The 5 Elements of So Bad It's Good

Have you ever watched a movie where the actors are not quite acting like how a normal person would act? I know, that’s practically every movie, especially these days. But it’s strange isn’t it? People demand realism or complain that something isn’t “realistic” and then they are fine when a giant purple alien from Jupiter is able to kill half of the universe with a snap of their fingers. It’s almost… what’s the word? Oh right: goofy!

Instead of realistic, I think what people are demanding is some kind of consistency or groundedness within the story’s own established tone and setting. Something that fits with how the scene is set up. We see a modern day police station with human police walking around and the phone ringing, we’re going to expect them to act accordingly with our societal standards. But then you get movies like Samurai Cop that turn the police station into a crazy mirror world where nothing makes sense and katana-wielding cops wear wigs while delivering elongated speeches like a robot reading an inventory.

As days go by, media becomes easier to create, and thus, easier to fail in, with contemporary audiences not helping in the slightest. In the old days, we couldn’t really create a hack style of writing because writing was a grand effort. Not everyone knew how to read and not everyone knew how to write, and to write a book meant you were going to dedicate years of costly education that was to then have years of work being put into a story. In other words: smart people did smart things to make stories.

Not anymore! Now any old joe-schmoe can write a story, make a movie, or have a YouTube series. This reality caused an increase in what we call “so bad it’s good” where the media in question is so “bad” that it horseshoes back into the area of “good” because it becomes entertaining. One of the most well known examples of this style is The Room, where we have moments that involve two people arguing at a party and they are fighting, but all the audience can do is laugh at how bad the fight and the acting is. Every introduction is with an “oh, hi…” and there are people playing football while wearing tuxedos.

It’s not that this is some kind of fantasy or even surrealism, but rather it’s a failure, whether intentional or unintentional, to apply contextual norms to the events and actions. We get taken out of the moment because it’s lost our suspension of disbelief and makes us disbelieve this cost millions of dollars to make. Dialogue becomes melodramatic, plotlines become campy, important moments become cheesy. But this enjoyment we gain from so-bad-it’s-good isn’t something to be ashamed of. Instead, it’s simply a function of us admiring the way it was attempted instead of what was done.

This factor in storytelling is why I try to tell people that tone is the most important thing to have in your writing. Establish your tone as soon as you can because there’s no telling whether or not you’re going to be the kind of person who tries to make everything grounded and serious or over the top and fun. There is a benefit to both ways and you can mix them up as much as you like, but you should find out the way you’re going to do it as soon as possible, and preferably before you start releasing your more important content.

But what exactly is campy and cheesy and hammy? What separates them from something that’s “well done” and serious or at the least grounded? What makes something so bad it’s bad if we’re able to laugh at failed attempts?

This post is going to go over those, one by one. But first, we must head off to the origins of the “so bad it’s good” style with the thing that started it all: melodramas.

Melodrama

I know I said I was going to start at melodrama, but I’m actually going back FURTHER to tell you that dramas in general began on a stage. People couldn’t see very well back in ancient Greece and ancient China, so the theater folk had to wear masks, also because they didn’t have many women to play the female roles because they weren’t really allowed to. The Greeks loved men(a bit too much if you ask me) and they had to find a way to have female characters. Thus, drag was born, with big wigs and giant dresses for everyone to point and go “I think that’s the female character.” This wasn’t a problem, because tragedies still got the job done and the acting still made people laugh and cry, but sometimes this was a cry laughing for the most part.

Fast forward to the 1800s and we evolve the dramas of theater to melodramas. Melo- means song(as in melody) and drama means “theatrical plot” as in a story for theater. Dramas tend to be tragedies because Greek tragedies were the most common plots in ancient times because they believed watching a drama and feeling that emotion could prepare children and sheltered people for actual hardship, which is true. We get desensitized to certain emotions over time and repetition, so something like seeing a stranger dying affects us less as we see it more often from our media, which currently we see so much death in media that we think a stranger dying is a statistic instead of a tragedy. Melodramas had to do something that was larger than life but also relatable, due to both limitations on the stage and the obvious lack of other genres at the time.

Operas were another big reason why melodramas blew up in the 1800s, with how the music would increase emotions and how opera itself was made so that the singing could fill a room and be heard from the cheap seats. But instead of bellowing out song lyrics, the melodrama used music as a sort of emotional background in order to make a normal situation feel like the entire world was on the line. That’s because technically the whole world was, but it was simply the world of the characters, and things like violins intensifying in speed would make tension, or something like flutes gently playing would make romantic moments more sweet.

