Pearls Before Swine and Farcus: The Great Chicken Rebellion

Animal uprisings are very popular in the comics section today. And why shouldn't they be? Animal uprisings are hilarious! Just ask George Orwell.

But the real raison d'etre of this post is to point out that single-panel cartoons face some pretty serious disadvantages as compared to multi-panel comic strips. Farcus and Pearls Before Swine are each employing the same gag here, but Pearls is funnier. Why? Because it has better defined characters and more space to lay out the joke.

Single-panel cartoons live and die by the absurd situations they illustrate. There's rarely enough space for them to do anything else. It doesn't have the advantage of being able to say funny things about those absurd situations or to have those absurd situations affect their characters. So for a single-panel cartoon to work, the situation has to be really absurd and inherently funny. It's tough to come up with a situation like that every day. And the result is that they tend to be pretty hit or miss.

It's similar to the difference between a sitcom and sketch comedy show. A show like The Office or Party Down can go a whole season without a bad episode, as each one did last year. But even the best sketch comedy shows are going to contain a lot of bad sketches. Even when everyone thinks it was better (which varies from person to person and depends almost entirely upon what era an individual grew up watching), the bad sketches on Saturday Night Live outweighed the good. The same is true of Monty Python and The State and The Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show with Bob and David. It's just really hard to come up with so many funny ideas. A lot of them are bound to fall flat.