Van Wilder Shit Scene

Humor Paper

I’ve chosen to write my humor paper about the “Van Wilder Shit Scene”.
In this clip, taken out from the movie “Van Wilder”, our protagonist gets a horrible diarrhea in the middle of a supposedly important meeting. We watch him struggle through the meeting, and as the situation evolves, so does his need of letting it all go. Eventually, he ends up on a trashcan at the same office, giving in to the “lower forces”. Diseases like diarrhea are a typical taboo among most people, but this clip manages to make fun of such topics, by almost literally throwing the taboo in the faces of the clip’s characters.
By doing so, it makes the viewers laugh almost out of disgust. The whole situation is very exaggerated, for an example at The trashcan shot, “Van Wilder Shit Scene”, 0:31 where he screams so badly, you could argue whether it was out of pain or relief. By doing so, it makes his situation more fun to watch, because of his diarrhea differing so much for our perception of a normal round diarrhea.
It also takes us by surprise. While we expected him to possibly shit his pants, none of us predicted him to throw himself onto the trashcan. Surprise goes, for that reason, hand in hand with incongruity in this clip. Our protagonist does not act according to our expectations, and we can therefore involve the

Incongruity Theory, which, to sum up, is about us laughing when things doesn’t match our expectations and are incongruent with our perception of the world. As a result of the surprise and the Incongruity Theory, more suspense is added to the clip. Knowing, or not knowing, that something not typical will happen, creates a more exciting experience, when you’re watching a movie. Without suspense in a movie, most movie-lovers could start packing their things and go home, because watching a movie with no suspense wouldn’t be worth the time.
Yet another thing that makes us laugh about the clip, is its use of ambiguity and irony.

At The office conversation, “Van Wilder Shit Scene”, 0.23, one of the men asks our protagonist a very ironic and ambiguous question: “You look like you want to get something out, son”. By saying that, he expected for our protagonist to start opening up and speak, but our protagonist chose to open up in the wrong end, which led to a very ironic and ambiguous scene because of the sentence being capable of having several meanings. It makes us laugh because he kind of predicted for that to happen, by saying what he did, even though he never knew what has going to

happen.
Exaggeration, surprise, incongruity, irony and ambiguity. It’s because of all these humorous devices we laugh at this clip. The use of exaggeration makes it funny to laugh at, and the way the whole clip portrays the scenario as a very untypical situation, adds a new layer or perspective to the clip, which makes it interesting to watch. Irony is a typical humorous device, which is also used regularly in real life, but can take you by surprise at any time. Putting all these humorous devices together, we get a combination or fun, disgust, surprise, and suspense which makes this clip a whole lot of fun to watch.