by Mike Meginnis
The secret to comedy may be timing, but the secret to great comedy is ambiguity. Often the funniest things are those we don't understand. Not knowing why you're laughing is a wonderful, disquieting thing. Few comics -- in either sense of the noun -- have been able to really find this sweet spot between sharp wit and beer-soaked confusion, but those few that do are the really great ones. Remember Monty Python's Flying Circus? Why was that show so damn funny anyway? Sure, sometimes it was their dry wit. Sometimes it was their sharp sense of the absurd. Sometimes it was blatant, all-conquering stupidity. Sometimes it was a combination of all three. And sometimes? Sometimes, you couldn't tell why you were laughing. You also couldn't stop.
Another prime example: British comedian Eddie Izzard does a set in English; then, in an attempt to demonstrate his international mindset, he does it all over again in French. The crowd laughs even louder the second time. They don't know French. They didn't memorize the set -- they didn't know it would be useful! All they have to go on is Izzard's animated gestures and the occasional probably-recognized phrase. It's still funny, but the crowd isn't entirely sure what they're even laughing at anymore, and that makes it even more hysterical. Confusion is the secret mana of the mind.
Achewood is a daily gag strip unlike any other. It's intelligent (in fact, it's genius) and it doesn't talk down to its audience. It takes full advantage of the potential of ambiguity in comedy, and it does so without apology or explanation. In the first strip... well, hell, just take a look, there's really no describing it.
Now, you can't not laugh at that if you're human. But why? What on Earth is the joke here? Sure, Phillipe is cute, but I don't laugh at cute. I say awww, cute. The only, best guess I have is that the ambiguity itself is the joke, here. With this first strip, the debut of his comic, Onstad seems to have declared his intention to create intelligent humor that does not explain itself, doesn't need to explain itself; it doesn't even necessarily have a "joke" to it. Non-punch lines such as this have persisted and been refined to a fine art by the creator since this first foray. Now, in many of his current comics, I often believe wrongly at first glance that I have successfully located the punch line, and it is what I'm laughing at. It often takes a second or third reading for me to determine that this is simply untrue. There was no punch line, I'm laughing anyway. This is subtle genius.
So, what am I laughing at, I sometimes wonder. Sometimes I am actually laughing at subtle tensions Onstad creates using a very careful attention to detail removing the commas and periods where they will not serve the timing. Something seems vaguely wrong with the dialogue or strangely on-target and not staged and I am laughing at this natural unnatural beat that he has created which captures the rhythm of dialogues in real life but seems so strange on the computer monitor.
You may see an (inferior) example of that technique if you look back at the previous paragraph.
Sometimes he lets things drag on too long. The humor comes from the fact that had he stopped a panel earlier, it would have been a neat, perfectly simple, pat little comic strip. By dragging things out, he makes it sloppy. He makes it unnerving. He makes you so ready to laugh and then he stops you, makes you hold it back and wait one more beat, which ruins the initial joke. Which is, of course, another joke in and of itself. A quite funny one, indeed. Yes.
You may see an (inferior) example of that structure if you look back at the previous paragraph.
Sometimes there isn't any joke at all, and you won't laugh. There was a sequence where Ray, one of the principle characters, died and went to hell. It wasn't funny so much as it was incredibly bizarre. Not long before that was a dramatic sequence with as many strips without a joke as with. In it, a crazed killer kidnapped Phillipe, planning to kill him. There weren't many laughs flying as tears flowed from sweet little Phillipe's eyes. There weren't many laughs when the genuinely harrowing conclusion came around, either.
Every emotion available is put to use in Achewood's considerable archives. Fear, anger, sadness -- Onstad evokes all of them with his character driven storylines, usually for comedy and sometimes not. The solid grounding the occasional joke-free strip creates for the rest is well worth the effort. Not always knowing if you're even expected to laugh only adds to the humor of the comic's constant explorations of ambiguity, and it's a master stroke that most comic artists would never even conceive of, let alone put to good use.
There are, of course, plenty of over the top gross-out gags. These have perhaps drawn an undue amount of attention. When Onstad does gross humor, it's generally hysterical, but an unfortunate number of people seem to have been turned off by these strips. If you're one of them, you should really reconsider this position. The advantage of Onstad's breadth as a cartoonist is obvious, but it also comes with its downside: for every ten pieces in his archives that are sure to make you laugh, there's probably one that will irritate you in some small way. You will not perceive him as putting his best foot forward every day. If you happened across his work at the wrong time, you would probably ignore it altogether.
Many of the comics are very character driven. Without foreknowledge of Roast Beef the Cat's long history of depression and fearful, mundane behaviors, there's little chance you would understand many of the recent year's gags. In a recent example, Roast Beef received a black T-shirt by mail as a gift from a friend. Initially, he was excited, putting it on to take it for a test drive. He felt so suave and strangely excited by this addition to his fashion identity. Then he imagined how his friends might react. In his nightmarish imagination, he conceived of them accusing him of pretension. He imagined them asking just what in the hell he was doing. In the next panel, we see him tearfully burying the black T-shirt rather than risk the scathing social backlash he has pictured for it.
There are two jokes at play here: On the one hand, this whole fiasco is absolutely ridiculous on the face of it. Who would ever get pissed off just because he wore a black shirt? On the other hand, there are people who feel just as terrified and ashamed about equally trivial things all the time. I would know: I'm one of them. Writing this article makes me feel terrified, and it makes me feel ashamed. I wonder if people will think I'm pretentious for the way I write it, or writing it at all. I worry that you'll hate me for writing it the way I have. Which is, really, pretty hysterical -- or rather, it would be if you knew me. The shirt burying incident will be hysterical if you know Beef, so read the archives before you try to dive in to recent comics, even though Onstad's early work only hints at the mastery of the form he would later attain.
Ambiguity is genuine. Real life is ambiguous in the extreme. Breadth of emotion is genuine. Real life will make you feel every way you ever could. Sometimes, truth comes from fiction. Sometimes it comes from humor. Sometimes it comes from humorous, fictional talking cats in thongs. But if you happened to have tuned in on Achewood on the wrong day, you may have very well gotten the wrong idea and never come back. Here's your second chance. Don't miss it.
Sometimes an inappropriately somber tone powers the humor in Achewood, too. See the previous paragraph for an (inferior) example.
