Lead Blog: The Good Place

For my lead blog, I have decided to write about a show called The Good Place. This show is about a group of people, a robot lady, and an immortal being. The group of people has all just died and think they are in The Good Place (this is supposed to represent heaven) when actually they have been sent to The Bad Place (hell) to suffer forever. They each suffer in their own ways until they figure out they are not supposed to be there. The immortal being was trying out a new technique of torture. Instead of burning and stabbing them, he was going to slowly have them drive each other insane. The robot lady is named Janet. She literally knows everything in the universe and is basically an Alexa but in a human body. She can also get you whatever you want. She originally is there to make the scene seem real to the humans but comes in handy quite often when the humans are scheming.

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The first scene from this show is when Jason, who is pretending to be a silent monk when he is actually a guy from Orlando, is talking about how he cannot go to The Bad Place because he is too young to die. He is already dead. He just is not very bright. He is worried about how he is too old to eat off the kids' menu but too young to die (again). I think this is funny because I can't imagine if someone told me I might be going to hell forever, that I would be worried about the fact I cannot order off the kids menu anymore. Jason's character has many moments throughout the show where the incongruity theory is used to enhance his humor. He is known for saying things at the wrong time that have no meaning at all. 

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The second scene from The Good Place that I find amusing is the one above. Jane, the knows-all robot woman, is talking about how Christopher Columbus is in The Bad Place. She has no idea that it is inappropriate to bring up the fact that Columbus raped and killed people and had slaves. She does not understand this because she is a robot and not a person with real emotions. This scene has benign violation because it is funny that she would just blurt out that "fun fact" without realizing how horrible it is. But, it is not too offensive that they should have left it out of the show. The scene has a perfect medium to where it is very funny.

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This third scene I will be talking about is about Elenor. She was a horrible person on Earth and is basically the ringleader of the other humans in The "Good" Place with her. In this excerpt, she is referring to how her mother had given her advice about always having another way out. But, instead of saying, "my mom told me to never give up!" Elenor states how her mom had advised her to gnaw through the handcuffs that are holding her back. This is another example of incongruity because it almost makes the audience do a double take. It is shocking that she was told that as a child, which makes it funny.