Blog Post 3.1
20 Acts in 60 Minutes
My favorites were:
1) Act 3: It’s Commerce that Brings Us Together
2) Act 13: More Lies
3) Act 19: Hard Life at the Top.
“Well, we lost it. So you can quit advertising it.” This concluding remark in Act 3 is funny and honest at the same time. That’s probably why I chose the rest of the acts in my list– a strange blend of innocence and humor, juxtaposing each other and giving these stories more dimensions and thus making them satisfactory. In this particular act, we get a glimpse of an American life which is hard to come by for those who live in the city and treat technology as their second nature. There is humor in their list of objects they are trying to sell and the unapologetic tone with which they announce them.
“Ohh, it’s mine; I keep change in that.” Act 13 is probably the funniest out of the bunch. Even though the college kids in this act are lying, there is this innocence about them that they are even embarrassed to admit to eating half a grapefruit and a can of black beans that they decided to erase any evidence of them ever existing by packing the other half of the grapefruit and the empty can in their bag. And the event that unfolds thereafter is just one of the few moments in life where life seems to be imitating a movie.
Whereas the very last act, although sans any laughter and guffaws, screams humor in the form of sobriety. You can’t help but laugh at the young cadet’s gaffes on their very first day at West Point. One is not sure whether to pay heed to the morbid histories, that the narrator relays, of the young cadets or the comedic scene of the scene at hand. “Is your last name Doe?”
When you listen to TAL, most of the time you like a story without knowing exactly why. I think the same is here as I try to choose the ones that I like. But I usually tend to like stories which are told live, rather than the ones which sound more like a monologue. Usually, I don’t look for particular themes or genre when I listen to TAL, but I do prefer to listen to stories that are personal, and tend to avoid those which sound like a reportage. However, the stories that I have listed above have this feel of remoteness– something that you yearn for when you live in a city.
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