Angriest Rice Cooker Director’s Cut 73–On history
Like the last comic, this one relates to what I was doing at the time I wrote it. Namely, having a really long bus commute to work, during which I was listening to old time radio shows burned to an mp3 cd. Among them were a bunch of Bob Hope Show episodes. They were quite funny–Bob Hope wasn’t synonymous with comedy for decades for no reason. But some of the funniest jokes for me are the topical ones that don’t make any sense now. I especially remember one joke that was something like:
Earl Warren’s bursting into bars in Washington and shouting “Orange Juice for everyone!”
Now, I know who Earl Warren is. At the time he was the governor of California and had been the candidate for Vice President running with Dewey against Harry S. Truman. I believe the joke was from a few years after that–1950 or so. He would later become the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court and, surprisingly considering his previous Republican party loyalty, preside over the most progressive Supreme Court in US history. But none of that can even begin to explain this joke to me.
By the way, I think my output in this period is a strong argument against the idea writing less means writing better, at least for me. I wasn’t making nearly as many strips at this time (shooting for two a week instead of five), and while that was largely because I didn’t have as much time, I still ended up spending more time on each individual comic than I did before. But because I didn’t have any rhythm, any momentum, the comics were certainly not improved by the extra time. Obviously this doesn’t apply the same way to people who actually draw comics, but I tend to find that aside from running through a couple of drafts, laboring over writing doesn’t actually make it better. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I think it’s pretty much always better to write more faster rather than slower.
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October 6th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
*poke*
OK, to add something substantial, I will say that after 9/11 somebody said that they finally go why Bob Hope was funny. All those oddly tame jokes focused everyone on life’s basics, instead of the existential struggle that was happening at the time.
OK, your turn.