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Comic Strip of the Day

CSotD: Much more funny, accurate and applicable than required

Published: October 15, 2011 1 minute 4 comments

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When Matt Bors posted this yesterday, I knew it was going to be the Comic Strip of the Day, a decision that, since I don't have any sort of early access to strips, doesn't normally come down until about five in the morning.

But who's going to do better than this? Who's going to do this well?

In one swell foop, he takes on the overall fat, juicy target of obituary cartoons as a whole, the specific topic of Pearly Gates cartoons for dead celebrities whose religion does not include Pearly Gates as well, and also the cultural deification of Apple as if it were operating in a different paradigm than every other American company.

And he doesn't just take it on. He plays upon its frets, tortures its strings and then burns and smashes it like Hendrix.

Yesterday (as you may remember, O Best Beloved), I had come up with a wonderful punning headline only to discover, as I did a little Googling for details, that the antelope that knocked that kid off his bike was not a wildebeest but a goddam hartebeest and so the pun didn't work. But I liked the pun so much that I kept it and went into a Flanders & Swann inspired discursion to justify it.

But the rules are these: A joke, to be valid, has to not simply be funny but to be accurate and applicable as well.

What I did was a cheap cop-out, like the way Pythons would run out of ideas in a sketch and simply have Graham Chapman walk on as the humorless army officer and declare the thing over. Self-deprecation can work now and then, but it never really negates the fact that you weren't able to seal the deal.

There are a world of headline writers who do not know this rule, or who, at the very least, don't care enough to apply it on deadline.

There are also a host of political cartoonists so invested in promoting their overall point of view that they are happy to seize upon stereotypes, cheap insults and unverified political talking points rather than look into the facts of the matter and see if their joke is accurate and applicable in addition to being funny.

And blaming deadlines is not only a copout, but one which this cartoon also destroys: As an experiment, Bors had announced that he was going to produce five cartoons this week, maintaining the pace of a staff cartoonist at a daily paper.

This was Number Five in the series, which is to say, the one that should have hit when he was more than burned out. But, while they were all good (use the "previous" button to see the others), this one has been shared and reposted all over Facebook and I'm sure many other places as well.

It's not just funny, accurate and applicable. It is a classic and will be brought out again when the topic of obituary cartoons comes up, for years into the future.

I was interested not simply in how many people shared the cartoon on Facebook but how many of those who shared it were also professional cartoonists. Watch-Your-Head cartoonist Cory Thomas reposted it with a simple commentary that likely speaks for many:

‎*closes piano*
*grabs hat*

 

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CSotD: Start Spreading the Gnus!
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Comments 4

  1. “But the rules are these: A joke, to be valid, has to not simply be funny but to be accurate and applicable as well.”
    Generally yes, but there are times when the joke is so good that a little artistic license is allowed, and it would have been a sin to scrap that headline simply because it was inaccurate. At my job (hospital librarian), it has become Tradition for me to start staff meetings with a joke, and recently I told one that involved me overhearing a conversation between my doctor and another patient while I was waiting for my doctor to see me. For me to (1) overhear and then (2) repeat such a conversation would be a gross ethical violation by hospital and library standards, which could lead to me being stripped of my glasses, hair bun, and sensible shoes. And job, for that matter. So, to get around this slight difficulty, I said something like “overhearing and repeating a confidential doctor-patient conversation would be unethical, and the only thing that prevents this from being a HIPAA violation is that I’m lying for comic effect.” What you did was not so much a cop out, I think, but rather a step back to point out the inconsistencies and poke fun at them. Perfectly acceptable, IMHO, if done in moderation.
    P.S. In the interests of accuracy, I should point out that as a middle-aged male librarian, although I do wear glasses (though if I let them dangle on a chain I’d bump into the first wall I encountered) and sensible shoes, I don’t have enough hair left to put in a bun. More of a tonsure, really.
    P.P.S. If you think I’m writing this to get out of doing all the other stuff I really ought to be doing today, then, um, well-spotted.

  2. “But who’s going to do better than this? Who’s going to do this well?”
    Jobs is a nice big juicy target, but were there any cartoonists who made note of the death the same day of Fred Shuttlesworth, who put himself on the line against Bull Conner’s dogs and fire hoses, and whose obit was kicked into oblivion because the guy who came up with the iEverything was a sexier topic?

  3. I’d have been surprised if Shuttleworth had attracted that kind of attention even on a day when nobody else of any stature died. His actions were great and, within the ranks, of course he was known. But he didn’t have the public name recognition of, say, Rosa Parks, who did get obituary cartoons, or James Farmer or Ralph Abernathy, neither of whom I think got many, if any. There is a difference between achievement and public stature and he did great things but simply never had the recognition outside the group that others had.
    There are worse things, by the way, than being passed over for this “honor.” Most of the Rosa Parks cartoons absolutely stunk on ice. Cal Grondahl’s was quite good, the others, for the most part were embarrassingly obvious and cringeworthy. See for yourself: http://www.cagle.com/news/RosaParks/main.asp

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