Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Kidscreen Day 2 - Show me the Funny - kids and humour

What do kids find funny?

Jeffrey Grant, Senior VP of Research, Animation, Young Adults and Kids Media will tell us.

Research was qualitative and quantitative amongst US kids,

Showed clip from Mad on Cartoon Network, spoofing the movie, Avatar - Avaturd. V funny.



Kids focus groups were asked to bring clips they liked. Questioned about whether the clips were funny - and why?

Polled about what channels have what kind of humour, whether they laugh at the same things as their parents etc

Boiled down to these:

- Slapstick/action humour (usually infliction of pain...)

-Toilet humour - farts, nose-picking, bad breath, vomit, BO, no 1 and no 2 in bathroom

- Parody

- Verbal humour

- Visual humour

- 'Throwaway' humour - like Family Guy, random quick one-liners and cutaway scenes

- Repetitive gags

Kids said over and over again that sounds and sound effects were best part of clips they brought in.

Production quality is often irrelevant

Cultural references can make a clip funny, even if they don't understand them. Mad did a CSI/iCarly mash-up which kids loved.

Younger kids like songs as a humorous device

Issues for kids include 'silly' agression - didn't like it to be overly graphic.

Approaches to humour began to emerge:

- Randomness and predictability

- Realism and relatability

- Stupidity

Things parents laugh at that kids don't like?

- Things that don't make sense or they don't understand - Charlie Chaplin (!), the news, movies (the entire Judd Apatow canon...), words etc

What do they laugh at with their parents?

- George Lopez show, America's Funniest Home Videos (but don't like it when someone really does get hurt), American Idol and, puzzlingly, NCIS...

Not sure how much of Cartoon Network's 'secret sauce' you could use in content development but there were some useful insights from  Jeff.  And Avaturd was pretty amusing - even for the older demographic in the room...



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