A recent post on the New Yorker Web site called “The Construction of a Twitter Aesthetic” caught my eye. It’s about an academic, Eric Jarosinski, who wanted to pare his bloated academese and found that the hundred-forty-character constraints of the tweet freed him to do so. Constraints free you? Seems like a contradiction in terms, but that is exactly what appeals to Jarosinski. Here’s how he describes his tweeting strategy: “You’re trying to find a way to state contradiction.” And contradictory statements, stated in the right way, are funny. That’s what oxymoronic humor is all about.
To wit (and also to-witter, because all of these are less than a hundred forty characters):
I also liked Jarosinski’s characterization of a good tweet as similar to “writing a cartoon caption for a cartoon that doesn’t exist.” Well, in my contradictory opinion, no and yes. Many of my own tweets do have this cartoonless-caption element:
Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, unless you’re a masochist.
I had a senior moment the other day but can’t remember what it was.
There’s a little-known fact that’s so little-known I have no idea of what it is.
However, like many tweets, these are much closer in form to one-liners than cartoon captions. Not only are they self-contained jokes, without any need for an image, but it would take a good deal of modification to shoehorn them into a cartoons. Fortunately, I was able to obtain a shoehorn for the first two:
But that last quip remained stubbornly unshoehornable.
Now, putting the shoehorn on the other foot, to make a cartoon caption work alone, as a tweet, is difficult because many cartoon captions only make sense when tied to an image.
Still, I found a sweet spot where a few of my cartoon captions would also make decent tweets:
While sometimes there is serendipitous overlap, I don’t think that “The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker” will someday have a companion volume called “The Complete Tweets of The New Yorker Cartoonists.” But I may be wrong. We’ve got some pretty active cartoon tweeters out there. Next week, they will weigh in on the topic.
