Hey, remember when I did a trope talk on Lampshading and then I spent like a third of the
video talking about something called "bathos" that had examples that overlapped with lampshading but,
let's be honest, was barely on-topic and really only made it into the script because I evidently
got really tilted about insincerity in media? Now I love going off on tangents almost as much
as you guys evidently like watching me go off on tangents for reasons I cannot fathom
but am extremely grateful for, but the fact is "bathos" is a really interesting subject that
I don't actually hate, and I think it deserves its own full-length dissection instead of just a
footnote in another video. So let's talk about it! As a refresher, "bathos" means a "rhetorical
anticlimax", which basically means that thing in storytelling where a moment that
feels like it could be profound or meaningful or powerful is rendered anticlimactic by something
incongruously low-brow cutting in and ruining the moment - a record scratch on the soundtrack,
a cut to the wide shot, a sudden awkward silence after a big climactic build to nothing. Basically
if the scene could end with a fart joke cut in and be almost entirely unchanged,
it's probably a moment of bathos. Now the definition of bathos has actually
drifted since it was originally coined in 1728 in the essay Peri Bathous, or "The Art Of Sinking In
Poetry," which was a parody of a Greek work of lit crit called Peri Hypsous, "On the Sublime."
Allegedly there's a typo in the original work where pathos, meaning a general vibe of typically
negative emotional experiences, was mis-written as bathos, an unrelated word meaning "depth".
The essay Peri Bathous was a protracted dunk on contemporary poets the author didn't like because
they had a habit of undercutting the profoundness of their own poetry by being bad at metaphor,
like comparing something beautiful or divine to something weak or dumb-sounding, causing an
effect of "sinking" in the audience. The essay is very incomprehensible to a modern reader
because none of the poets getting dunked on are remembered nowadays on account of how they sucked,
but the gist is comparable to modern things like the Bad Sex Scene Awards or when writers
call eyes "cerulean orbs" and stuff like that. The idea is that comparing something profound
or glorious or beautiful to something low or comedic or just plain goofy-sounding is a good
way to completely undercut the impact. It's not enough for a metaphor to be like "this thing is
like this other thing," the two things need to evoke a similar feeling. Comparing a sunrise to
a bowl of cheetos doesn't exactly feel poetic just because they're both orange. This early definition
of "bathos" basically referred to situations where something intended to be highly impactful
was undercut by the weakness of its execution. Now while this original definition referred to
an unintentional quirk of writing, the modern definition of bathos has shifted to mostly refer
to purposeful undercutting, where the writer intentionally shifts the tone of a scene from
something sincere or profound to something goofy or self-aware. But the old definition is still
in use, and frankly it can sometimes be hard to tell if the writer's doing it on purpose or not,
so nowadays there are a few different kinds of bathos, and unpacking them
sounds like a good place to start. The first form of bathos is basically
the original one - where it's Not That Deep. In these instances a story attempting to be
deep and profound misses and belly-flops into the shallows instead. These cases are almost
always unintentional unless they're happening in-story - like if a bad guy is monologuing and
gets interrupted by a good guy giggling at an innuendo in their phrasing or something,
which is a case of in-universe bathos rather than one experienced directly by the audience.
But outside of that sort of scenario, this version is basically by definition accidental, caused by
clumsy metaphor or dubious execution or otherwise the story just not living up to its own promise.
This has some overlap with a separate trope which is called Narm for… tvtropes reasons. The gist of
narm is that a moment intended to be emotionally impactful sparks an unrelated response in the
audience because of some overlooked component of the execution, like a weird line delivery
or a jarringly-placed swearword or dialogue that was clearly written by someone trying
very hard to be cool or just plain bad acting - so basically a moment that dislodges the audience's
immersion in the story by virtue of kinda sucking, typically turning a serious moment into a comedic
one because sometimes when the execution is bad enough all you can do is laugh. These cases of
bathos are accidental, highly subjective and difficult to control for, because they boil
down to being a skill issue on the part of the creator and it's always hard to hear that the
way to make your art better is to just git gud. Now my theory is this type of accidentally bathos
is indirectly responsible for the cases of intentional bathos - because most writers
are very afraid of messing up a moment that's supposed to be sincere. Just like in real life,
sincerity is vulnerability, and there's nothing worse than allowing yourself to
be vulnerable and then getting laughed at. So a writer writing a sincere moment might be struck
with fear that their sincerity will become the object of ridicule - and just like in real life,
one of the easiest ways to feel in control in that situation is to be the first one to laugh. If you
make fun of yourself, then when other people laugh they're laughing with you, not at you.
