Making It New

Some days, you're just in the mood for thoughtful silliness, like Deflocked.  And I don't mean "thoughtful" in the sense of "absolutely new gags," much less in the sense of "gags you need to really think about before you get them."

First of all, there aren't a lot of new gags, at least not since Gary Larson was introducing them, and Larson had the grace to retire when he realized he was not doing enough innovation anymore. 

A lot of original gags defy freshening. When the "opposable thumbs" gag appeared three decades or so ago, people fell over laughing because the term was familiar from biology class, not from the comics page. Now it appears on the comics page on a regular basis, but nobody has made it new and therefore nobody has made it funny.

I went to look up that term -- "making it new" -- and found a better summary that I can provide --which I guess is ironic -- in Pericles Lewis's "Cambridge Introduction to Modernism."

The poet Ezra Pound expressed the aspirations of modernism in the slogan "Make it New." He wanted his poetry to show new sides of reality to people who had become accustomed to seeing only one side. The Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky, a contemporary of the Russian cubo-futurists, wrote that art's distinctive contribution is defamiliarization. By this he meant that most people see the world through inherited conventions, what Neitzsche had called "metaphors which are worn out and have lost their sensuous power." Shklovsky argued that art makes those conventions come alive again by making them seem new or strange.

To which I can only add the insight provided by noted graphic artist Tony Carillo, to wit:

Successful cartoonists play off the concept of "making it new" constantly, in this case, the deadly encounter of the corrida crossed with the extremely non-lethal encounter of the cream pie.

Humor requires that combination of familiarity and surprise, which, in turn, requires timing and presentation, and that's where Deflocked is able to breathe life into the fairly tired stock character of the feckless bachelor. (Note to Irish readers: That's not what it means.)

There are any number of comic strips that will haul out the slacker who doesn't want a job or the single guy who won't commit and get only the chuckle of familiarity, the pro-forma "heh heh" of the person who looks up from a crossword puzzle to laugh along with the laugh track on a TV sitcom. It's funny because it's funny because it's always funny when he does that, just like it's always funny when someone says "opposable thumbs."

Except that it is almost never actually funny.

Part of why Jack Benny could get fresh laughs from his well-established "miser" jokes was that (1) he made his character more than simply a miser and (2) he had impeccable timing, perhaps the textbook example of timing, which was also the basis of his equally exquisite, patented slow-burn.

I'm not putting "Deflocked" on a level with Benny, because there isn't anyone on a level with Benny. But the reason today's gag works is because, to begin with, the set up is ridiculous -- simply running out and yelling would have driven away the crows, so that Mamet's dress-up idea starts us off on a high level of silliness.

Then, not only do the crows counter with equal silliness, but Corriveau avoids stepping on his own gag by providing nothing more in the way of a reaction from Cobb than a flat acknowledgement of what has just happened without any comment on its absurdity.

Meanwhile, in the background of that last panel, Corriveau gets a second laugh from showing us the gag he didn't tell.

One more example:

Agnes has a well-established character that works well in the familiar "church doorway" gag setting, a character who is a combination of intellectualism and rationalisation with the vulnerability of a young girl who is both poor and unpopular but steadfastly refuses to admit it.

Her willingness to bargain with God but preference to treat the priest as yet another adult asking a polite-but-meaningless question adds a wonderful edge to the usual "I noticed you fell asleep" exchange this setting usually evokes.

That is, if he is a priest, she dare not lie to him. But if he's just another adult, well, then it's just another conversation, which she is free to turn from polite chit-chat into an outrageous lie.

And all I can say is that Agnes is very well named, and, if God doesn't have a special place in his heart for this lamb, he's not much of a deity after all.

Comments

[Christopher]

Or, as Alan Alda put it in Woody Alan's Crimes and Misdemeanors, "Comedy is tragedy plus time." :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCWMcmZtt-Y

[Gilda Blackmore]

I wish I had a grown-up Agnes friend! I sometimes think I'm a grown-up Agnes myself