“The Real Danger of Minions” (2023-2024)

This essay started as a joke. When choosing an artwork to write about, I went to my Letterboxd profile and scrolled through the list of movies I had seen over the past two years. I saw Minions: Rise of Gru and thought, wouldn’t it be funny if I wrote an essay about the Minions? 

I at first felt that the children’s characters were an immature topic for a college essay, but then I thought about their multi-generational popularity: teenagers started the #gentleminons TikTok trend, and adults have created a new genre of Facebook memes around the Minions. They’ve earned their status as a pop culture icon of the 2010s. With their image everywhere, they should be taken seriously and analyzed critically. 

The essay revealed itself to me when I found an interview from the creator of the Minions, Pierre Coffin, who cited the slapstick comedy of Charlie Chaplin as a major inspiration. While I didn’t know much about Chaplin, I had previously studied the origin of slapstick, a form of Italian theater called Commedia del’ Arte. As a comedy writer myself, using Commedia as a model to understand the humor of both Chaplin and the Minions felt intuitive. 

In the end, I think I wound up with an essay that is very nerdy and information-dense, but also interesting and perhaps a bit surprising. I hope it reminds readers to think carefully about the meaning of their laughter, not just for the Minions, but for all media.

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Aidan Kash is a dramatic writing major at the Tisch School of the Arts from Louisville, Kentucky. Her scripts focus on using comedy to dissect philosophical and political ideas. She hopes to use her voice as both a scriptwriter and essayist to inspire people to question the world around them and enact change. Her essay asks readers to think critically about why they laugh and what they are laughing at through the example of the Despicable Me franchise’s Minion characters.