QI AUDIENCE PLEASURES

I went to the BBC website at www.bbc.co.uk and found clips of QI, a comedy panel game hosted by Stephen Fry and featuring permanent panellist Alan Davies. I watched and analysed the clip called 'A Mind Blowing Snack' from series L which you can see here.

Audience pleasures in the clip:

• You see familiar people (Stephen Fry and Alan Davies) who are in every episode and so you form an on screen relationship with them and their personalities (i.e. Stephen Fry as the erudite intellectual and Alan Davies as the scapegoat). Relationships is one of the four gratifications of consuming media in the Uses and Gratifications model, and is a way audiences get pleasure from watching TV shows like QI. You feel you know the characters and are included in their jokes and banter.
• Alan Davies is consistently the scapegoat and always falls into the trap of saying the most obvious answer rather than the 'quite interesting' one. In this clip he does just that by asking if the green food is wasabi causing the sirens to go off. This gives the audience pleasure because it makes them feel safe in that they can watch from the comfort of their own homes and answer rightly or wrongly without such public humiliation. It also endears the audience to Alan as they feel sympathy for him always being the one to get the question wrong. This also helps in creating the on screen relationship with the panellists.
• There is physical humour, for example when Jason Manford comically fans his mouth after taking a bite of the green horse radish. This exaggeration is humorous and so gives the audience pleasure.
• The audience gets pleasure from watching Johnny Vegas take a big mouthful of the horse radish and then realise his mistake as it is very spicy. This gives the audience pleasure partly because his pain is humorous as he over reacts even though you know it is not as bad as he says and partly because they are relieved not to be in the same situation (similar to the idea of not having the sirens go off if you get the answers wrong). Johnny's over reaction is humorous to the audience because they know he is mainly putting it on; he uses physical humour like pulling faces and irony, for example telling Stephen Fry it would have been useful if he'd put up the pictures of the horse radish first instead of 'giving us some and saying 'Put that in your mouth'". He also jokes that he will be "flying home" and that he can "see through walls", entertaining the audience and playing up to them. This kind of humour from comedians on the panel is typical of QI and is one of the pleasures as they get to see other familiar faces such as Jason Manford, Aisling Bea and Johnny Vegas in this clip.