Q&A 41: On comedy

Three questions on a similar theme:

Megan Gearhart enquires:
"I'm reading Solver again this time on WebComics, and I've been enjoying it more in the long format simply because it makes me read more attentively and I catch more of the jokes on the first read. Which makes me appreciate how joke dense your writing is. Tina Fey wrote in her biography something to the effect that the goal for joke density on 30 Rock was so high many jokes went unnoticed on the first pass. Do you have a joke density philosophy or goal when writing?"

Coming from newspaper-style strips, I am very attuned to punchlines. If i have to write a three/four panel strip, I know where the joke has to be and how to tee it up. In my very early days, I was clueless about how to achieve this, so I had to reverse engineer the rhythm of a newspaper strip. I read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County collections, "clever comics", so see how it was done. I don't think my early jokes were strong, but the rhythm was established. When I've reverted to the newspaper rhythm in later years (for example, on Bobbins.horse) I can, with a list of rough ideas for the direction of the little stories, type the dialogue straight onto the lettering page, moving the balloons about to get things just so.

In some ways I prefer doing strips to full pages (it's quicker, i can do more and move things along more quickly) but they're awkward to collect in print and readers seem to overwhelmingly prefer the full-page format. But I chose one at random from 2019, when I was churning them out, and it illustrates my approach well enough. I think there are two good jokes here, "pulse lung" and "grandfather me onto the forklift truck team". In both cases those are phrases that hopefully no-one had ever heard before. "Pea vat" is a nice turn of phrase, "moonlight flit" is a fun and unusual colloquialism.

This period (when I was in and out of periods of overwork and burnout) was my "bare minimum" system for writing - characters I knew very well, four identically sized panels and type the same size as the Calvin and Hobbes lettering. My only rule was to get something of interest into each panel. It never has to be a joke. If the characters were well enough established (even within the context of a single strip), they would hopefully carry whatever mild amusements were possible at the time.

I've written so many jokes at this point that it's very hard to make me laugh. I'm pretty jaded. There are a few friends who can really crack me up, make me properly go, but it's very tricky for me to know, writing alone, what's funny. I get very little feedback from people telling me they laughed at something. So I throw everything at the page. Let me find a relatively recent one:

So on this page, I have attempted (successfully or unsuccessfully) to amuse the audience in every panel.

Panel 1: D-Slide have pivoted from on-stage too-adult sensuality to being slightly cowed schoolboys. They talk to a teacher like he's a teacher. Dean's reference points are a deliberately insane juxtaposition, Irish talent show twin-act Jedward, and respected modern prog rock act Porcupine Tree. That's a joke for the four people reading with familiarity with both those acts. It will only land occasionally.

Panel 2: Dean shouldn't have an opinion on choreography. "Dearth" I always think is a funny word. Lottie has pivoted to straight woman here, which plays against type.

Panel 3: Another good line from Dean.

Panel 4: The vape party is a good, pathetic scene. "Time and mist" is profoundly meaningless. Again, I'm trying to use a phrase no one has used before. It's the same as the Bobbins strip, hopefully tickling the reader by catching them unawares.

So I think the answer to the joke density question is that I will take every opportunity offered to get a good line in. Hopefully that means the comics bear re-reading. I'd not thought about what it would mean on a platform like Webtoon, when every panel is isolated for the scroll. Thus far, my experiment with those platforms has yet to find a new audience, so we will have to wait for that to happen for the data to start rolling in.

All this is not to say that I have to throw the kitchen sink at every page. This (below) was the next page. The only jokes are in Claire's first utterances of the first panel. Then the tone changes. There has to be a break or it's too much. I think this is probably why people like the full page proper stories better. I've got much better at pacing them since my adventures in monthly American comics.

John Cannan asks:
"How do you stay funny?"

I've damaged my mind writing "jokes" (see above) for 28 years. I don't think like I used to. I've continued to write my comics through some extremely personally difficult periods of my life, periods that were so very, very far from funny. I'm not sure there's a concrete answer to this question, but I try to remain open-hearted and as uncynical as I can. Ideally, at the most difficult times, visiting my little cartoon kingdom should be a welcome distraction. I'm sure there are life events I could not continue to write through.

John Smith wants to know:
"Have you ever thought of doing a comic that wasn't a comedy or even a dramedy? Or would that be too weird."

Comedy is a part of life. Laughter and humour are vital in even the darkest situations - apposite to the subject matter, of course. It might be very dark, coping-mechanism humour. I don't think I'd ever write something unremittingly bleak, or po-faced. The lack of humour in a lot of comics is reflective (to me, at least) of how poorly they are written. I think the funniest comics are the best comics, to the point where the art barely matters. But then, I like cow tools.