Two Ways Cartoons Deliver Humor

One way to explore erotic humor is to check out cartoons online. What are the topics? How is the humor communicated?

In perusing a few such cartoons recently, I came up with quite a list of topics, including erectile dysfunction and infidelity.

Many of the cartoons communicate their humor in one of two ways: by starting with a comment or question that “sets up” a humorous response and ending with the humorous response, or punchline, itself. In one such cartoon, an older couple, apparently a husband and wife who've been married a number of years, sitting up in bed is discussing a problem:

Husband (Setup)	Wife (Punchline)
“Do you think the doctor could give me some pills to improve my sex urge?”	“No, lad; he can only heal the sick, not raise the dead.”

Bamforth & Co.

This cartoon provides a setting (the bedroom, at night); characters (husband and wife), a situation, implicit or directly stated (erectile dysfunction), and dialogue (speech bubbles in the cartoon designate the speech of both the husband and his wife).

In other cartoons, an image creates a context for which a caption, often representing the dialogue of one of the featured characters, provides a commentary or an explanation:

Image (Setup)	Caption (Punchline)
Two coed students, seated on a bench on campus, discuss another coed passing by, a male student ogling her.	“She was on the dean's list until the dean's wife heard about it.”

Playboy

 

As in the example, above, the humor is often derived from pun or other form of wordplay: “dean's list” referring, simultaneously, to an academic honor and to an actual list of names, a “black book,” kept by the dean.

The image provides the setting (a university campus), characters (the coed students and the male student), a situation (the student is on the dean's list), and a suggestion of dialogue (one coed is addressing another coed); dialogue is spoken only by one, not two characters, and it is represented outside the cartoon.

The Television Situation Comedy, or TV Sitcom

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

A situation comedy (or “sitcom”) involves a continuous cast of regular, recurring, and unique stereotypical characters in comedy that arises from a shared environment, from a specific set of circumstances, or from a particular situation that results in predictable behavior and rapidly resolved conflict. For example, The Andy Griffith Show portrays the life of small-town sheriff Andy Taylor as he interacts with his family, Aunt Bee and Opie, his deputy Barney Fife, and his friends, neighbors, and fellow townspeople.

Regular characters are those which occur in almost every episode of a sitcom series. Such characters include the protagonist, or main character, and the supporting characters with whom he or she routinely interacts, such as a spouse, a child or children, servants, friends, neighbors, coworkers, or roommates.
Often, a regular character is a foil to the protagonist, highlighting the main character’s personality traits by exhibiting traits that are opposite to the protagonist’s qualities. Often, when a foil is part of the regular cast, the sitcom will be filmed in a single location, in a relatively small space, such as an apartment, that the foil shares with the protagonist. Andy Taylor, the sheriff of Mayberry, North Carolina, is the protagonist of The Andy Griffith Show. As such, he is one of the show’s regular characters. Other regular characters include his Aunt Bee, his son Opie, and his deputy Barney Fife.

Recurring characters are supporting characters who interact less frequently with the protagonist or one of the other regular characters than do regular characters; recurring characters may include visitors, government officials or representatives, customers, out-of-town or distant relatives, or supervisors. Some of the recurring characters on The Andy Griffith Show are schoolteacher Helen Crump, Andy’s girlfriend; Thelma Lou, Barney’s girlfriend; barber Floyd Lawson; mechanic Gomer (and, later, his cousin Goober) Pyle; fix-it man Emmett Clark; city clerk Howard Sprague; Aunt Bee’s friend, Clara Edwards; and Mayor Pike.

Unique characters appear only once in a single episode of a sitcom series. The character who is portrayed by a guest star (a actor of some renown) is a special type of unique character. Such a character appears in an episode because the celebrity who plays this character has charisma or glamour that adds interest to the sitcom. A guest star’s appearance may coincide with “sweeps weak” or may occur during a decline in the show’s ratings, to increase the show’s audience. Other unique characters usually appear for a specific purpose, such as to fulfill the need of a particular plot.

