Ranch Salad
- Luca starts a salad in Liam's bedroom
- Luca pours ranch on it
- Luca adds parmesan from under the bed
- Luca adds more ranch
- Luca throws ingredients on the floor
- Luca cannot stop
In my sketch Ranch Salad a very picky roommate, Luca, tries to eat healthier to get the approval of his housemates. With every obstacle, Luca manages to pursue complete mechanical rigidity regardless of every obstacle, and his roommate, Liam, dissuades him from making the choices he's making. At every step, the salad he's making gets worse, and the room gets a little messier, until the salad is inedible, and the room is destroyed. Luca is unable to adapt to Liam's pleas; he cannot stop. We laugh because we see what he can't, the plan is not working and yet he persists.
The laugh is what keeps us from judging him too harshly as we watch the error of the mechanization, but it is not inherently a failure, it is Luca's only path forward.
Bergson locates the mechanical in the person. In my work, the mechanical system extends to the world itself. If the world is its own character, it too can exhibit mechanization unknowingly, especially in contrast to other works of mine where the world does not lack agency.
Revisiting The Human and Duck Show, we see aspects of the world's lack of awareness and mechanical behaviors. The canned laughter and applause after every terrible thing the duck says shows a complete lack of awareness from the environment, which we know has control in this sketch, as it will not allow Human to expose it. The studio set is its own entity hellbent on staying true to its behavior no matter how unfitting it is for the situation.
The mechanical unawareness exposes those mechanisms clearly to the audience and we are actually given a chance to reflect. What we're noticing is the absurdity of the system, in this case, the show pretending to be normal when it is definitely not. The laughter is what gives us an ease, what Bergson called "a momentary anesthesia of the heart," allowing us to put our emotions on hold and observe with solely our intelligence. This is what keeps us from falling in when accessing the bird's eye view.