"Now that's comedy!"

Not long before Christmas, Scriptshadow reviewed a script called "Valedictorian", about an over-achieving student who would stop at nothing to attain the titular accolade. Haven't read it, but it sounds like something for people who thought that Election and Heathers were too cuddly. 

Carson singled out one of his favorite scenes in the script:

One of my favorite sequences is him trying to score a perfect score on an oral Spanish test. Larry is terrible at Spanish. Luckily for him, the real Spanish teacher is sick this week so a substitute is in. And the substitute is blind. So Larry comes up a plan to recruit a Mexican student who can’t speak a lick of English, and tell him to go into the class and pretend he’s him, Larry, before taking the test. However, before he goes, Larry fears that the student speaks Spanish a little too well. So he sits him down and attempts to teach him how to speak Spanish more like an American, erasing the heavy accent and the rolling R’s. It’s a funny scene and a great representation of the humor in the script.

Now, as I probably mentioned before, when it comes to plotholes and big twists, nine times out of ten, I'm a little slow on the uptake...but then comes that magic number ten (I'm still pretty proud of myself for figuring out the twist early on in Shutter Island). Here was my defense against that scene:

Larry sucks at Spanish, but a substitute is in for that day...and he's blind.

Does no one else's movie logic spidey-senses tingle at that? And that's not even getting into the coincidence factor.

Edit: And what's more, are all the other kids in this Spanish class blind, too? It's been mentioned that Larry is a douche with a capital bag, so who's to say that one of his (non-blind, might I add?) classmates wouldn't narc him out a) for some kind of revenge (cf. the janitor in Election) or b) just because "Hey, you're not Larry!"?

A few people agreed with me (quite a few upvotes), but one person responded with the following: "Short answer: it's a comedy." Meanwhile, I'm thinking, "You know, it's a good thing that you're just auditing this website and are not someone who's trying to be a better screenwriter or get something produced, because otherwise, a response like that comes off as really fucking stupid." Seriously, it's the kind of thing that's allowing improv to choke the genre to death. 'Oh, there doesn't need to be any plot logic or character consistency, because it's just a comedy.' And a hearty 'fuck you!' to anyone who sincerely believes that. If you throw this stuff out because you don't think you need it for comedies, you are dead in the water.

On that note, boy was I disappointed with The Wrong Guy, and I say this as a dyed-in-the-wool "Kids in the Hall" fan. 'Underrated comedy', my ass. Greedy is an underrated comedy. This was a piece of my heart dying.