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The legacy of Matthew Perry - a new genre of entertainment
Manage episode 382560848 series 3495401
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This week I'm going to talk about Matthew Perry and a couple of things that have come to light following his sad and untimely death. Soap operas were a pretty crowded market back in 1994 when Matthew Perry and friends first hit American TV screens. Friends brought together comedy and a soap opera and the concept of bringing together two things which are quite different to form something better than the two is known as integrative thinking. Another thing that has come to light from Matthew Perry’s life is that although he was wealthy and successful, he based his whole idea of what was good on one simple thing, “do I get the laugh?” And when he didn’t get a laugh from the audience Matthew took this personally. Comedy is a tough business and there are other ways to evaluate what was happening, this leads us to think about ways in which other comedians evaluated and moved on. Ken Dodd was one of the most analytical comedians in the UK, testing and refining different jokes on different audiences. And we can learn a lot about how analytics can move us from a pass/fail test to something more useful and enlightening – in Ken’s case a Giggle Map – an analytical tool to help Ken to place the right joke in the right place. According to Ken, northern audiences needed a lot of “one liners” whereas in the south of the UK some more subtle jokes were called for.
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