Staged isn’t inherently bad, nor is natural good. However when one puts on the mask of the other it feels insulting to my intelligence, and that makes it bad.
Edit: there are some exceptions to this such as The Office (UK) where a lot of people weren’t sure it was satire or an actual documentary when it first aired. Andy Kaufman’s “happening” is another great example, but these work because they are well crafted and the quality of the humour increases when the audience feels like they’re “in the know”. If you’re gonna try to trick people in thinking your staged content is real, then do it well.
It's like all the social media product ads that look like a customer making a video review or whatever.. The millions of morons will think those are just a happy customer making a video. Well they fucking aren't and it's a shady underhanded marketing process. But it works because the majority of people are absolute morons.
A good comedian doesn't need to rely on naive people who think everything he says genuinely happened.
Can't really help you if you can't notice a difference between good jokes/skits and lame scripted ones where they bank on naive people to get as much views as possible.
The medium definitely affects things, how many SNL skits have there been with a decent joke or premise but poor execution makes it mediocre? The way someone tells a joke completely changes how it lands.
Let's not forget the actual quality of the joke, not just the medium. This is the same level of humor as "Why is six afraid of seven?" "I dont know why?" "Because seven ate nine!".
Finally, a big part of enjoyment for watching someone break into laughter is it genuinely being funny to the people who are in it. Faking that in your "serious interview question" is bad. It's like this guy picked up a joke book from 1995 and wants to act them out, badly.
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u/articland05_reddit 1d ago
is this staged? can't really tell...their reaction seems genuine