Cartooning 101: Basic Arithmetic
Last week, I alluded to the patterns in cartooning and this week I want to give you a few examples to understand what I mean by that and maybe even make your own cartoons with. This will be a bit of inside-baseball, so if that’s not your cup of tea, please scroll down and click a link or two to fool the almighty algorithms for me. Thanks.
Let’s begin.
car·toon
/kärˈto͞on/
noun
A cartoon is simply a drawn image, usually meant to be humorous, but what makes the medium memorable is the interaction between artist and reader. The cartoon is a meeting place for these two unrelated parties; it’s a puzzle that the artist presents and invites the reader to complete.
We place the characters and scenarios in front of you, and you connect the dots to derive humor. Great illustration is certainly capable of provoking that kind of participation, but cartooning requires it. The interaction lasts for no more than a second, but the experience is profound enough to elicit an emotional, and sometimes physical, reaction. Today, I’ll show you how to construct these interactions with a simple equation.
[An early attempt at the single-panel/“New Yorker” format.]
One thing I want to emphasize is that there are no hard and fast rules to cartooning. These are just my observations and how I came to understand cartooning. Cartoons can be anything you want them to be, but for our purposes, I’ll be focusing on the Single-Panel format.
Drawing + Caption = LOL
Again, rules can be broken, gags can be strictly visual but this is a form most of us will recognize: a drawing and some dialogue. Some cartoonists are caption-first and others will start sketching and arrive at a punchline later. I’m typically caption-first, but flipping it around can help to spur new ideas.
[Exhibit A]
An easy place to start when thinking of captions is to list out things that are often used in conversation, movie quotes, or an awkward turn of phrase.
So, in this example…
Caption = “We’ll get him to talk.”
This is something you might hear in a police-procedural and something that’s not inherently funny on its own.
The drawing can be broken down into two components: the interrogation room and the barber shop. Our equation, then, looks something like this…
[interrogation room + barber shop] + “We’ll get him to talk.” = LOL
But really, if we don’t distinguish between the types of variables, the equation should be reconfigured to look like this:
[interrogation room + “We’ll get him to talk.”] + barber shop = LOL
The barber shop is the punchline to this gag—without it, I’d just be transcribing a scene out of Law & Order. It’s the addition of the unexpected element that (hopefully) creates humor.
[Exhibit B]
Conversely, if it’s easier to start with the image first, you can use one of hundreds of cartoon tropes as a jumping-off point. Tropes are the visual or linguistic references, cliches, and themes that are instantly recognizable to the reader. Visual tropes are much easier to spot in cartoons: the deserted island, Sisyphus rolling the boulder up the hill, and so on and so forth.
In Exhibit B, I drew the scene first and then tried to write dialogue around it. The caption could use some workshopping but I like the premise enough: God, the disappointed parent that sent their kid to a party school.
Two of the biggest sources of cartoon tropes are the Bible and Greek mythology. Remember, the interaction is instantaneous, so the more details you fill in, the less work the reader has to do to arrive at the punchline.
Keep in mind, using a trope is not the objective here. Tropes are just tools in the toolbox—relying too heavily on them becomes a joyless, paint-by-numbers exercise. The comedy comes from the unexpected combination of seemingly disparate things*; these are just prompts to get the gears turning.
*see also Cards Against Humanity, Apples to Apples.
A more modern version of this is the meme. Memes are a combination of familiar iconography and wording that reframes it to give it new meaning. You create this cartoon-like interaction any time you send memes to a friend—you’re providing the visuals and text, and they’re filling in what’s funny, usually from a shared experience.
[Source: The Simpsons + the internet]
Extra Credit
With this understanding of cartoons, go back through the newsletter and try identifying the different variables I used in each. What tropes do I use? What details am I filling in, and which ones are you?
Here’s a set of problems you can also complete for extra credit:
Try your hand at The New Yorker’s Cartoon Caption Contest.
Draw a cartoon using a trope (e.g., desert island, Greek myths, fairy tales, etc.)
Use one of the following screenshots in a group chat this week:
[Source: The Last Dance, ESPN.]
I’d love to see what you come up with, so please send me your creations! And remember, this is just one way to cartoon. All the tropes and prompts in the world won’t add up to something funny on their own—the unexpected element is you.
“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
Pocket Change
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Cheers,
Evan
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P.P.P.S. I know, I know, order of operations pretty much renders my equation example pointless—it’s not a perfect analogy. Please excuse my dear Aunt Sally.