I was watching It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia (IASIP), the latest episode (S07 E10 "How Mac Got Fat"), and it gave me the idea for this post. The set-up is Mac telling the story of how he got fat to a priest. Watch it, as always, IASIP is hands down hilarious.
When you make a show, tell a story, shoot a movie, whatever,... The goal is to create an Illusion so that your audience gets sucked in the story. Illusions are built in various ways, some very easy like just saying "Once upon a time", some much more complicated like a movie set during the French Revolution where you would need to have realistic clothing, tools, buildings, and so on.
An Illusion compiles a bunch of different factors and tools to ensure that it is still working. But you must always keep in mind that it isn't real. Actually, you accept for the duration of the story that it is real, but at the same time know it is complete fiction.
The most common way of building an Illusion is having very realistic sets. However, Illusion is not only a question of setting up an alternate reality, it's also ensuring that the Illusion is still holding. In Linguistics, we call this a Phatic factor. For example, you're telling a story and want to make sure your friends understand what you're saying :
"So this guy walks into a bar, ok? And he goes up to the counter, ok?"
Every time you say "Ok?", you are making sure your audience is still on-board with the Illusion you've set up. "Ok?" is a Phatic expression.
Now let's move on. Let me give you a taste of Inception.
When in a sitcom episode (or any kind of story telling by the way), you have a character telling a story and you actually see simultaneously the character and the acting out of the story, for LOLz I call this Inception. Two Illusions one on the other.
A story in a story. The character telling the story is already an Illusion and he himself is building another Illusion to make sure his story is understood. In IASIP's latest episode, that's what we get. In the Arabian Nights, that ALL we get : a story in a story in a story in a story... Inception.
When Inception happens, an added Illusion tool appears : the "Fake Audience". In this episode of IASIP, Mac tells the story to a priest. The priest is the "Fake Audience", Mac is telling the story to us, the viewers via the priest.
Since we now have a "Fake Audience", it must react like a normal audience. So the priest asks questions and little by little these questions are not church related. The priest becomes an ordinary audience with general questions about the show and the plot. So when Mac asks the priest if he understands his situation the priest says that none of what he just heard made any sense. IASIP is an absurd show and although things seem to make sense, it's always in a weird corrupt way.
In the same way, when Mac is talking about the secondary plot, the priest tells him to focus on the main one.
Our perception as viewers shifts from a rather passive state to a more active one by identifying ourselves to the priest.
Inception
This happens frequently in Sitcoms because it manages to change the normal course of an episode and creates a mild surprise effect. So find other occurrences of Inception in other shows. For another example, check out American Dad S03 E07 "Of Ice and Men", the same thing happens there.
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Thank you,
TRJ
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