Comedy Teams — The Penguins of Madagascar

The Dream­works ani­mated film “Mada­gas­car” was about a group of ani­mals who escape from a met­ro­pol­i­tan zoo in an effort to return to the wilder­ness.  Like many ani­mated films, it included sec­ondary char­ac­ters who have no pur­pose beyond  comic relief.  Such char­ac­ters do not have the com­plex devel­op­ment arc to fol­low, so they can just be funny.  Those are the kinds of char­ac­ters I really like.  In Mada­gas­car, the sec­ondary char­ac­ters were a team of pen­guins fol­low­ing their own plan to escape from the same zoo.  As enter­tain­ing char­ac­ters the pen­guins were suc­cess­ful enough that Dream­works spun them off into their own tele­vi­sion show, which is pro­duced by Nickelodeon.

The four pen­guins are Rico, Skip­per, Pri­vate and Kowal­ski.    Skip­per is the leader, and speaks with a speedy pat­ter rem­i­nis­cent of hard­boiled detec­tive movies.   Kol­wal­ski is the smart one.  He’s a genius who report­edly is unable to read.   I like his name because it was also a char­ac­ter in the old TV show “Voy­age to the Bot­tom of the Sea”.  Toss­ing a Pol­ish name into the mix used to be stan­dard mate­r­ial in com­bat related sto­ries.  Rico is a sup­pos­edly a “weapons and explo­sives” expert.  He is a sub ver­bal char­ac­ter who is able to regur­gi­tate any thing they might need.  Pri­vate is the omega in the group, but he pro­vides a sim­plic­ity that helps group from becom­ing too weird.  Why he has an Eng­lish accent I don’t know.

When the show first aired, I watched an episode.  But I was dis­ap­pointed.  It just didn’t work then, and I didn’t fol­low up.  But recently my nine year old was watch­ing it, and I joined him.  I found it much fun­nier now.  I was con­tin­u­ously enter­tained, and at a brisk pace too.   It is an excel­lent car­toon, and the show also got me think­ing about com­edy teams.

I real­ized that com­edy teams cre­ate their own real­ity.  Such teams are bliss­fully out of touch with what other peo­ple are think­ing.  They develop a small soci­ety, rein­forc­ing each oth­ers beliefs.  They under­stand each other where out­siders would be con­fused.  They develop lan­guage to suit their pur­poses, and their ver­bal stylings become a humor of their own.  The pen­guins all share the same delu­sions about their sit­u­a­tion.  It’s like an improv com­edy group where say­ing no stops the momen­tum.  They are a team, in the sense of a sports team who play together to win.   None of them would stop and say their plan is fool­ish, unless they had an even more fool­ish plan in mind.

Teams tend to have a leader, or at least a star.  Grou­cho was the most func­tional of the Marx Broth­ers, he could actu­ally catch a woman or become pres­i­dent of a coun­try.  Skip­per is the alpha of the pen­guins, and he is some­what para­noid.  He tends to get very dra­matic about their sit­u­a­tion, and the rest of them fol­low orders.  His over-reaction is often what dri­ves the com­edy.   The para-military theme of their oper­a­tion allows for lots of action.

Another char­ac­ter­is­tic of great com­edy teams is their energy.  Like the Marx Broth­ers or the Three Stooges, the shear speed and deter­mi­na­tion of the pen­guins over­whelms the rest of the zoo soci­ety.  The “nor­mal” world doesn’t have a chance.  The come­di­ans also have strange tal­ents that allow them to achieve things oth­ers can’t.

Also, com­edy team mem­bers each have dis­tinct and inter­est­ing styles.  They can break off indi­vid­u­ally, or into sub­groups, and the dynamic changes and allows for fresh direc­tion.  The vari­ety adds depth to the indi­vid­ual per­son­al­i­ties, and broad­ens the range of comedy.

Even though the pen­guins are funny, they are seri­ous about what they do.  To bal­ance the energy they are often inter­act­ing with the light­hearted disco danc­ing lemurs who also came from the first movie.   The lemurs form a team of their own, and the two teams in rela­tion form a kind of com­edy duo.  Seri­ous team in con­trast with silly team.

The Pen­guins of Mada­gas­car were cre­ated by Eric McGrath and Eric Dar­nell.  The show is directed by Brett Haa­land and Nick Filippi.