to a viewer what's happened in charlie's brain is pretty obvious he knew that some guys called the renaissance men were coming into town saw these guys in historical dress and assumed oh that must be them he's just making sense of the information that he has wasting you know that we're gonna come and kill grip criminally with arrows and stuff to pimp though this just reawakens the misconception that charlie must know stuff about these guys no no i didn't know that was good who are the renaissance i don't know what that means because that's renaissance he even correctly points out that they weren't in renaissance period dress they were in a different form of historical dress but that's not they didn't look like renaissance man but i i i i literally don't know and we end the episode on the note of the characters just being a bit miffed off with each other because of their failure to effectively communicate i'm literally telling you the extent of my knowledge i knew that the renaissance men were coming to town that's it okay everything about this scene is [ __ ] ridiculous and stupid and yet you can relate to it fundamentally it perfectly captures the tone and feeling of two people who care about each other just having a failure of communication the guys who actually show up at the end not even being from the renaissance period is a master stroke as well they're sort of conceptually adjacent to something you might call the renaissance men in a way that i think most people will naturally assume they're the renaissance man until someone points out they're not even from the [ __ ] renaissance you're relating to the characters because you're having similar thoughts about the events you've seen it being ridiculous nonsense events contributes to it because we the audience is seeing the characters try to make sense of something we're watching this from a meta perspective knowing that there is no sense to be made of these events at all are these guys actually the renaissance men that charlie was talking about or are they entirely unrelated well there's no answer to that we can speculate if we want to but deep down we know that there is no actual answer because these are just random events that happened for the sake of the joke the characters aren't in on it though and that's what makes it funny it's also a bit more than just completely random nonsense it's a clear play on jakob's gun the writing principle by which you introduce something early in your story because it's going to impact the story later on charlie even breaks the fourth wall a little bit to provide this commentary and i i literally told you the beginning the renaissance men were coming to town he didn't believe me i'm pretty sure you noticed just in case you didn't he's referring to the beginning of the episode there just to be clear the thing about the renaissance men though is that they don't actually impact the story at all the story has been resolved by the time that they arrive but the event isn't totally random at least not from a meta perspective instead it resembles a trope but with all of the functionality that trope serves sucked out it also has a pretty clear progression from beginning to end where it builds up and up as it goes this is something that smiling friends is really good at a while back i criticized a show called hoops for being [ __ ] at being funny one of the ways it was [ __ ] at being funny was the way it incorporated running gags in episode 6 hoops introduces a character called the darwa he's very very flexible and they make the obvious joke immediately whoa look at you are you sucking your own dick no then as a form of running gag they wholesale repeat this joke over and over again every time the dawah is on screen there's a strong chance the main character ben is going to reference how he could totally suck his own dick and that's really funny you're in the little man tate and you could suck your own dick you might be all right after all darwin they even bring the darwah back in the series finale just so they can make this joke go again your own dick there's never anything more to it it's always literally just lol this character could suck his own dick and you dawa stop trying to [ __ ] change people sure i'm angry but it's who i am if people don't like it then they can shove it up their asses with that sad i find it very impressive you could suck your own dick [Music] smiling friends has a very different approach to bringing that gags in episode 8 charlie [ __ ] dies we then follow him having an adventure in hell because smiling friends is just that kind of show there is your hell mattress there is your hell toilet yeah i'll be real i don't really want a [ __ ] in that i could probably stomach pissing in it though as soon as charlie arrives in hell he's given a grand tour of his room which ends with an introduction to jeremy this is jeremy your only form of hellish entertainment yeah i already think this is funny and you can't stop me the substance of the joke here is pretty simple hey you've arrived in hell and instead of the conventional torch you might expect you're being tortured with the fact that the entertainment is something a bit annoying and obnoxious although genuinely not as obnoxious but everything about the delivery just makes this for me everything about jeremy from his cute little face to his weird proportions to the fact that he is called jeremy really helps he's actually kind of adorable and charming in his own little weird way this means he's not just annoying and obnoxious which makes it way easier to smile in response to him which in turn makes it way easier to laugh in response to him like people don't actually tend to be in the mood to love when they're irritated it's coping and seething not coping and wheezing so with this we already have a perfectly good joke charlie is the kind of character who doesn't really have any patience for stuff like jeremy and says this to him dude if you do that again i'm gonna punch you i'm not kidding and that's it that's the end of this gag with jeremy