Off the Mark: Bryan didn't realize who was following him.

Off the Mark is a really solid single-panel gag cartoon that I rarely talk about but usually enjoy. Today's installment uses both Twitter and a pun in service of a joke, which normally wouldn't be a good sign, but Mark Parisi manages to pull it off.

The cartoon works because neither Twitter nor the pun are the joke in and of themselves. Rather, they sort of each work as a set-up and a punchline at the same time; the tweets set up the pun, but the pun does just as good a job setting up the tweets. And what's really funny about the cartoon is the situation.

Which makes sense, given that single-panel cartoons tend to live or die by the absurd situations they depict.

Mother Goose and Grimm, Mutts, Rhymes with Orange, and Reality Check: Don't play those reindeer games with me, pal!

AAARGH MAKE IT STOP.

Flying McCoys and Mother Goose and Grimm: Dancer with the Stars

Reindeer puns are going to get old pretty quickly.

Barney Google and Snuffy Smith: Harpees.

I imagine the brainstorming session for today's Snuffy Smith went something like this:

Cartoonist A: OK, our punchline is purty gud. But I reckon we need a little background humor.

Cartoonist B: Welp, they're gunna be holdin' some fashion magazines, ain't they?

Cartoonist A: Sure.

Cartoonist B: Welp, why not make up some funny names fer 'em that sound like th' name o' REAL fashion magazines?

Cartoonist A: Hey there, that's a great idea!

Cartoonist B: Vogue can become Vague...

Cartoonist A: That's hi-larious!

Cartoonist B: And Bazaar can become Bizarre...

Cartoonist A: Ho ho! You're on a roll now!

Cartoonist B: And ... um ... hmm ...

Cartoonist A: Welp, how's about, er, that there Harper's magazine.

Cartoonist B: Harper's, eh? Is that a fashion magazine?

Cartoonist A: I reckon it must be.

Cartoonist B: Sure. Sure, you must be right. All magazines is about fashion these days, ain't they?

Cartoonist A: They sure are.

Cartoonist B: Welp, then we'll call it Harpees.

Cartoonist A: Ooh, Harpees! That's terrific! It sounds just like a derog'tory word for women!

Cartoonist B: And a lot like a sex'lly transmitted disease!

Get Fuzzy: Why did you think Don Quixote had fur?

Best. Malapropism. Ever.

Better Half: I finally figured out what I.M. means. It means I.M. too old to chat this way!

This cartoon is hilarious because "I.M." sounds a lot like "I am."

Get Fuzzy: Reflections on a vase

The punchline to this comic exists in the unseen fourth panel and is funnier for being unseen. The third panel, meanwhile, is made funnier by the moment of uncertainty the absence of the obvious punchline causes. The second panel is made funnier when we realize--the uncertainty of the third panel having passed--that Bucky's not actually looking at the vase. And the first panel is made funnier by knowing just what kind of reflections Bucky means. And so maybe the punchline is in the first panel. And so maybe the first panel is the fourth panel. And it's at its funniest the moment you just catch sight of that.

Mother Goose and Grimm: There was no tern left unstoned.

This pun deserves props. In general, Mike Peters makes pretty good use of the much maligned play on words, and is probably second only to Stephan Pastis as the pun master of the comics section.

Get Fuzzy: You got an ibaboonprofin on you?

I was going to write about how, even though I love Get Fuzzy and therefore cut it a lot of slack, this is a pretty terrible installment with nothing to recommend it.

But then I saw that Bucky had changed the name of the Boston Bruins to the Boston Baboonians, and it made me laugh. So if nothing else, at least there's that.

The real lesson of this comic then is that if you're going to go with word play, go with lots of word play. Your odds will be better that way.

Get Fuzzy: Folk! You folk, buddy!

This is an example of an actually well done pun, mostly because of the implied vulgarity. But, and I know I harp on this a lot, what really makes this comic is the specificity of the characterization. Of course Satchel's favorite style of music is folk. Of course Bucky would misunderstand and beat the shit out of Satchel. And of course Rob would intervene too late.

This specificity carries over into the dialog. Get Fuzzy is one of those rare comics in which the characters actually speak differently from one another. Rob speaks like a reformed slacker. Satchel stammers and puts his sentences together slowly. Bucky, meanwhile, puts his sentences together too quickly for his mind and, as a result, often says things that make no sense.

This is what informs the comic's unique construction. The funniest jokes in Get Fuzzy tend to fall in the middle, in the back and forth between the characters. "Well that totally techno-ed" is a pretty decent punchline, but the third-to-final panel is funnier.

All of which is to say, the foundation of any given installment of Get Fuzzy is almost always going to be characterization. And that's why the comic is so good in general.

Betty: If it helps, think of it as an app for your iBod.

While The Family Circus settles for combining just two tropes, Betty manages to riff lamely on three of them:

1. Kids get bored easily,
2. It's boring inside, but FUN FUN FUN outside, and
   
3. These kids today with their computers and their iPods and their techhoozits!

Also, a lazy pun!

Frank and Ernest and Brewster Rockit: Fun--and not so much fun--with puns.

All puns are bad. Take the above installment of the always awful Frank and Ernest, for example.

But some puns are so bad they're good. Stephen Pastis is the master, but Tim Rickard pulls of some pretty decent punnery, too.

The difference between bad puns and so-bad-they're-good puns lies mostly in the set-up. The better the set-up, the funnier the pun. The set-up in that Frank and Ernest is just lazy, and so the pun comes off as lazy, too. The set-up in Brewster Rockit, meanwhile, is so absurd and unexpected that the pun is sort of funny. Likewise, the set-up in the linked Pearls Before Swine is so ornate that the pun is sort of funny. In each case, it's not really the pun that produces the humor, but all the obvious and self-conscious effort the author put into the set-up to make the pun work.

On its own, a pun is a just a pun, after all. And everybody knows puns suck. The trick to making them funny is taking them seriously.

Get Fuzzy and Doonesbury: Boogie shark.

Most great comic strips are built on great characters. And having great characters lets artists do things they ordinarily couldn't do.

Neither of these strips has a traditional joke. The pun in Get Fuzzy is buried in the middle panels and never explicitly commented on, while the construction of the joke in Doonesbury is so fractured that it doesn't really play as one. Both artists even go so far as to make little meta-jokes about the subtlety of the jokes that would normally be the centerpiece of a comic by having characters not get them.

But both strips are funny anyway, entirely because of the character interaction. Comics with lesser characters can't get away with this particular kind of subversion and still be funny.

Shoe: I wonder if any of the X-men would be interested in my x-wife.

There's something wrong with this joke. It's just a lame pun, of the sort Shoe does all the time. But beyond that, the construction of the joke is flawed. The set-up does not lead smoothly into the punchline. Cosmo's "What did you think?" is asking for an appraisal of the movie. Shoe's reply can in no way be construed as such; it seems like he's answering an entirely different question. The panels, therefore, feel disconnected.