Then movies started to be made and TVs started to be invented, allowing melodramas to enter the silver screen and the fishbowl screen. Noir flicks, soap operas(named after their tendency to be sponsored by soap products because they were directed towards women during a time when each show had their own commercials), pretty much every Betty Davis movie. The idea of having music to amplify emotions quickly gained a barrier between tasteful and distasteful. Have some flutes and romantic music when the dramatic kiss happens in the rain, that was considered tasteful. Have that soap opera organ go off when someone reveals they are a long lost twin brother, that was considered distasteful.

But what exactly causes the distastefulness? Is it the instrument used or the plotline?

I’m sure it’s not the instrument, because there’s flutes in that cliched Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet love theme that everyone uses whenever someone has love at first sight, and that kind of moment is treated as a joke(hopefully) in most cartoons. So instead of blaming the instrument, it’s actually the derivativeness and lack of creativity when it comes to the action where it serves nothing to the genre or story, which is what clichés are all about. But we don’t actually like clichés on their own, it’s the exact opposite, we hate them and we feel bored as hell when we see clichés. So why are clichés acceptable in cartoons and are actually enjoyed?

Well, that’s because a cartoon benefits from what we call: cartoonishness.  

Cartoony

We’re back to the 1800s, we’re over there now. It’s almost as if the 1800s were the spark for practically everything we enjoy these days, and that’s because it is. The 1800s was when mass media took the spot the church once had in promoting fiction(oh yeah, I went there) and the political caricatures of the 1700s started to leave the political sphere to become the funnies of the newspaper. Cartoons came out of these characters, because of their exaggerated shapes and symbolic worlds that allow them to have hearts in their eyes or make a wick bomb appear from behind their back.

Cartoons quickly grew logic of their own, separate from our own world, through a cartoony culture. The point of a cartoon is that things are not meant to make sense and reality itself is the butt of the jokes, which is why gravity doesn’t work until you look down and only the roadrunner can go through a tunnel that’s painted against a mountain. It’s not that they have their own logic, but rather logic is thrown out the window in something that’s cartoony. The only thing that stays consistent in a cartoon is the lack of logic or the role of the characters, such as how Patrick Star will always be stupid or how a Family Guy episode will always have an unrelated cutaway.

Clichés in cartoons are known to be cliché, which is why they do them. But instead of using the cliché as a crutch, like that shitty Will Ferrall Sherlock Holmes movie, the charm in cartoons is that clichés become both deconstructed and made fun of by exaggeration. It’s a lot like a meme where people try to redo a template, but instead of repeating the same meme, they modify it with something like a pun or sarcasm or German anti-humor(which is my favorite). The cliché itself is being made fun of instead of allowing the story to suffer from the cliché, which is rather difficult to detect because we rarely notice where the cliché begins and ends.  

Clichés when presented straight forward are simply bad, and it shows. But when you apply a cliché alongside the plot, it actually turns it into a pretty good joke. One I always remember from cartoons is when they make fun of art exhibits and the Mona Lisa. Running around the Mona Lisa isn’t really anything noteworthy, but a cartoon character using, say, the statue of David to express a masterful sculpture(like in that Spongebob episode) is a great cliché. It’s great because of the exaggerated usage and the exaggerated reaction to it, which works in a cartoon, but fails in a live action movie that tries to use the mustache disguise as an actual disguise.

This kind of exaggeration and lack of reality is what causes us to call something cartoony, and cartoony can create a so-bad-it’s-good aspect to a story because of this 2-D exaggeration. Actors like Jim Carrey were perfect in movies like The Mask because he’s such a cartoony person with how he flails his arms and his face can exaggerate like it’s made of putty. Arnold Schwarzenegger turns anything he’s in into a cartoon with how much he loves explosions and makes his iconic Austrian grunts. It’s almost as if he’s required to run away from an explosion in every movie he’s in, and it’s as if nobody questions how he survives all of these bullets and explosions and knife wounds to the arm.

This survival is caused by a simple thing known as cheese, and boy is it delicious.

Cheesy

Back to the 1800s, we’re over here now again. Oh my god! It’s like everything in the media these days comes from the 1800s or something. It’s the same time period when they had bikes always falling over because they were two tired. Oh yeah… I went there.

Cheese is a strange word because it technically came out of British slang but was used sarcastically, but also wasn’t. I don’t know, but the term came from how people would eat cheese when they drank wine, and so cheese meant something like “complimentary” or “fine”. It still sort of means that, because for sure a cheese factor compliments something goofy, but it most certainly isn’t fine as in “high class”. Cheese means cheap and inferior, like a dad joke, because it takes such little effort to make a laugh out of something like an obvious pun or something that gives you a headache after you hear it.

