a small victory for charlie brown

Charlie Brown is one of those comics I read just because it's there. I usually have no response to it at all. But today's (actually it's probably several years old) was worth a chuckle, not because of the punchline, but because of Charlie Brown's wish to be called "Flash." Something about that name just made me smile.

I'm not a fan of Wizard of Id, but occasionally it's worth the few seconds it takes to read. The interesting thing about it is the device it occasionally employs in the first couple of panels, as in today's. It sort of sets up a quasi-punchline in the very beginning, and then the end relates back to it. Unfortunately, today's gag is pretty unoriginal, but I could see the device working well with a better joke.

garfield almost did it!

For the first time in my life, today's Garfield almost made me smile. The key word here is almost. Unfortunately, though it had a decent joke, it fell prey to a common error in comics (especially those that have been running so long they're probably not written by the same author anymore and if they are he probably pieces together comics from the 1940s to make new ones.) That error is having too many panels. Nearly every joke falls apart if it takes to long to tell or if it is over-explained. Today's Garfield would have actually caused a humor response if it had just trimmed out over half the panels where Garfield just sits there.

Comics are hugely more funny if they give us a joke that is subtle and let us figure out the in-between stuff (such as Garfield still drinking his cocoa) on our own. If a person isn't intelligent enough to understand the joke, explaining it doesn't help at all. If you doubt this, just think back to a time when one of your friends told a joke you didn't get. Once they explained it to you, you either faked a half-hearted laugh or sat there staring. The joke won't be funny unless you understand it anyway, so why ruin it for the rest of us by over-explaining it?