That's the theory, anyway. In practice what this means is that anyone who was taking you
seriously will feel weird at best and actively mocked at worst, which is also likely to select
for an audience that does want to laugh at you, since they're gonna be the only people
comfortable with the tone you're establishing. This is basically just another angle on the fact
that self-deprecating humor is really only funny to the people who are comfortable deprecating you,
and uncomfortable to everyone else. But as a writer, this is an easy trap to slide
into. And the threat of accidental bathos can incentivize writers to shy away from sincerity,
because what if somebody thinks it's silly? So you end up with stories that intentionally undercut
their moments of depth or emotional vulnerability so that they can be the first one laughing.
That's how we get the subcategory of bathos that covers joke twists,
where a scene is set up to play out in a serious way, often according to a trope that the audience
is expected to be familiar with - like a slow-mo explosion walk or a big romantic kiss or a moment
of emotional realness before a dangerous situation or a heart-wrenching heroic sacrifice - and then
the audience's expectations are subverted when instead they… don't do that. Somebody doesn't
respond according to the expected script. A heartfelt and emotional confession, instead
of receiving a heartfelt and emotional response, gets a cut to a wide shot with crickets chirping
while the other characters either uncomfortably ignore or poke fun at their teammate for their
emotional vulnerability. A dramatic and menacing threat from the big bad, instead of being received
with fear or heroic determination, is met with an unrelated non-sequitur as someone comically misses
the point. The number one clue that telegraphs that this form of bathos is happening is when
the soundtrack starts getting weird - if the music is just a little too sincerely bombastic in the
windup, it's a good sign that it's about to cut out on the punchline as a musical cue to direct
how the audience should be feeling - a sudden drop from investment to uninvestment. This form
of bathos is always purposeful, but it suffers from the same weakness as all plot twists:
if it seems like the expected un-twisty sequence of events would've been more fun or meaningful,
the audience might regret the wasted potential, and if the story does it too often the audience
can get a bit sick of the story constantly twisting away from their expectations into
dull insincerity for the sake of feeling clever or protecting itself from ridicule. For instance,
while it can be fun to have characters that can lighten the mood or show their Heroic Fearlessness
by cracking jokes in the face of peril, if the audience wants the characters to have a heartfelt
and emotional conversation because there's a lot for them to talk about that hasn't been discussed,
it can get pretty annoying if all they do is joke and derail and act too cool for the story they're
in. If the villain could really use a cool moment to establish how terrifying they are,
making it seem like nobody important takes them seriously is a really good way to convince the
audience that they don't pose any sort of real threat. If the couple in the big romantic subplot
are about to finally kiss and then some comic relief sidekick pops up to give them a reason
to put that off for another two seasons, the audience rage could be picked up by seismic
stations three counties over. Setting up one thing and delivering another always risks frustrating
the audience that would have preferred to see that first thing they were promised. That doesn't make
it automatically bad, it just makes it risky to overuse. And if this form of comedy is motivated
on the part of the author by fear of ridicule, the author is expressing a form of mistrust in their
audience - and the audience can sometimes pick up on that. If a story feels embarrassed to exist,
the audience is liable to feel embarrassment by proxy, even if they don't necessarily realize
that's what they're picking up on. Joke twists are not inherently harmful to audience investment and
can be very funny, but like all twists they affect audience trust in the story, which means if they
happen too consistently they'll train the audience to expect the twist - and because these twists
are specifically located in climactic moments of emotional depth and sincerity, if the audience is
trained to anticipate a subversive punchline, they are going to enter those emotional moments - the
moments they should be at their most invested - reflexively uninvested. The big moments won't hit
until the audience knows for sure that there's not gonna be a joke. So if a story has a good mix of
moments that are sincere versus moments that are Wacky and Off-Script, the audience won't fully
check out and the moments of comedy will be fun little highlights instead of a constant reminder
that nobody thinks any of this matters. Speaking of which, the third major form
of bathos is The Un-Reaction. While a joke twist derails with humor, the Un-Reaction derails with
disinterest. The events of the story may be high-stakes, impactful, emotionally profound
or just plain cool to look at, but if the character's actions and dialogue don't reflect
their circumstances, the impact of those events on the audience can be drastically weakened. This
happens very often when a character is being framed as Too Cool For School, and this is
being demonstrated by putting them in a perilous situation and then showing how totally unbothered
they are by the danger - but the thing is, if the characters don't care about what's happening,