This is why we have things called cheesy one liners, and I fucking love the shit out of them.

My absolute favorite cheesy moment in a movie was Independance Day, where Will Smith made an alien crash, strutted up to the alien ship, opened it up, said “Welcome to Earth” and knocked out the alien’s suit. Not the alien. Knocked out his OUTFIT, with a single punch where he had to assume it had a chin and could get KOed like a human would. That’s the single moment needed to turn an okay alien invasion movie into a cheese fest, and after that it was an endless chain of nonsense that became cheesier as scenes went by. The movie had a satellite technician give the aliens a computer virus. Need I say more? But I wouldn’t have this movie any other way, because that is what made the movie so-bad-it’s-good.

Whenever alien invasion stories are tried with a serious tone, we never get an actual “feeling” for such a thing. Alien invasions without any cheese are just sad and tragic. You’d have babies getting shot in the face by alien lasers or whatever, it would be horrible. And so, in order for an alien invasion to be enjoyable for an audience, the actual invasion has to be turned kind of cartoony and the action needs to be turned cheesy, otherwise it ends up bland and tasteless.

Simply put: Godzilla needs to be flashy! I’m tired of these boring Godzilla movies coming out where they try to treat it like it’s goddamn 9-11. We get it, the towers fell and the US military is useless, now give us a cheesy plot to follow while Godzilla blows stuff up. I’m not sure if that King Kong and Godzilla crossover cranked up the cheese, but if it did, then that’s probably why it did better than Godzilla (2014). I know this is a controversial opinion here, but I would rather see Matthew Broderick saying “that’s a lot of fish” instead of pointless scenes with some dumb nurse rushing to treat injuried people. The reason is because we remember that scene, but who the hell remembers what the nurse said in Godzilla(2014)?

Ah-ha, you’re starting to realize what this is about, aren’t you? Cheese… helps us remember things. We remember cheesy lines and we remember cheesy moments. These moments stand out because they are not a typical action or event during such a situation.  

You’re about to kill someone, tension is high, your life is in danger. The last thing you’re thinking of is what to say as a timely zinger. Not for cheesy one liners, which is what nearly every great action movie does because it tacks that memorable moment for the death of the villain. And it doesn’t just have to be a fitting death. It can also be something like when Arnold says “I’ll be back” because of how many times the fool repeats it in his goofy movies and its actual implications.

When he says something like “I’ll be back”, it’s a slight variation of the cliched villain quote “you haven’t seen the last of me” kind of thing that was popular for serials, because we do tend to see them again. Comic book villains, serial villains, they come back because of their iconic role and because of the lack of more actors to play more types of villains that would end up just filling the shoes of the same role. Cheesy one-liners are reminders for the viewer that what they’re watching is a work of art, and as a work of art, it’s a part of a culture and it has a history before it. We love one-liners because of this reminder, because it reminds us of what inspired the work in the first place.

But there’s another word that relates to cheesy, and also food, and that word is: hammy.

Hammy

Also known as “chewing the scenery”, because they might as well be with how exaggerated they are, hammy acting is when the actor acts so over the top that it’s no longer related to reality. It is related to melodrama, however, but instead of being exaggerated in drama, it’s usually used for exaggerated motions, expressions, and loudness. One of my most favorite hammy actors is teen sensation Nicolas Cage, and all you have to do is watch a Nicolas Cage compilation, out of context, to know why. His acting is… not human, and I love him for that. Just the way he says the alphabet is hilarious, with the way he does his hand motions and how he increases speed and scream.

It’s not that hammy acting is bad acting, but rather it’s perfect for a comedy, and especially one that is theatrical. You want to make a spectacle and you want to put the attention on yourself, and so you go crazy. The term ham though is speculated to originate from the term hamfatter, which was a thing people called thespians in the 1800s because ham fat was used to remove the thick makeup they wore. Makeup around this time wasn’t really that popular because of how expensive it was and how it made people look really cartoony. In a casual setting, makeup was reserved for prostitutes, which is why we hear parents sometimes go “hey, you look like a whore with all of that makeup on” to their kids. Let’s also not forget that this was a time where loads of toxins were in makeup during such a time, so people who got word of its negative effects stayed away from such and just dealt with their wrinkled smoker face.

So because these actors were over-the-top and comedic, that was considered hammy. But, in relation to makeup, there is another word that we have that is about being very attention grabbing, and that word is: camp.

