CSotD: Esprit de ici et maintenant
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Dave Coverly does a sort of metagag, in which he takes an exceptionally lame old joke, puts a somewhat ghastly spin on it, and turns it into comedy.
The great thing about this panel is that the joke works on two levels: Vulture gifts are a pretty funny idea to begin with, and even funnier with the re-imagining of a very, very, very old and overused joke.
There's nothing "new" about that.
Humor, after all, is mostly taking familiar things and adding an unexpected spin.
"Unexpected" doesn't even have to be the same as "new." Morey Amsterdam built a dynamite comedy career not on creativity but on memory — he was quite open about the fact that you didn't have to come up with a fresh, new gag on the spot if you had a good memory and could retrieve one that fit and that others had forgotten.
The difference between Morey Amsterdam and the rest of us mortals is that, if you say, "The topic is a pirate with a dog," he'd immediately machine-gun out five or 10 gags about pirates with dogs, while, for the rest of us, the challenge would immediately drive every joke we'd ever heard that involved a pirate or a dog, never mind a pirate with a dog, out of our brains completely.
Morey Amsterdam had esprit d'escalier, but it would hit him on the way up instead of on the way down. And therein lies the difference between a comic genius and a normal schlub.
My daughter-in-law, who teaches neuroscience, is very excited about this new development in which they have learned to turn the fat in brains into a Jell-O-like transparent substance, allowing the structure to be studied without slicing it up.
I told her it was nothing new, that the fat in my head turns into Jell-O at 8 pm every evening. But it can happen much sooner: Just challenge me to come up with a good gag about a pirate with a dog.
Happens to the best of us.
There are days when I go through my extensive list of strips and panels and it seems like everybody is just selling retreads of desert island gags and jokes about those wacky kids with their messy bedrooms and by golly but don't women carry a lot of stuff in those purses!
Or gags in which the straight man can't figure out why everyone is excited, because he doesn't know there is a Monster/Bear/Dinosaur standing behind him.
Or "No cherry on my sundae; I'm on a diet!"
Or "I rushed to get ready for school and it turns out to be Saturday!"
And bear in mind that I've assembled a roster of strips and panels by people who generally do a whole lot better than that. There are plenty of other features that toddle along by doing nothing at all but recycle familiar old gags.
On the days when nobody offers anything new in the strips, I head over to the editorial cartoons, which, at the moment, consist of trenchant, edgy analysis which provides these critical insights:
1. Margaret Thatcher was called the Iron Lady and was good friends with Ronald Reagan.
2. The leader of North Korea is much like a baby throwing a tantrum.
3. Ebert and Siskel are now both dead and watching movies together in heaven.
However, and on the other hand, don't mistake a few low points in the creative cycle for a universal affliction. There are cartoonists doing good work in syndication.
For instance, Cory Thomas just added a marriage to "Watch Your Head," and it's probably a good thing so few editors have the insight or cojones to run this strip, because there would be the sound of explosions all over town, followed by a rain of blue hair and brain bits:
Yes, it's true: She married a Canadian. What's this world coming to? So much for the sacred bonds of traditional marriage!
Meanwhile, in a strip that is, in fact, carried in quite a few papers, Jimmy Johnson stakes out his refusal to add a four-footed Urkel to his cast, with a rare-but-not-unprecedented look backstage as the most realistic cat in comicdom argues over his status:
Have a little pride there, Ludwig: Hairballs are better than air balls.
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