Review: Adventure Time “Blenanas”

It’s funny, you see?

Overview:

Finn tries really hard to make other people laugh at his joke.

Our Take:

The entire episode revolves around one thing—Finn makes a joke and gets upset that nobody finds it funny. He goes around Ooo, trying to find someone to laugh at his joke, but everyone either doesn’t get it or is too busy trying to do other things. The lack of validation ends up getting him frustrated, so he goes about other means. The thing is, it’s a weird feeling when you come up with something and nobody notices it. It’s frustrating, and it’s easy to want to tell the joke again just to make sure that you were really heard. However, as frustrating as it is, sometimes what people do with that going forward is where it differs.

In order to prove that his joke was funny, Finn continues on with his journey and makes it permanent in print. By immortalizing it, he can prove to the world that his joke was in fact, funny. He finds some help in the form of the Ice King, who laughs at his joke, and they team up in having similar senses of humor.  Along the way, and in teaming up with the Ice King, Finn starts to see his way as the most important, and the ultimate joke. When he finds out what the original caption was, he says that it wasn’t funny, and he was better. The Ice King burns the comic factory down after the first printing, preventing anyone else from possibly wanting to make their own jokes as well. After a while, it becomes less self-validation and more puffing themselves up, which is a very easy trap to fall into. Just by making it ‘official’ doesn’t mean that anyone should laugh at it more. Humor is flexible; if it’s not funny the first time, it’s likely not funny the second time around.

It turns out that the best sense of humor ended up being the simplest one. What gets BMO to laugh isn’t Finn’s joke, but a banana peel. Finn slips on the banana peel, and that’s the best joke there is. In the end, humor doesn’t have to be particularly high-brow- the classics are just as funny, and there’s really no need to go that far. Sometimes, something simple is enough to make people laugh.