Weekly Blogpost 5

Within the video "Laughing With" by Regina Spektor, the artist and director aim to create varying contexts for the audience to experience by utilizing the concepts of logos and pathos and a multitude of literary devices including parallelism, irony, and imagery. By analyzing Regina's lyrics we become acutely aware of the parallelism and structure she employs in order to appeal to the logos of her audience. The repetition of the phrase "No one laughs at God" creates a sort of comparison between real life events that invoke emotions and a crossover between logos and pathos. These references to experiences we as human deal with throughout our lives take the audience on a journey on which the outset invokes a variety of feelings and leaves the audience with both fulfillment and inadequacy.

Spektor's lyrics aim to call her audience to be wary of passing judgement on their omnipotent overseer, God, and imply that we place ourselves in his shoes every now and then. The first half of the chorus, "But God can be funny / At a cocktail party while listening to a good God-themed joke / Or when the crazies say he hates us / And they get so red in the head you think they're about to choke" exudes a certain irony with the concept that God himself laughs at jokes at his own expense. Such irony appeals to Spektor's audience's pathos in the sense of a darker humor that no doubt we all would need to acknowledge in order to make sense of the actions of our overlord.

Regina choses rather intense and vivid imagery for her audience to conceptualize as apart of her first verse in which she references an airplane full of passengers that experiences engine failure. She provides brief expositions that get gradually more mournful. These references pull at our heart strings as listeners and allow us to place ourselves within the context of the song and thus appeal to pathos. Emotions such as sorrow and despair are powerful devices used in Regina's work.