BOO!
If we can make you jump, we can make you laugh.
One thing that is essential to almost all cartoons is surprise. Surprise is essential to humour because it confounds the viewer’s expectations and offers a fresh perspective. How many times have you heard or seen a bad joke that made you groan and said ‘That’s obvious, I saw that coming’? It can be assumed, therefore, that good jokes are the non-obvious. They are the unexpected laugh, a benign version of what makes you jump in a horror movie.
You may laugh because an idea is surreal, has hit a nerve, is childish, embarrassing or pokes fun at something important (all these areas we can cover in other blogs), but unless the joke is offered in a fresh take it may well not make anyone laugh.
The “boo!!” factor can be in the image, the caption or both – but with rare exceptions it does have to be there, as one thing a joke should be, is a surprise.
Ed Steed gives us a visual surprise in this cartoon, where he is essentially playing with our expectations of the understood conventions of cartoons and drawings.
Alternatively Peter Steiner confounds expectations using a different but more conventional method by making the caption do the work – this time writing exactly what you aren’t supposed to say. The drawing and scenario magnify the funny by picking and depicting the grandest of occasions to make the gap between what you expect and what you read the largest
Despite their obvious differences, what is important to both cartoons is that the twist/surprise/joke is right at the end. There is no suffix, or emphasis, or depiction of the aftermath. There is just the joke. In fact both jokes, though outwardly different, share the same rhythm of three beats. Beat one, drink in the scene or first picture. Beat two, see the seen develop as the speaker starts a familiar sentence, or the swimmer starts to leave the pool, Beat three, twist.
Cartoonists can use all sorts of tools to create the surprise, it could be word play or puns, optical games, convention breaking, exaggeration, observations on life, or surreal flights of fancy, but unless there is some confounding of the viewers expectations it probably wont be a joke.