Hacker News Reader

Comment by FrankWilhoit | Hacker News Reader

Mozart wrote for audiences who were only half paying attention. If that is all he had done -- and it was all that most of his peers did -- he would be forgotten. But at the same time he also wrote for audiences who were paying the closest possible attention. He is remembered for doing both. It is quite a trick, as you will see if you try it. Netflix do not even see the need for it, and therefore, their "works" will be forgotten.

View on HN

Not quite as highbrow, but Pixar stuff, particularly the earlier movies, manage to have jokes that work for kids and their parents. It was much appreciated.

Many of the original Loony Toons and Warner Brothers cartoons fall into this category.

The reason they were produced from the 1930s to 50s was to be run in movie theaters before the main picture. Since they would run before different kinds of movies they had to entertain both kids and adults. Some of the humor in those cartoons clearly went way over the kinds heads.

It was only later that they were bundled as TV shows for children.

The first few seasons of SpongeBob SquarePants are also masterfully crafted in this way

Bluey is pretty good in in that aspect too.

Yes! I can still go back and re-watch SpongeBob episodes despite the being 30, and I still laugh. Just at different things now :')

It already is. Every time they drop a new show, it's a hot topic for a week, maybe two, then it immediately falls out of the gestalt. No one brings up anything they've done in the future ever again. You barely ever hear anyone mention things like bird box.

oh I love the old shows that were written with two-level humor.

think foghorn leghorn with funny physical humor for the kids and subversive humor for the parents.

Sort of related -- I have friends who are immigrants to the US. They have a hard time with subtle types of humor, but some extra physical humor can sometimes let them have a good time anyway.

And parents of the time also got that Foghorn Leghorn was a parody of Senator Claghorn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Claghorn

Edit: Apparently, Foghorn goes even further back and is a parody of the sheriff from Blue Monday Jamboree as the first Foghorn episode predates Claghorn: https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/the-origin-of-foghorn-...

This is a great point that's applicable to legal writing. Thank you for sharing it!

Any chance you have a source where I could learn more about this aspect of Mozart's work?

Good question. The literature does not tend to be very informative on this point. It is a difficult topic to discuss because you can either handwave and presume agreement, or else go very deep. It has a lot to do with the amount and kind of repetition, and that is where the analogy between music and prose gets wobbly. The nearest thing we had to a Mozart in living memory was Stephen Sondheim. Something like "Comedy Tonight" would have been very familiar to Mozart, in purpose if not in all the details of execution.

In terms of technical writing for multiple audiences, it comes immediately to vocabulary, and there, again, the analogy fails, because it is much harder to get away with using unfamiliar words. For your purposes, Churchill might be a more direct model than Mozart. Look particularly at how he deploys words of one syllable, two syllables, etc. to shape phrases and produce climactic rhythms. Occupational dialect, full of terms-of-art, is obviously an obstacle to this kind of thing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com