Wednesday, April 9, 2014
Obscure References
So, this past weekend, I went to see some student written plays get performed at my old high school. A lot of them were actually really funny and well-written. Anyway, one of them was basically a lot of nerdy references to Doctor Who, but it was really clever and really funny, if you watch Doctor Who that is. I think me and like, four other people in the audience of 200 ended up having any sort of response to the jokes and whatnot, which is kind of a bummer. All of this made me think of the risk of making references in writing, especially when it comes to pop culture. It could be a really funny reference, but if you don't have the right audience, it gets lost, and you confuse and lose people. So, is it really worth the possible laugh to make risky references?
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Ideally, I would hope that a risky reference would have elements of humor that would appeal to both people who understand the reference and people who don't. Since that can be very difficult though, the value of obscure references is highly dependent on the expected audience. If the writer wants their work to have wide appeal then it should have few risky references, but if they want to occupy a specific niche for people already familiar with the references then there really isn't much of a risk in using them. In this case obscure references should be kept to a minimum in a mainstream work. However, I think there is more freedom to use more popular references in such a work as well. In the case of Doctor Who, having a police box shaped object travel through time, a Tom Baker-esque character with a long scarf, or a hostile alien yell exterminate! would have a better chance to be recognized by a less informed audience than the weeping angels or any of the companions. Mixing in these types of references and having more generally understood humor would hopefully keep the majority of the audience entertained rather than just the select people in a pop culture niche.
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