The Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 5–On Humanity

Want a new comic? Here’s the next best thing: A new punchline. This was the first one that, looking at it now, I just don’t feel like had the kind of punch that I wanted. But don’t worry, I’m not going to go all Lucas on you: both the new one and the old one live beyond the cut, along with an explanation about why I made the change, and some musings on poetics. I’m interested to hear what people think about the difference: is the new one funnier, or should I have left well enough alone?

First the original:

And then the new one:

Ok, so why did I make the change? Here’s the long answer:

It probably won’t surprise you to know that I value the minimal quite a bit in art. I like Hemingway a lot–issues with his treatment of women aside. I belong to an online critique group and I tell about 9 out of 10 people to cut their overall word count by an arbitrary amount as an exercise–they may like the short version better, but even if they don’t, it will make them more aware of how they use words and what the story really needs and what it doesn’t.

In a writing class I took once, one of the poets who came in and spoke said something about poetry that really stuck with me because I think it applies to other kinds of writing as well. I wish I remembered his name because I really liked his poetry, too–he started as an SF poet, but had switched to more of an experimental formalist style. He talked about how a pile of sand behaves in unpredictable ways–add a single grain and the entire pile might rearrange itself. A poem is like that pile of sand, he said, and each word should fundamentally rearrange everything that came before it. If a word doesn’t do that, it’s probably not the right word for the poem. At least, that’s how he did his writing. When I reread the original version of this comic this morning, the punchline felt totally dead to me. And I think this was the reason why. It didn’t change the nature of what came before it. This may be important for any word in a poem, but it’s critical in the punchline of a gag comic–that shift is what the entire comic is based around. The single word, “sometimes,” has this shift, I think. It not only comments on the line above it, it echoes and changes the “sometimes” in the previous panel.

Short answer: I laugh at the new one.

But I welcome your comments.

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This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 12:00 am and is filed under Writing, Angriest Rice Cooker Director's Cut. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.