Regardless of whether a character is a regular, a recurring, or a unique character, he or she is usually a flat character and a stereotype whose behavior is predictable. A flat character is one that is made up of only a few personality traits are present in most sitcom characters, and these traits can be identified by a short list of adjectives. Barney is a flat character, whose fictitious personality is summed up by such adjectives as “vain,” “sensitive,” “self-important,” “inept,” and “braggadocios.” A stereotypical character is one that fits preconceived ideas about the class of individuals of which he or she is a representative. The sitcom character also usually behaves as viewers imagine such a type of character would behave--that is, according to type. A rustic character is apt to be simple, unaffected, and gullible; an urban character, urbane, pretentiousness, and cynical. Therefore, such characters’ behaviors would be predictable. The simple rustic is likely to misjudge situations or people, underestimating them; provide overt indications of his or her true thoughts and feelings through his or her facial expressions, body language, and speech; and be deceived by unprincipled characters. Gomer is a good example of such a character. A trusting soul who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt, he sometimes chastises those he’s underestimated by shouting, “Shame! Shame! Shame!” at them after they have hoodwinked him with one unlikely story or another. On the other hand, the urban character is apt to see several more implications concerning a situation’s significance or several meanings concerning a deed that would escape the rustic character’s notice; to disguise or hide his or her true thoughts and feelings; and to dismiss good intentions or noble feelings as the motivations or causes of another character’s behavior. On The Andy Griffith Show, Mayor Pike comes the closest to such a character.

In some situation comedies, two or more characters share the same environment. In some instances, one of the regular supporting characters is a foil to the protagonist. Because of their diametrically opposed qualities, these characters are doomed to disagree and, often, to annoy one another. They see things altogether differently, often in opposite terms to one another’s perceptions, thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or beliefs. For example, in The Odd Couple, Oscar Madison is a slob who shares his apartment with Felix Unger, an obsessive-compulsive neat-nik. Much of the show’s conflict--and comedy--stem from their attitudes toward cleanliness.

The shared space can be, and usually is, larger than an apartment. On The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rob Petrie shares an office with his fellow comedy writers Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrel and his home with his wife Laura and their son Richie. Likewise, the entire community of Mayberry, including the courthouse, Andy Taylor’s house, Wally’s Filling Station, Floyd’s Barber Shop, Emmett’s Fix-It Shop, Weaver’s Department Store, and several other locations, make up the shared space of The Andy Griffith Show.

The sitcom situation is of an everyday sort, such as viewers themselves might encounter in their daily family or work lives or during their leisure time. Each situation gives rise to a commonplace conflict that is resolved within the span of the show’s duration--typically, thirty minutes (no counting commercial messages). Some of the conflicts that occur in plots for The Andy Griffith Show include Opie’s discovery of the harm to relationships that lying causes; Goober’s learning that pedantry is apt to cause others to feel contempt instead of admiration for know-it-alls; and Andy’s willingness to let others retain their personal dignity by taking credit for the good deeds that he has done.

The themes (or subject matter) of sitcoms suggest the type of topics that television audiences find amusing. Over the years, various types of sitcoms have aired on television, several of which types overlap:

• Offbeat comedies (The Addams Family, The Munsters, My Mother the Car)
• Comedies of the workplace (Alice, The Andy Griffith Show, The Bob Newhart Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Oh! Susannah, Laverne and Shirley, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, Night Court, Our Miss Brooks, That Girl, Cheers, Home Improvement, Frazier)
• Comedies involving single-parent families (The Andy Griffith Show, Bachelor Father, The Courtship of Eddies’ Father, Make Room For Daddy, One Day at a Time, WKRP in Cincinnati, My Three Sons, Full House)
• Comedies involving merged families (The Brady Bunch, Eight Is Enough, Yours Mine and Ours, Please Don‘t Eat the Daisies)
• Colleges about roommates (Bosom Buddies, Three’s Company, Friends, Laverne and Shirley, The Odd Couple)
• Comedies featuring black families (The Cosby Show, Good Times, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air)
• Comedies focusing upon nuclear families (The Cosby Show, Good Times, Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Donna Reed Show, Married. . . with Children, Roseanne, Home Improvement)
• Comedies centering upon multi-cultural families (Diff’rent Strokes)
• Comedies featuring extended families (The Mothers-in-Law, Everybody Loves Raymond)
• Comedies about married couples (The Jeffersons, Ozzie and Harriet, The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, I Married Joan, I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners)
• College comedies (Dobie Gillis)
• Comedies concerning high schools or private postsecondary schools (The Facts of Life, Welcome Back, Kotter, Happy Days)
• Rustic comedies (The Dukes of Hazzard, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, The Real McCoys)
• Espionage comedies (Get Smart)
• Supernatural comedies (The Flying Nun, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeanie, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Girl with Something Extra, Topper)
• Military comedies (The Phil Silvers Show, F Troop, Gomer Pyle, USMC, Hogan‘s Heroes, M*A*S*H)
• Beach comedies (Gidget)
• Political comedies (The Governor and J. J.)
• Extraterrestrial comedies (My Favorite Martian, ALF, Mork and Mindy)
• Animal comedies (Mr. Ed)
• Comedies about a Servant (Hazel, Who‘s the Boss?, The Nanny)
• Comedies focusing upon musical families or groups (The Monkees, The Partridge Family)
• Comedies about superheroes (Batman)

How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It

Copyright 2011 by Gary L. Pullman

Professors don’t have any mercy on students. If they did, they wouldn’t make them read at all, much less a whole novel (or even several of the damned things). Haven’t these old fossils heard? We’re living in the Digital Age! Books are passé, as dead as the slaughtered trees from which they’re made. If they have to be printed (and they don’t), they’re best used as doorstops, not educational resources.

