Somehow I completely missed the fact of, and the posts about, the publication of the Hyperbole and a Half book until ads appeared for it just now in the Comics Curmudgeon RSS feed. I’ve been waiting for that book to come out for ages.
There is often more wit in a single day’s episode of Bad Machinery than there is in most comics’ entire runs.
So of course you link the strip that best fails to back up that assertion.
That was the front page, you moron.
Oh fun, so we get to sit and wait for the wit to arrive. It’s like bird-watching!
If you are bad-talking Bad Machinery, then there is something wrong with you.
I swear, I could link “Calvin & Hobbes” and you would badmouth it.
Well I mean, is the tiger real or a stuffed animal? There’s no consistency. MAKE UP YOUR MIND, WATTERSON!
Yeah, and what’s up with those rear window stickers you see everywhere? Why did he license those?
I think somewhere in the depths of the thread I badmouthed Mr. Scarygoround (which autocorrect wants to be scary forums). I decided to give it another shake. I went to the beginning of the “case” in Bad Machinery (why is it called that), I read ten or twenty, and I didn’t find anything more than a couple of smirks. I seriously do not get the appeal.
Also,
Those first (second if you count the title panel) and final panels fucking kill me.
I’ve never gotten scarygoround either. I remember being told that it’s some kind of sublime genius, but it depends on you having read everything from the start so that you can see how brilliant it is. Of course I’ve never been able to push through enough to actually start thinking any of it is witty, so I tend to think it’s something more akin to stockholm syndrome.
The humor in it is very, very dry. It took me a while to start picking up on it, and never would’ve bothered if Tycho Brahe hadn’t recommended it so highly.
It’s like e.g. Arrested Development in that there is no obvious cue (e.g., a laugh track) to show you the jokes, and it rewards repeat reads as you see the jokes you missed the first time around (jokes get set up way in advance), and a lot of the humor is based on the characters using each other as foils.
And then there’s just the basic absurdity of how blasé everyone is about the ridiculous amount of supernatural and bizarre activity that happens in and around their lives.
The hilarious thing, Funkula, is that the humor in SGR/BM is just like the humor in that first (second?) and last panels of the Achewood comic you posted and praised … so I don’t get how you’re missin’ it.
Well except any episode of Arrested Development and that Achewood comic are actually funny just by themselves without relying entirely on having seen/read the whole rest of the series.
See, what I like so much about Achewood is how dense the dialogue is. I count nine jokes in five panels. It’s overwrought and about as far from naturalism as you can get, but Onstad has a gift for coining phrases and finding new meanings for words (“I was rad and walking” being used synonymously with “I had a boner” remains one of my all-time favorites). And while that one doesn’t really show it because Fuck You Friday is always about cramming unrelated rants into a vague narrative, he is excellent at developing a distinct voice for every character, even minor ones like Showbiz or Emeril.
In SGR/BM, from what I’ve read, the dialogue is very dry and laconic. That’s not a bad thing, but I have difficulty seeing similarities with Achewood. And the thing about everyone being blase is that it comes across to me as the characters all being sort of smugly detached. Again, that’s about as opposite from Achewood’s diversity of character styles as I can imagine.
And thinking about it further, I’m not sure the Arrested Development comparison holds up either, because it is similarly dense and layered.
The density of the humor in SGR/BM is inversely proportional to the density of the reader.
Anyway, Buttersafe posted this today.
That particular Achewood comic, yes; Arrested Development, not even a little bit. Even the few jokes in AD that don’t depend on having watched the rest of the series (and that, very carefully) often depend on having a good awareness that e.g. the narrator is the director who also happened to be on a TV show as a child actor with Andy Griffith AND also as a teen was on a TV show with the guy who played the attorney who also happened to be replaced on that show by the actor who plays Bob Loblaw. Meanwhile, a joke like the name “Bob Loblaw Law” or the “chicken dance” just seems silly and stupid and ham-handed.
The only real difference is that you’re generally familiar with AD’s in-jokes, and not SGR/BM’s. The only real problem is that SGR/BM has had quite a few more seasons than AD did, so you have to spend more time to catch up.
Meanwhile, a joke like the name “Bob Loblaw Law”
The Bob Loblaw Law Blog, to give the full joke its due.
Yeah. Even then, “Bob Loblaw Law Blog” is so ham-fisted; it’s not wit, it’s “LOOK AT ME HOW FUNNY I AM BEING.” Or the chicken dance: “LOOK AT HOW RIDICULOUS THESE PEOPLE ARE CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS FAMILY”
Just like the “Achewood” strip. It’s just shouting “THIS IS SUCH A FUNNY STRIP OH MY GOD YOU CAN LAUGH AT EVERY FRAME BECAUSE WE DON’T EVEN BOTHER WITH SET-UP WE’RE NOTHING BUT PUNCHLINES DON’T YOU SEE HOW FUNNY WE ARE!!!”
Whereas the real joke in Bob Loblaw is when you get that they replace the lawyer they used with another lawyer, who is played by the same actor who replaced the other actor in the “cool guy” role in a TV show that the director was also in, while making a reference to a fictional attorney (Matlock) that provokes the narrator (also the director) to make an additional comment about the actor referencing that he was also in a TV show with that character’s actor. But you either have to be lucky enough to be familiar with all those details, or willing to spend a little effort when you don’t quite exactly catch why the narrator happened to say that.
If you’re not willing to, say, read read a Wikipedia article on occasion, or go back and re-read a strip to see how this strip references this one, then perhaps SGR/BM isn’t really for you. ;)
Apparently if you can summarize something in capital letters (no matter how reductive) it’s no longer funny. Got it. It’s kind of a low blow, though. “That’s a Bob Loblaw low blow!”
Whereas the real joke in Bob Loblaw is when you get that they replace the lawyer they used with another lawyer, who is played by the same actor who replaced the other actor in the “cool guy” role in a TV show that the director was also in, while making a reference to a fictional attorney (Matlock) that provokes the narrator (also the director) to make an additional comment about the actor referencing that he was also in a TV show with that character’s actor. But you either have to be lucky enough to be familiar with all those details, or willing to spend a little effort when you don’t quite exactly catch why the narrator happened to say that.
I don’t know that I’d call that the “real joke,” per se, more like “Hollywood inside baseball that’s absolutely irrelevant unless you care about TV shows that are twenty to forty years old.” The ways that Ron Howard’s career is subtly referenced definitely add a layer to AD, but it’s a lot less important than the characters, their relationships, running gags within the plot…basically every other element.
If you’re not willing to, say, read read a Wikipedia article on occasion, or go back and re-read a strip to see how this strip references this one, then perhaps SGR/BM isn’t really for you. ;)
Yeah, I’m okay with it not being for me, but I didn’t need the Wikipedia article and I can’t see any particular parallels in the dialogue, composition, or theme of those two strips, aside from the fact that they’re part of a connected story. I do concur, though: Ham.