Madcap is a great Funny Filter to act out visually. It makes use of broad, physical comedy, funny faces, and pure silliness.
Audiences love slapstick comedy on stage, on TV, in movies, and in street art.
The question is, how do you do Madcap when the audience can’t see you? What about Madcap in prose? What about audio?
The answers are simple. In prose, you describe it. Prose is, after all, a screenplay for the movie readers make in their minds. They’ll laugh at physical humor just as hardily in good Madcap prose as they will at a Madcap movie.
You can find Madcap of all kinds in novels, humorous essays, short stories, and articles.
Here’s a recent example from The Onion. Here’s another.
Audio is the “theater of the mind.” It’s more an animatic than a screenplay for the movie in the audience’s head.
Sadly, the art of audio slapstick is dead, for the most part. Hilarious physical humor was once performed nightly on radios across the land with sound effects and voice. A funny voice, after all, is just as funny as a funny face. It all counts as Madcap.
Here’s a not-too-ancient example from Monty Python.
There’s plenty of Madcap happening on podcasts today, but most of it is spoken word only. Stand-ups use Madcap in their acts routinely.
Do you know of any radio drama Madcap produced today? Let me know in the comments.
Rocky and Bullwinkle, Underdog and Roger Ramjet were written like radio plays, thus the insane pacing and the art was insanely madcap.
There are a couple of kids' podcasts that use the radio play format to tell stories with dialog, music and sound effects such as Story Pirates and The Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd.
Spike Jones comes to mind. Pure radio madcap.