it can make it harder for an audience to care about what's happening. While the intention is
generally to show the audience that a character is very cool because they're completely blasé about
a scenario the audience finds perilous, it can instead draw the audience to conclude that the
situation is not actually perilous and thus not worth paying any real attention to, because the
character isn't emotionally invested in anything that's going on. This form of bathos is typically
unintentional, because the effect the author wants to produce is making the character look cooler,
not making the situation look boring. The bathos of this can be countered by letting the character
react to their situation in other ways. If the author wants to communicate that this character
is very cool and competent and not scared of the perilous situation, instead of broad
apathy they could instead show the character focusing intently on key details, checking in
on their team's well-being, or being gleeful or enthusiastic about the process of navigating that
situation - perhaps reveling in the challenge, admiring an exceptionally nightmarish threat,
focusing on a seemingly very minor part of the scenario like protecting their snack or continuing
a heated argument with an ally. There are a ton of possibilities because this is basically just
letting the character feel like a person uniquely navigating a scenario they may find challenging
but not frightening. This communicates that the character is very competent and unafraid
of their situation without making it seem like the character is uninvested in their situation
or an emotionless vehicle for fight choreography, because it maintains the idea that this character
cares about something - whether that's their friends, a good fight, getting to show off,
eating something tasty, winning an argument or whatever. It anchors the story for the
audience by providing a clear point of sincerity. And sincerity - and the lack thereof - really is
the crux of this trope. Cases of accidental bathos are perfectly sincere on the creator
side of things, but the flawed execution makes it difficult for an audience to sincerely engage
with the work - even a good-faith audience might find themself laughing at supposedly
serious moments or bored and uninvested during the narrative climax if the story
keeps kneecapping itself every time it builds up a hint of emotional investment. And cases of
intentional bathos are purposefully insincere - setting up an intention of honest, impactful
storytelling and then subverting expectations so the audience takes the scene as a joke instead.
Now when I started this video I said I don't actually hate this trope, and I meant it,
even if the last five-ish minutes might make that hard to believe. The fact is, bathos in its modern
intentional form is a comedy trope, and comedy is all about timing. The problem a lot of people are
having with bathos is overexposure. If every line is a punchline, those jokes better be fresh as
hell or they're gonna start getting old fast. And there's an element to bathos that feels
almost… wasteful sometimes. As mentioned, the number one reason a plot twist can disappoint is
if the theoretical un-twisty version of events strikes the audience as more interesting or
satisfying or fun to explore, and that means if you set up something profound and then deliver
an empty punchline instead of a powerful moment, the loss of that potential moment can feel bad.
Storytelling involves a process of planting and payoff, and if the thing you plant isn't the
thing you pay off, you're gonna gradually teach your audience not to trust your storytelling to
pay off the cool ideas you have planted. And an audience that can't trust a story is an
audience that will struggle to get invested in the story. Like the boy who cried wolf,
the story that cried "punchline" will train its audience to always anticipate a joke or a quip,
and if the story does finally indulge in a moment of uninterrupted sincerity for a crucial moment
in the plot, the audience might have trouble taking the moment at face value if they're too
busy glancing around for the custard pie. A story that repeatedly smacks the audience for
caring about the expectations that the story has set up is a story that's teaching its
audience to keep its distance - and selecting for an audience that is not going to care.
So the stories that use bathos in a way that I like tend to be really good at knowing what
moments of theoretical sincerity they can afford to sacrifice or undercut without losing anything.
The powerful and important moments that mean something to the characters get to be played
straight, with full sincerity and maximum emotional impact for the audience - and
the subversive moments of bathos are worth the cost because they're funnier than the
impact of the theoretical un-twists they're replacing, since they typically either replace
something small or something repetitive. There are also cases where the bathos-y
punchline can be the less frustrating option than whatever trope it was replacing. For instance,
if a character is pulling a Noble Heroic Sacrifice and in the un-twisty version of events is about to
be dead or worse, it can be both funny and emotionally rewarding for a punchline to
undercut that, saving the character and getting a laugh at the same time. Frustration at "subverted
expectations" is liable to take a backseat to relief that they aren't losing an interesting
character. Or if a character is about to be taken in by a villain's manipulations before
swerving into a punchline instead, that couples bathos with a heroic moment and can make it feel
very triumphant, like the hero is winning so hard it's actually changing the genre a little.
