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.
I can't decide whether the apparent continuity error regarding the importance of glaze to the doughnut people--it seems to be a fuel in Wednesday's cartoon and a vital bodily fluid in today's--is a lazy mistake or a typically absurd Tim Rickard joke. Either way, it's funny.
This comic is hilarious because empathy is an important attribute that far too many seem to lack or disregard.
This, of course, is what life will be like in the socialist paradise of the future. That's your grandmother in the pot, and she is delicious.
The Yoda parody is fine, but what really makes this comic funny is Brewster's facial expressions.
Both of these comics rely on fairly subtle, mostly image-based set-ups, and therefore actually require the reader to pay attention in order to completely get the jokes. This is an unfortunately rare occurrence in the comics section.
All puns are bad. Take the above installment of the always awful Frank and Ernest, for example.
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.
While not quite as thematically challenging, Brewster Rockit is far funnier than Battlestar Galactica ever was.
I have to believe that in the future we'll be able to change the channel on our televisions using nothing but the power of our brains. And the little chip we'll all have in our brains.