he's present for the rest of the scene but just in the background reacting to what happens with facial expression oh and when this other demon gets upset jeremy puts his arm around him which is just a cute funny background detail after that charlie goes and gets on with the plot of the episode we get some gags about him meeting his grandma in hell which are just all delivered perfectly that seems a little bit unreasonable i don't think you should be in hell for that he goes on a journey looking for satan i'm almost there i think the biggest surprises are behind me [Music] and it's perfect so he did say one thing and then the opposite thing did happen but when in the past i've criticized lazy comedies for relying on that formula of joke that's been because it's the only thing there is to the joke this bathroom is a lifesaver i've taken some great a leaks in here the best part is there's never a lie god damn it the punchline is clearly telegraphed by the setup and you have long enough to think about it before it arrives you know exactly what's coming and it's a joke based on subverting your expectations it's not a winning formula that is unless you count getting greenlit by netflix a win but if i got a letter of acceptance from them i put it on the shelf with all of my other participation awards this joke is a far cry from anything like that first and foremost it doesn't telegraph the specifics of the punch line a lot of audience members will probably suspect that a gag is gonna follow that line but there's no indication of specifically what that gag will be jeremy had already been used to tell a perfectly good one and done joke and it would be totally normal for him to never show up again the audience has no reason to assume he's gonna come back on top of that charlie has barely finished delivering his line when jeremy shows up if charlie had said that he thought the biggest surprises were behind him and then paused i think more audience members would have realized that something that's supposed to surprise them was probably about to happen this specific gag works best by not giving the audience time to think and finally once the punchline has been delivered oh they're not done actually you're hopefully already laughing and then more is added to the joke charlie did say that he was gonna punch jeremy if jeremy did that again but you're not thinking about that right now because you're still in the middle of being surprised by jeremy being here at all so the show manages to catch you off guard again in the middle of it catching you off guard already this is how you do a [ __ ] running gag if jeremy had been a hoops character as well as looking [ __ ] he would probably have just shown back up and then sort of done his thing after you already knew he was there dude i warned you i said i was gonna do that if you did that again the story progresses and charlie actually talks to satan but it doesn't go super well and satan gets mad at charlie and decides to torture him in the midst of all the torture jeremy gets his [ __ ] revenge in a joke that was in no way telegraphed whatsoever and moreover actually expands upon the previous material rather than simply repeating it of course expanding on your material is important and smiling friends is great at it one of my personal favorite jokes in the show is the smallmouth joke episode three of the show starts with a fake poll asking viewers to text in whether or not they want smormu to be added to the regular cast of smiling friends if you want smallmouth to be the fifth smiling friend text small moo to 55501 then we get like well you know the whole episode the events of which leave pim feeling a little bit upset and paying off that setup that was the poll at the beginning of the episode small move shows up to turn that frown upside down i could cheer you up as the same announcer as before happily announces that smallmouth won the vote and is now the official fifth member of the smiling friends you voted and we listened this cannot be undone is here to stay now the callback to earlier as well as the satirization of actual shows that really do this kind of thing is layer one of the joke obviously smallmouth seems kind of annoying and you probably wouldn't want him in the show but [ __ ] you that's how the vote went and now this is what you're stuck with for a lot of comedies that would probably be the whole joke you know if they'd managed to come up with it if you want to make a physical connection with someone the only thing that matters is pheromones mean body odor that's actually an offensive label created by big deodorant okay but this is smiling friends so of course they build on it when the announcer says you voted and we listened here's the graphic they show it's small you voted and we listened and not only are you hit in the face with how close the vote was you suddenly have a split second to comprehend the fact that apparently smormu was elected via electoral college and there's separate charts for the popular vote and electoral vote it's beautiful if it's your kind of thing this show is really [ __ ] funny thought care and effort has clearly gone into every part of it from the animation to the jokes the characters are incredibly well realized and important to act as a grounding force through which the audience can appreciate the absurd world they're in in fact the main complaint i have about it is how little of it there is one season of eight episodes at 10 minutes each there is an hour and 20 minutes of it which isn't very much but i'm sure we'll get more of it all we have to do is be patient from everything we've gone over today this is clearly a show that thrives on meticulous thought and effort no aspect of it can be squeezed out of a production line going off of a formula it's glorious and i can't wait for season two but i will also sorry this video took a long time to come out i was busy sleeping with your wife

Channel: Jay Exci

Views: 3,832,660

Keywords:

Id: WMeqiMbIFX8

Length: 26min 56sec (1616 seconds)

Published: Thu May 19 2022