Deadpan
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Deadpan is an adjective, describing a deliberately emotionless or impassive, matter-of-fact manner. It is also a form of comic delivery in which humor is presented without a change in emotion or body language. It is usually spoken in a casual, monotone, or cantankerous voice, and expresses a calm, sincere, or grave demeanor, often in spite of the ridiculousness of the subject matter. This delivery is also called dry humor or dry wit, when the intent, but not the presentation, is humorous, blunt, oblique, sarcastic, laconic, or apparently unintentional.
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Etymology
The term deadpan first emerged as an adjective or adverb in the 1920s, as a compound word combining "dead" and "pan" (a slang term for the face). The oldest usage recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary comes from The New York Times (1928), which defines the term as "playing a rôle with expressionless face". An example of this usage is in a scene from the 1934 film The Gay Bride in which a gangster tells a man on the other end of a phone conversation to "give it a dead pan" (with the emphasis on "pan"), so that the man does not inadvertently alert anyone else in the room as to the importance of what the gangster is about to say. The usage of deadpan as a verb ("to speak, act, or utter in a deadpan manner; to maintain a dead pan") is recorded at least as far back as 1942.
Examples
Many popular American sitcoms use deadpan expressions to deliver dry humor, most notably Curb Your Enthusiasm, Arrested Development, The Office, Red vs. Blue and Seinfeld. Some good current examples are the characters April Ludgate from the TV show Parks and Recreation played by Aubrey Plaza, or Bob Newhart as Arthur Jeffries in The Big Bang Theory. Another example is the often philosophical comedy of Steven Wright. Dry humor is often confused with highbrow or egghead humor, because the humor in dry humor does not exist in the words, their delivery, or both. Instead, the listener must look for humor in the contradiction between words, delivery and context. Failure to include the context or to identify the contradiction results in the listener finding the dry humor unfunny. However, the term "deadpan" itself actually only refers to the method of delivery.
Other deadpan comedians:
- Aubrey Plaza
- Buster Keaton
- Christopher Walken
- Craig Kilborn
- Dan Mintz
- Dave Hughes
- Demetri Martin
- Fred Armisen
- H. Jon Benjamin
- Jack Dee
- Jack Handey
- Jane Curtin
- Jim Gaffigan
- Jimmy Carr
- Jon Stewart
- Jonathan Katz
- Leslie Nielsen
- Mitch Hedberg
- Nathan Fielder
- Nick Offerman
- Patrick Warburton
- Paul Merton
- Peter Sellers
- Ricky Gervais
- Sarah Silverman
- Stephen Colbert
- Steven Wright
- Tim & Eric
- Angel Villasenor
- Todd Barry
- Zooey Deschanel
Styles within deadpan
Deadpan can vary in subtlety. Obvious deadpan uses a high amount of contrast either with characters or situations. It may also take the role of mirror to characters who are unaware of their folly. Some of this can be seen with the characters Britney and Kevin in Daria. More subtle deadpan can test the observational limits of the audience and even play off the audience's awareness (and thus off the implied intelligence of the audience). Some British comedy relies on this.
See also