And some stories will manage to work in bathos in a way that lets them have their cake and eat
it too. For instance, you might get a story with a really cool fight in it, and then after a good
chunk of really cool fight, things get interrupted by a bathos-y moment - like a goofy non-sequiter
or a complete tone shift or the bad guy getting randomly one-shotted by a truck - and while
this is a moment of bathos because it abruptly dunks the tone from seriousness into silliness,
it isn't really replacing or costing us anything, because the only thing it's undercutting is
more of the same fight scene, and we've already seen all the good fight choreography. It's only
replacing something repetitive. Or maybe a very cool and fun character is out of commission and
their replacement is unexpectedly very different from them, typically in a disappointing but
comedic way - but that disappointment doesn't deprive the audience of the impact of the cool
original version, because they still got in some time with them, and the downgrade manifests as
an in-universe disappointment because the characters also recognize that their cool,
sincere, best option has been replaced by a comedically inferior version. Since the
audience gets to see both the version of events that's played straight and the version of events
that gets undercut with bathos, it doesn't feel so much like one is being sacrificed for the other.
There are also, obviously, ways to incorporate comedy into a scene that don't automatically
undercut or derail that scene from its expected trajectory. A character can quip or comment
sardonically about their situation without it grinding the plot to a screeching halt and making
the whole thing seem pointless and uninvested. For one thing, characters can be both funny
and sincere at the same time, lightening the mood without disconnecting them from the plot. In fact,
there's plenty of comedy to be found in sincerity - characters responding earnestly to rhetorical
or metaphorical questions, or asking curious follow-up questions to stock villainous threats,
or just generally taking their situation at actual presented face value rather than playing
along with whatever stock tropey script the other character is trying to pull out. This can result
in moments of bathos that reinforce the emotional impact of the story rather than damaging it,
because it's coming from a place of in-character sincerity and narrative investment instead of
the story feeling too embarrassed to let a real character moment play out.
Bathos has gotten a bad rap. From me. Personally. People, and by "people" I mean me,
love to rag on "joss whedon quippy dialogue" and "marvel dialogue" and "he's right behind me isn't
he" and there's a reason for that. The reason is oversaturation. The reason is a desire for open,
risky vulnerability. I was rewatching Fellowship of the Ring the other day and when Aragorn and
Arwen were on the bridge in Rivendell having their heart-to-heart and she said "I choose a mortal
life" and the camera held on him for a second I literally braced for a quip! I knew the movie
I was watching, I knew Tolkien would never do me dirty like that, and my brain still autocompleted
a theoretical scenario where the soundtrack cut out and Aragorn went "a mortal life with me,
right? because ya know, there's a lotta great guys out there and Boromir's right upstairs-"
and Arwen smiled and kinda shook her head a little because oh, men are so funny and
she has to be the sensible once about it - and that glimpse of that darker timeline shook me. I
brought that energy with me. It was in my head. The thing is, the Lord of the Rings movies are
not Bathos-free. Gimli's characterization is very different than it is in the book, and it's
a change that smacks of insincerity. This noble, regal prince character is rewritten as the short,
funny comic relief to contrast the tall, gorgeous serious people in moments of tension by yelling
about his beard and complaining about having to run places, and it feels like the director
maybe didn't trust the audience to accept a trio of characters that were all serious,
sincere, epic figures. Someone had to be funny, because stories need comic relief and Merry and
Pippin were busy getting absolutely hash-blasted with the ents. It's much less densely bathos'd
than a lot of more modern stories, but it's still there, and it deprives the audience of some good
Gimli content. But bathos is the exception in those movies. Most moments are played straight,
and the audience is not trained to expect a punchline when two characters are having
a heart to heart. Gimli even gets moments of sincerity - sincere awe of Galadriel,
sincere gut-wrenching grief in the Mines of Moria. We still get to take him seriously sometimes - but
the cost of his book-accurate character feels like a pretty hefty price to pay for "not the beard!"
Bathos is not bad. But it can be symptomatic. It can signal that a writer or director doesn't
trust their audience to take their story at face value or in good faith. Being vulnerable is scary,
and on some level telling a story you care deeply about is a bit like tearing your heart out and
submitting it for peer review. But that's a risk and a sacrifice artists have to be
willing to make in order to share the things they care so much about. Trying to shy away from that
vulnerability risks sabotaging the creation to shield the creator's ego. And that bums me
out! It's sad to see a story plant a beautiful, nuanced concept and then break it because they
got scared of paying it off. It shows you what the story could have been if it were sincere,
and then it kills it for a laugh because it decided you were already laughing.
And I… could insert a punchline here, because… that's haha funny and this is a haha funny
channel, but that would be hypocritical of me and it's right behind me, isn't it. Haha- okay,
all right. [laughs] Good night, everybody. So yeah.