Camp

Back to the 1800s, we have to realize that this was a time when theater was at its peak. Industrialization meant more people were close together and the lack of television meant people needed entertainment after a hard day at the coal mine. However, this was also a time when we started making up terms for gay people more, because as Christianity lost power from the reduction of church attachment to nations, we started to see more gayness and especially in the theater. In reaction to this gayness, the term camp was coined, possibly from the French term camper, meaning “to pose in an exaggerated fashion.”

Camp is about an aesthetic instead of an action or event. This aesthetic is in your face, very bright with lots of colors, and a lot of things are attached to costumes that mean nothing to function and may not even mean anything symbolically. The best example of campy is 60s Batman, where the costumes were bright, the villains were over-the-top, and the heroes were so good that people assumed they were gay with each other. It’s not that camp makes something gay, but rather gay people in a theater setting create a campy tone because of their focus on aesthetics and effeminate behavior. Instead of trying to make a real fight, the fight looks more like a flashy dance and the armor they wear might as well be covered in feathers and flowers with how loud they are.

Recap

Now that you know the terms, let’s go back and dumb them down to make it easy to separate.

Melodrama: grounded plot with over-the-top roles and exaggerated emotions

Cartoony: rejection of logic and exaggerated features that also mock clichés

Cheese: rejection of tension for the sake of nostalgia or homage

Ham: exaggerated acting that becomes comedic

Camp: exaggerated aesthetics with flamboyant or effeminate features that lack practicality

Now, remember, cliché makes something just plain bad. Making something cliché is not what you want to do because you’ll be rejected for being so lazy and for boring the audience by wasting time. But when you enter the realm of so-bad-it’s-good, you have removed that boredom because you’ve turned your boring moment into an entertaining romp. You’ve gone from disengaging to engaging and that’s all you really need from your audience is the engagement. However, when you are being so bad it’s good, you’re going for all 5 of these elements at the same time.

The plot is over the top, the characters are over the top, the costumes and setting are over the top, the very logic within its own story becomes meaningless. All you can do at that point is sit back and enjoy the spectacle because it’s not like you’re going to find any meaning in it. The quality of the art gets reduced in anything that grounds it and it becomes as attention grabbing as how theater was in the old days. And I think that’s the beauty of so-bad-it’s-good. It’s a part of our culture where we ignore reality, enjoy escapism, and can still feel for some of the characters in an outsider-looking-in kind of way. We don’t have to relate to the situation at all to enjoy it, all we have to do is think as to why they went that certain direction.

People who love movies for the experience are more likely to enjoy the so-bad-it's-good quality. People who enjoy video games or comic books are more likely as well, because games and comics are almost all campy or cartoony in execution. It’s this appreciation of art that gives us more insight into the process, and thus more appreciation for so-bad-it’s-good. We tend to enjoy creativity over groundedness or realism, because escapism is rather difficult when we have to endure realism. So-bad-it’s-good is peak escapism, with each of the lower elements also being great forms of escapism.

This is a good thing. Art needs to be more… engaging and creative. Being flamboyant and colorful is a great thing, like those Guardian of the Galaxy movies or pretty much any SNES game that didn’t have murky colors. People are told to avoid being campy or cheesy or cartoony, even though some of the more highly praised works are that very thing they are told to avoid. I personally think that the problem is that we cannot avoid them.

There is, however, a sixth element that could be part of this phenomenon, which is called kitsch. This style is something you’d find on old Christmas cards, because it’s a romantic and pleasant aesthetic that few find disagreeable. This one is a maybe, because it’s usually seen as a “bad” thing for how basic or superficially quirky it is. Classic examples are things like the dogs playing poker painting, but I wouldn’t consider that so-bad-it’s-good. Perhaps it’s more like a so-bland-it’s-good because that kind of thing is about popularity and controversy instead of quality.

However, if you want to go for something that’s kitsch, I personally say that would be better than most of the garbage we get plagued with now at the contrived level of stories. I would rather see sentimental quirk instead of pointless political advocacy, but that’s just me. I’m starting to think kitsch is why I like shows like Eureka and Warehouse 13, because those two do seem to have a style that resembles kitsch with how they use quirky music and rely on nostalgia for the eras they make homages to. I would consider both shows as so-bad-it’s-good, but the kitsch part isn’t really a factor, it’s everything else.

That’s about it, if you have questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. Let me know your favorite so-bad-it’s-good movies or shows or whatever. Watch Rikki-oh if you haven’t already. And, as usual: You’re just a chicken Mark! Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep!