Discussion Main / WorldOfHam

Also, title spacing fix? I don't know how to do that.

I agree, for instance, none of the Star Wars movies qualifies as "A World of Ham" (which I call a Hamboree, by the way), just a few shouty moments or a couple of overacted scenes does not a World of Ham make. For a world of Ham, we need more something along the lines of Blazing Saddles, where Mel Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Dom De Luise, Gene Wilder and Slim Pickens are _all_ playing exaggeratedly. And mere shouting has nothing to do with hamming it up. It's like this: Hamming is stage-acting in front of a movie camera: Imagine an actor in a theatre, they have to speak loudly, even when whispering, so the back rows can still hear them, and if they need to express disdain, they need to hike their eyebrow up to the top of their heads, so those same back rows can notice. In front of a film camera, an actor can express themselves even without changing their facial expression much, because the camera is on top of them, and they have a boom hanging over their heads, ready to record the merest breath they expel. If you need to see hamming it up, watch Jim Carry, who has build a comedy career on that and snap comebacks. See "Liar, liar" or "the Mask". So, how do we clean up the examples? If I'd simply delete every instance I think unworthy, I'm likely to err on the side of "not ham" and upset some people.