 

But, for good or ill, professors, like books, are here, it seems, to stay, and since they had to read the same books they’re forcing their students to read (payback is a bitch!), they’re not about to let any of their pupils off the hook.

 

What’s a student to do?

 

I have a few tips on how to read a novel without really reading it. Hence, my essay’s title, “How To Read A Novel Without Really Reading It.” (Always put the titles of articles or essays in quotation marks.)

Follow these easy steps, and the pain associated with reading, although it won’t go away completely, will be reduced to manageable proportions. 

1. First, read the blurb. A blurb is the text on the inside of a hardback book’s flyleaf (the paper cover in which hardback books are usually wrapped) or on the back cover of a paperback. I know, I know, you’re asking, Why would I want to read even more text than I already have to read? The damned novel is way more than enough already. No doubt, you’re also thinking, This is the stupidest advice I’ve ever run across for avoiding reading! Don’t quit reading! Not yet. Give me a chance to explain. You’ll see there’s a method to my madness. There’s somewhere between 200 and 250 words in the typical blurb. That sounds like a LOT of “extra” words to read, I know, but, by reading them, you’re saving yourself from having to read maybe fifty, or even 100, PAGES of the novel itself, each one of which can contain 400 word or more, so, conservatively, that’s a savings of between 20,000 to 40,000 words! (Aren’t you glad you didn’t quit reading my essay.) It gets better. As a result of having read the blurb, you will know certain facts about the novel that you can use in your book report, lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. For example, you will know the main character’s name. (In your essay, refer to him or her as the “protagonist”; professors are windbags, and they like to read, as well as speak, long words.) You will know the setting. You will know the basic storyline, or plot. You will probably learn the inciting moment. You may also learn the names of lesser, supporting characters. All this for only 250 words or less!
2. Realize that a chapter can be summarized in one sentence. Then, read the chapter only until you can summarize it in one sentence. (Unfortunately, a “Prologue” and an “Epilogue,” if they are part of the novel, must also be read and summarized.)
3. After each chapter, write a sentence that summarizes what it presented. Here are examples, summarizing the prologue and the first two chapters of Lincoln Child’s novel, Terminal Freeze (always italicize the title of a novel): (Prologue) A Native American shaman’s attempt to appease the gods for a woman’s careless violation of a taboo fails, requiring him to take the woman southward, to a mountain, where a greater violation of a different taboo has occurred. (Chapter 1) The face of a melting glacier falls away, revealing the mouth of an ice cave. (Chapter 2) Scientists exploring the cave find a monstrous beast frozen in the ice. (When you finish summarizing each chapter of the novel, you will have summarized the whole book. For example, there are 53 chapters, a “Prologue,” and an “Epilogue” in Terminal Freeze. Therefore, the whole damned thing can be summarized in 55 sentences. Not bad.)
4. Keep a list of characters’ names, brief phrases that identify them, and the names of the places in which the action takes place. Here are examples from the first three chapters of Terminal Freeze: (Prologue) Usuguk (shaman), Nulathe (woman who violates taboo), Koukdjuak the Hunter (god); igloo village in an “arctic desolation”; (Chapter 1) Evan Marshall (protagonist; a paleoecologist), Gerald Sully (research party leader)., Wright Faraday (evolutionary biologist)--they work for Northern Massachusetts University in Woburn and are researching global warming in Alaska’s federal Wildlife Zone; their base is at Mount Fear Remote Sensing Installation, which they’ve rented from the government; (Chapter 2) Penny Barbour (fourth member of the scientific research team, a computer scientist), Ang Chen (graduate student)
5. Most of the text in a novel is unnecessary. It’s filler, the rambling philosophical musings, existential questioning, and self-indulgent wishful thinking of the author, or descriptions of various persons, places, or things, including, believe it or not, the weather, little if any of which has any bearing on what is actually happening in the story itself and may be ignored without any ill effect on your grade, so SKIP IT. Instead, read just the dialogue (the words supposedly spoken by people--the characters--who don’t even exist). By reading just the dialogue, you will be able to keep track of the story well enough to summarize it (remember,. Each chapter can be reduced to a single sentence!). Only dip into the descriptive or expository (explanatory) blocks of text when you need to do so to reestablish a sense of continuity and context--maybe twice or so every four or five chapters. You will find that you are skipping entire pages of the text and still know what’s going on, kind of like returning to a movie after a bathroom break, which just goes to show you that most of a novel is unnecessary padding.
6. After reading and summarizing each chapter and updating your list of characters and settings, stop! You are done with the book. Do NOT return to the novel. Close the cover! You are finished! Do not second guess yourself, wondering whether you missed something (you didn’t) or whether your summaries are detailed enough (they are). It’s a novel you’re reading (or, if you follow my guidelines you are not reading, not the Bible or the Koran of the Bhagavad Vita or even the Kama Sutra. How important can a book of fiction be, anyway? (Not very!) You’ve done more than enough, so quit already!

