The Joke Factory
A Behind-The Scenes Look at Humor
This JOE comic strip mines those childhood memories of field trips while also utilizing the old trope of the “behind-the-scenes” gag. You’ve seen this many times, like when Saturday Night Live uses the “what’s happening backstage during the live show” gags, or when David Letterman would leave his talk show desk to interrupt another TV show in the middle of their airtime. “Blooper Reels” are another example.
Then there was the “How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Create Spider-Man” comic strip, which changed my life when I was 12 years old. As a kid I thought comic strips were a weird window into an alternate dimension, but this story explained in detail how real people created my favorite comic book. This encouraged me to write to Marvel Comics to see if there was a school that taught how-to-draw comic strips. They wrote back and suggested The School of Visual Arts (where Spider-Man’s artist Steve Ditko learned to draw comics in the 1950s, when it was called the Cartoonist and Illustrators School):
How Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Create Spider-Man
Remember school field trips as a kid? Growing up in Connecticut I remember visiting a chicken farm, the New Haven Register newspaper, the United Nations in New York City, The Mark Twain House in Hartford, and several trips to New Haven’s Peabody Museum (with their huge “Brontosaurus” skeleton on display, along with other dinosaur specimens).
Okay, yeah, I’ll fess up: The Joke Factory also shows how humor can become dated. Does anyone tell (or even remember) “traveling salesman” jokes in the Internet Age? Mother-In-Law and “big nose” jokes also seem to be ancient history, along with bald head jokes (thank you, Michael Jordan!). Those “topical humor” jokes about Arabs and Oil worked in the 1970s, when Richard Nixon was a favorite target of humorists and caricaturists in the 1960-70s. Today people prefer Donald Trump as a target. Ten years from now people will probably forget that guy, the same way Nixon is a faded memory. This is why I have always avoided material about politics and current events. “Tain’t funny, McGee!”
Surprisingly, the Robin Williams and Steve Martin references still hold up. Like the Marx Brothers or Three Stooges, those two comedians seem to hold a bit of relevance because of all the classic films they appear in. Likewise the Kermit the Frog joke, and ye olde “Changing Light Bulbs” gags. Slapstick is still funny (we all love the Three Stooges, right?), along with changing light bulbs, “walking into a bar” and eating ice cream. Even the final panel’s hippopotamus joke is, if not outright funny, at least a bit humorous.
Anyway, I hope you get a laugh or two out of Joe’s trip to the Joke Factory. That is why “comic” strips were invented, after all.