Last week, I promised I would do something more this week on what I posted then, so here, right on time, are the New Yorker cartoonists Joe Dator, Matt Diffee, and Drew Dernavich weighing in on the comedic connection between cartoon captions and tweets. I’ll weigh in myself, where warranted, without throwing my weight around.
First off, Joe Dator:
The difference for me is that, in a good cartoon, the caption and the drawing support each other to make the joke work, whereas tweets are one-liners that stand on their own as complete jokes. While tweets may seem like captions in search of a cartoon, any images that they conjure are best left in the reader’s imagination, and adding a visual would either be redundant or would take away from the humor. That’s why they go in the “post it on Twitter” pile instead of the “draw it as a cartoon” pile.
Here are some of my favorites from the Twitter heap:
“I only have one thing to say, and this is it.”
“Anything called ‘Ye Olde’ isn’t.”
“I just joined an improb group. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever meet.”
“I’m laughing all the way to the bank, and then the post office if it’s still open.”
“Today would have been my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary if I’d met someone and got married in 1988.”
“I’m creating a Kickstarter to pay for a fund-raiser to finance a money-making scheme.”
“Who was the first person ever to call N.Y. “The Big Apple”? I’ll bet it was someone who had absolutely no idea what an apple smells like.”
“This may be the margarita talking, but I am a delightful frozen alcoholic beverage.”
For Joe, I think the distinction holds up well because his cartoons almost always have an incongruous element that the caption makes sense of.
And the caption alone need not have any humor:
But, even with Joe’s material, there could be some tweet/toon overlap. Here’s a cartoon caption by Joe that could be a tweet:
“My wife is recording everything the kids do until they leave for college. Then I’ll binge-watch them grow up.”
Still, I do think that caption is helped by the accompanying image, which acts as a setup for the line.
I also think that Joe’s tweet—“This may be the margarita talking, but I am a delightful frozen alcoholic beverage”—would be funnier as a cartoon, if it were set in a bar with a clearly inebriated guy hitting on some woman before his pitch dissolves into nonsense.
Still, regarding Joe’s stuff, most times, the toon and the tweet do not meet.
Matt Diffee’s take on the topic was a bit more complicated. When I e-mailed to ask for his ideas, he responded this way:
My thoughts about Twitter are vast and varied and maybe even some other adjective staring with a “V” that I can’t think of now, but it will come to me. Anyway, here they are:
I use Twitter as a writing exercise, a warmup, and, in some cases, a sketchbook for comedy ideas. Of course, the brevity is appealing to me and the precision of language is the same as captions, and most of the same joke-writing rules apply. I also am interested in the bigger picture of how a person cultivates an audience or a tweeting voice. There are different strategies and different times when different strategies work better than others. The tweets are in the following categories: good short jokes, Twitter-type jokes, and tweets that led to cartoons.
Good short jokes:
“Just got attacked by a sloth. Luckily, I know Tai Chi.”
“I wonder if a lot of retired curling champions end up doing custodial work.”
“My Siamese cats are inseparable.”
“I scream, you scream, we all scream because life is meaningless.”
Twitter-type jokes (which follow a Twitter-type joke format, refer to Twitter, or work best when read in the context of Twitter):
“I’m a HUGE fan of minimalism!!!”
“Doctors told me I’d never type again, but they were wronf.”
“In 2018, Easter and April Fool’s Day will fall on the same day. You’ve got five years to work up a zinger, atheists.”
“Tweeting about 12/12/12 is so 11/11/11.”
“Guy: What’s up, dawg? Me: Sorry, I’m not really a dawg person.”
“I promise this tweet will have no hashtag #AprilFoolsSucka”
“I’m narcoleptic so I someti”
“I just spent sixteen minutes trying to decide whether to end a tweet with ‘just saying’ or ‘for real.’ Just saying.”
“Two reason why I’m not a vegetarian: 1. Bacon 2. Canadian bacon”
“ ‘Wait, a Fudgsicle isn’t a bicycle made of fudge?’ — me, age six, disappointed”
Tweets that led to or became cartoons in the magazine:
“I bet clowns are afraid of accountants.”
I manipulated the basic idea behind this tweet to create this New Yorker cartoon:
In the case of this tweet—“The first rule of Bible club is always talk about Bible club”—the appropriate cartoon image is obviously just a bunch of guys gathered around Bibles saying the line.
Voluminous! Yep. That’s the third “V” adjective I couldn’t think of to describe my thoughts about Twitter—or was it “vacuous”? In either case, now you’ve got them thoughts.
Like Matt, Drew Dernavich uses tweeting both as a practice arena for writing captions and for exploring the medium’s potential for other kinds of humor. I’ll let Drew tell it in his own voice. If he tries it in any other voice, especially that breathy Marilyn Monroe imitation he does, he just sounds silly.
Twitter is obviously a perfect vehicle for that classic brand of one-liner that fits equally well into a standup routine or in the mouth of a character in a cartoon. I initially tweeted the caption for the following cartoon from a coffee shop, but later realized that it was good enough to stand on its own as something that one of these ladies might say. Because of the hundred-forty-character limit, you have to be able to edit tweets down to their essence, which is great practice for caption writing.
These other tweets follow the classic cartoon-caption pattern of a normal-sounding statement in which the “kicker” comes in the form of a surprise twist or added, unnecessary phrase tacked on at the end, but they don’t necessarily need an accompanying image to work:
“It’s normal, but it bothers me: that sound of pipes knocking when somebody in the apartment above me is taking a shower with a hammer.”
“The best time to weigh yourself is when you’re soaking wet after coming out of the womb.”
“Just got my first-ever summons for jury duty, which I consider one of the highest duties that a citizen should probably be hung over for.”
“My lack of knowledge of cultural idioms has always been my Achilles’ neck.”
You can leave a tweet unfinished, which you can’t really do in a caption.
“Just cooked a bunch of bacon. The downside of having your place smell like bacon is”
These are similar to @NeinQuarterly’s tweets about creating a scene. Of course, I don’t think of it this way when I’m writing the tweet, but the humor comes from somebody imagining what, exactly, is going on, and it’s a lot funnier to leave it to the reader’s imagination:
“I hate the sound those automatic paper-towel dispensers make when they say, “Give me fifty bucks.” Whoa—maybe that wasn’t a towel dispenser.”
“Either this is a weird couple of dudes next to me, or it’s a weird couple of chicks, or maybe couch pillows have no gender.”
“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is fine, but when will these places start taking credit cards?”
And Twitter gives you the ability to inject yourself as a character in a scene, which you can’t do in a cartoon:
“I was collecting a crazy amount of cat hair in the lint filter of the dryer, so I finally decided: duh, stop putting the cat in the dryer.
“The museum guard said, ‘No photography.’ I said, ‘I know—they’re all oil paintings, duh.’ ”
“It’s so true that a watched pot never boils! I finally gave in and decided to turn the burner on instead.”
“Sometimes, if a recipe calls for fresh ground and toasted coriander, I just substitute going out for dinner instead.”
It’s fun to see how short you can make a tweet. Sometimes even a clipped sentence structure is too much, and all you need is a few words, a phrase, or an equation, whether it makes any sense or not.
“washing-machine abs > washboard abs”
“Backsteak Outhouse”
“sOMe cAps”
I told Bob I had a lot more to say on this, but he said that whatever additional points I had to make were probably already covered in Matt’s “voluminous” remarks.
