Daniel
'Dutch' VanderWerff
Humour...
If you're writing a humourous comic, then humour plays a big part in
the widespread success and appeal of your piece of work. Without humour,
your humourous comic is simply an ous comic, and no one reads those,
eh? But what is humour, and how can it be measured within your comic?
And will everybody appreciate it when you put it in?
This article doesn't claim to answer this question comprehensively.
It only claims to suggest a few ways to tackle the problem. You want
comprehensive, check out the wiki.
The dictionary defines humour, depending more or less on the specific
dictionary you've managed to lay your hands on, as 'a message whose
ingenuity or verbal skill or incongruity has the power to evoke laughter'.
A lot of big words in there for something that basically says 'it
makes you laugh'. Next time I look for a decent definition I'll
stick to the good old Macquarie Junior Dictionary. If it's not in there
then kids aren't likely to need to know it, so I don't need to worry
about teaching it.
Also, the definitions are easier to understand and don't use big words.
Let's just stick with the layman's definition that humour is what 'makes
us laugh' and work from there. If something makes us laugh, smile,
chuckle or feel at the very least mildly amused then we can safely say
it is humourous. The problem here is...is there a universally accepted
form of humour?
Let's cut a long story short and say 'no'. There's no joke in the world
that is going to appeal to everybody. There's no joke in the country
(whichever you may be residing in at the moment) that everyone is going
to find funny. When you come right down to it, there's not all that
many jokes in the world that will appeal to all of the people in your
street. I guess it's sort of like ordering pizza for an under-tens year old's
basketball team. Some kids want Hawaiian, some kids want Supreme, the
coach is adamant he wants Meatlover's because his wife isn't home tonight
to complain about the smell, and no bugger wants the little salty fish.
So what are you going to do about it? What sort of humour is involved
in webcomics to make them attract a readership? How can you measure
the amount of humour in your comic without having to cut it up like
a badly cooked pizza so that everybody gets to take a bite?
Let's cut the long story short again, eh? You can't. Ask the most vocal
people in the industry and they'll give you the impression that if you
try to appeal to everybody you end up boring and stuck in the funny
pages in some syndicated newspaper making money. Who wants that, eh?
Is there a way to actually measure that abstract state known as 'funny'?
In the absense of any better device, I give to you the rubber chicken.
A rubber chicken doesn't need anything to make it funny, it just is.
I give the rubber chicken a funny factor of 1. Therefore, the
funny anything else can be measured in rubber chickens. Look
at a rubber chicken and you'll feel inside you the funny value
of 1. Read a comic to yourself and you'll also feel inside you a certain
funny value. Compare this amount of funny to the rubber
chicken, and you have that comic's funny value in rubber chickens.
Easy, eh?
Now, back to the problem. Humour...what is it and how does it relate
to your comic on the web?
I'm going to go back to the dictionary on this one to perhaps find
an answer to what sort of humour seems to work best for webcomics. Here's
another definition of the word 'humour', although this one's
a little old. Medieval old, in fact. In medieval times humour was defined
as 'one of the four fluids in the body whose balance was believed
to determine your emotional and physical state; "the humors are
blood and phlegm and yellow and black bile"'. Well, for me,
that explains a lot of the humour in webcomics today.
Blood. Apparently one way to make people laugh is violence.
Apparently, the more random and violent the better. Right. We've all
seen comics that take that path.
Phlegm. Ah...the old yucky assortments of bodily fluids. Right.
I'll leave this one alone, we've all seen strips resort to these sorts
of jokes.
Yellow and black bile. Okay. Crude, offensive and generally
unhealthy yucky stuff that tends to shock you when you see it brought
up in front of you. Yep. We've all seen plenty of this example too,
eh?
Hmm...maybe those old farts in robes were onto something back then...
Back to the problem. How to make your comic humourous and appealing
to a large number of people. Here are the generally accepted things
to do to fit in with the great big crowd...
Include any amount of these things for quirky fun; zombies, ninjas,
demons, ridiculously stupid characters, jokes in really bad taste, violence
(the more random the better), drunkenness, making famous people or corporations,
etc, appear stupid (Down Here we have a name for it, the Tall Poppy
Sydrome, where you try to cut down those who've become successful) and
some bloke called Cthulhu. Notice something? Yep. They're all pretty
well considered cliches too.
But somehow they seem to still work. Buggered if I know how, eh?
All of the above seem to have their own scale of funny, or
their own number of rubber chickens. At least, to a good range of people,
zombies, ninjas, demons and that big feller called Cthulhu seem to all
have ample rubber chickens to go around. Why is this so?
It seems that, in the current demographic climate of the industry (a
term used loosely because industry implies everybody's making some sort
of money out of it), the vast demand are in the form of young adolescents
and very young adults. The above themes seem to appeal to this demographic,
so their rubber chicken rating is considered quite high when used properly.
Humour evolving from nostalgic events, old fashioned approaches and
more thought provoking instances and jokes don't seem to have the same
rubber chicken rating. Perhaps that is to do with the overwhelming age
of the demographic? Maybe in the future the rubber chicken ratings of
the above will fall as the demographic grows older?
Who's to know for sure what will be considered funny a few years from
now?
One thing's for certain though.
A rubber chicken will always be a rubber chicken!