That’s all there is to it, six simple steps. Now you have all the information you need to write your book review or your lit crit essay, or whatever the hell your professor’s making you write. What you do with the information is up to you.

 

Anatomy of the Sitcom: “Gomer the House Guest"

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

“Gomer the House Guest,” episode 97 (Season Four)


This episode is constructed of a series of problems (conflicts), followed by its results (often examples of a character’s behavior), and solutions which themselves give rise to additional problems (often examples of a character‘s behavior or the results of the attempted solution). The problems are and solutions are situations; the examples of instances of a character’s behavior (action).

Near the middle of the story, a turning point occurs, during which the protagonist plans to take, or actually takes, an action that moves the plot in the opposite direction from that in which it has been progressing. At some point, toward the end of the story, the protagonist makes a discovery (moment of recognition), which allows him or her to solve the problem once and for all time (resolution), and the story ends with the results of this final solution.

Since situation comedies are, by definition, comedies, they end with the main character in a better situation than the one in which he or she found him- or herself at the story’s beginning.

Initial Problem: Wally is upset with Gomer because he spends too much time telling stories to some of his customers, while others get impatient for service.

Result(s): Wally notices one impatient person driving away in disgust.

Solution-Problem: This incident causes Wally to fire Gomer, which puts Gomer out of both a job and a house because his living quarters were in a back room of the station.

Result(s): Gomer asks Andy if he can stay in one of the cells at the courthouse for a few days.

Solution-Problem: Sympathetic, Andy invites him to stay at the Taylors’ until he finds a new job; Gomer turns out to be a real nuisance..

Result(s): Gomer talks throughout an episode of “Shep and Ralph” (a story of a man and his dog), ruining it for Andy and his family. When Gomer decides to do some chores for the family to earn his keep (since Andy won’t accept any rent payment), he chooses to do them overnight. He does some sawing, and while trying to repair the toggle switch on Aunt Bee’s vacuum cleaner, he turns on the machine. These escapades wake up the entire family. Finally, Andy gets him to prepare for bed, but Gomer gargles loudly and sings “No Account Mule” over and over, annoying Andy.

Solution-Problem: The next morning, Andy, exhausted, bluntly tells Gomer that due to the racket last night, he did not get much sleep.

Result(s): Gomer apologizes and vows to be more quiet. Sure enough, in the evening, Gomer retires when the family does and quietly reads his comic book in bed.

Solution-Problem: Unfortunately, two of his former customers come by the house asking for Gomer’s appraisal of the condition of their automobiles. This situation creates such a din that Andy’s neighbors wake up and complain.

Result(s): The next morning, Andy, Opie, and Aunt Bee are unusually cranky with each other. They realize they are not getting enough sleep.

Turning Point: Andy becomes determined to tell Gomer he must find other arrangements.

Solution-Problem: Meanwhile, he goes off to work as usual, where he demonstrates that his grumpiness is even-handed.

Result(s): He begins handing out tickets to any driver whose automobile is in poor shape. He discovers a lot of offenders.

Moment of Recognition: Andy also discovers that Wally’s business has dwindled drastically since he fired Gomer.

Result(s): When he returns home, Andy finds Gomer chatting with his old customers, who have missed their stories as much as his mechanical skills.

Resolution: Andy orders them all to follow his car, and they parade straight to Wally’s, where Andy points out that Gomer is Wally’s business.

Result(s): Wally needs no coercion to rehire Gomer. Andy suggests to Wally that he could improve Gomer’s “kitchenette” by providing an extra burner and an icebox. Wally readily agrees and even adds some fresh paint and some groceries to make his prized employee more comfortable.



Note: The plot synopsis is taken, nearly verbatim, from -- Dale Robinson and David Fernandes’ The Definitive Andy Griffith Show Reference: Episode-by-Episode, with Cast and Production Biographies and a Guide to Collectibles (McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, NC, and London, 1996).