Incongruent Activities

Dissecting humor

Let’s look closely at a cartoon.

This one that I did for The New Yorker is a personal favorite. In part because I was happy with the drawing—not always the case! I used the pillar in the middle to make it visually more interesting, and to seperate the speakers from the subject. And my pen seemed to behave itself, the wash is loose and the people’s faces not overly drawn. I say this because sometimes I can’t get there, as hard as I try. Was it the quality of the paper I used? The ink? The nib? Or just a lucky day? Stars aligned?

I could have put the man, who is the subject, on the right, which, if a cartoon is a sentence and reads left to right, it is the natural end of the sentence. On the other hand, your eye goes to him first, I think, and you get the mood…then go on to see (or visually read) that he’s being talked about by two women. Then you actually read the caption. For some ideas, placement of characters is important but not necessarily this drawing.

Also, in cartoons, word usage is key. The words “engagement” and “nasty” are incongruent. They don’t fit together. One normally thinks of an engagement as a happy time, a joyous period. Certainly not nasty. And now as I think about it, the words “came through” are sort of funny. You can almost picture the unfortunate journey this man was on.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my little examination of my own work. I rarely look this closely, or think specifically about what I’m doing when creating a cartoon. Any inspection is best done so AFTER the cartoon is finished, if at all. Otherwise, examining humor can kill it, as writer E.B. White famously said.

“Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

-E. B. White, 1941