Category: Writing

In January, Dave Barry will go on hiatus for the first time in thirty years. It’s uncertain when or if he’ll be back.

I’ve been meaning for a while now to write about Dave Barry and Izzle^2 Pfaff, among other things. Skot Kurruk, who writes the latter blog, is somebody who was obviously–like me–raised on Dave Barry’s humor; he appeals to me even more because he plays to my fetishes by using theatre terminology and cuss words. His posts read a lot like columns, and include a connect-for-bonus final punchline. He even has the same cumulative effect as Dave Barry: one entry will make you smile, but by the fifth or sixth you’ll be snorting in your cube, desperately trying to conceal your laughter by shoving a hand up each nostril. Okay, that’s just me.

So read Izzle^2 Pfaff, is my first point here. I have others.

I started reading Dave Barry columns not long after my introduction to joke books, in probably the fifth grade. Yes, I’m the kid who read joke books, and recited everything in them to my friends and family, usually multiple times. It is surprising that I survived middle school.

I thought that these books were hilarious, and the obvious parallel that I drew between them and Dave Barry was the Platonic punchline, the kind of thing that usually gets followed up by a musical sting (“ba dum dum CHHHH” is a sting, not a rimshot; if you call that a rimshot, you don’t know what a rimshot is). I deduced, subconsciously, that this was the root and source of all humor. Anything can be made funny with a punchline, I thought! If I make punchlines, I will be funny!

It is for this reason that I was stalled in the humor department for a long, long time. I was not a funny person, and I honestly didn’t understand why. I am only now overcoming this: I still don’t consider myself funny, but I am getting funnier.

My slog toward freedom from punchlines has been long and difficult, but along the way I was fortunate enough to discover webcomics. People talk a lot about how webcomics are revitalizing and expanding sequential art, but not so much about the boundaries they push in humor. Think about it: there is nobody on earth who is doing what Chris Onstad is doing with Achewood, a humor and pathos with no individually funny elements, built entirely with rhythm. Granted, everybody at Dumbrella is doing some of the same things, but nobody else has Onstad’s easy mastery of the method. Chris Onstad is the John McCrea of comics.

Before I read Achewood, though, I was reading Penny Arcade, by a couple of guys who are–let’s say the Ramones of comics. They have double-handedly inspired about 70% of all the comics on the Interweb right now. Like the Ramones, they took a short form, stripped it raw and made it different; like the Ramones, they made a lot of boys believe that anybody could have a smash hit with just a few ingredients and a lot of heart. (This is not true, which is why most webcomics feature two sarcastic guys and die after a month.) They are not entirely punchline-free, but a single Penny Arcade strip is often jammed with more lunacy than lesser comics can fit into their fourth panels all week.

And before even Penny Arcade, I was reading Checkerboard Nightmare, the first thing I’d seen that managed to satirize the entire concept of punchlines. I’m going to mix allegories here and call Kris Straub the Jon Stewart of webcomics: the only guy who’s capable of calling out, duelling and deflating anyone in the medium, including himself. The kind of writer who’s so sharp that he gets attacked for not being an impartial journalist–then has to remind his attackers that he never made any promises to be either.

The non-webcomic thing that had the biggest impact on the way I perceive humor was Project Improv and its spinoff, my own improv troupe, Street Legal. I’ve pretty much parted ways with PI (for that matter, they’ve pretty much parted ways with themselves), but I owe Ken Troklus and Rebecca Grossman a lot for pointing out to me that punchlines are not funny–connections are.

Dave Barry (remember? I was talking about Dave Barry?) has stated in print that he is a big Achewood fan. It’s almost bathetically symbolic to me, now, that he is taking an indefinite break from column-writing, and that Achewood is moving from the Chris Onstad’s local copy shop to a real publisher. I still read Dave Barry’s columns every week in the Washington Post, and it’s taken Achewood and over a decade to make me realize that punchlines are the smallest part of what he does.