When’d we get a narrator?
on March 5, 2013 at 12:01 amHey, cartoonist, stop creeping on Joyce.
Obviously, this strip worked a lot better in the pages of the college newspaper, where Joyce could actually point at Zippy the Pinhead. Also obviously, “it’s the last panel so make a joke now” should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be used as a punchline ever ever.
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Never was a fan of meta-humour, but it seems cute here.
Yeah, maybe it’s just the fact that I know it was published ~15 years ago, when this was more original, but it doesn’t seem as cliched as it would normally.
I spent a GOOD chunk of my late middle school/early high school life thinking breaking the fourth wall was the funniest thing ever.
As did I. It still can be funny, in the proper circumstances, or if it’s subtle enough, but it rarely is.
“Subtle” is definitely not the way I would describe its usage here.
I STILL think breaking the fourth wall is one of the funniest things ever. But there are definitely many situations where it should never be used (i.e. anything where the story is actually important.)
It starts getting weird/subjectively acceptable when the fourth wall is double-layered.
Well, apart from if the fourth wall itself is important to the story, but that’s hard to do well.
It, like any trope in any medium, depends upon being used well and in the right circumstances.
When I was a kid I found fourth-wall-breaking more irritating than anything because it impeded my ability to give a shit about what was going on.
The worst fourth-wall breaking is, in the first strip, having a character say, “It’d be great if our comic had a plot.”
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Zippy is hilarious in the right conditions.
The right conditions, in my case, were when I had a pretty bad fever and was on medication, and my mom picked me up a lot of comic collections from the library. 103 degree temperature plus meds plus Zippy equals good times.
I still read it every now and again, and if I perform a sort of mental equivalent to crossing my eyes to see a Magic Eye picture, I get it.
Zippy was one of those that builds the funny up over weeks at a time, and really works best in collections.
Our college paper had a strip like that (Jim’s Journal) that was used only as sporadic filler. It generated the worst hate mail that the paper printed.
Man, I loved Jim’s Journal. What people didn’t get was the meta-joke. This guy’s life is full of non-events, yet he still keeps a journal about them.
Enjoy Jim again!
http://www.gocomics.com/jimsjournal/
Wow. “Zippy”. All these years, I’ve read that as “Ziggy”.
I assumed it was Ziggy, too. I had to google Zippy… doesn’t look like a comic I’d follow, so meh.
I always thought it said “ZIPPT”. :\
You’re goin to punchline jail
The joke is that there is no joke.
HIGH-QUALITY HUMOR, FOLKS.
Huh, I never noticed Joyce was reading a book in this strip. I always assumed it was a newspaper because of the punchline.
“Also obviously, “it’s the last panel so make a joke now” should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be used as a punchline ever ever.”
More than one Cyanide and Happiness comic comes to mind.
That’s their charm. Everything those guys put out is so dreadful that when a strip like that comes up, it’s surprisingly good by comparison.
It’s always a good sign when one of the characters knows more about the construction of comics than the cartoonist.
Joyce must be happy, God is speaking to her.
If Joyce knew her God was a Transformers fan in a Hawaiian shirt, she’d become an atheist pretty fast.
If God is a transformers fan in a Hawaiian shirt, I’d become a christian pretty fast.
Zippy just strikes me as a kind of proto-hipster comic. Like it’s the kind of thing hipsters would say they were into before it became “mainstream” but it never became mainstream and it’s older than most hipsters.
Well, to be fair, it started out in underground comix. Moving from that to newspaper syndication is pretty mainstream.
Good point, it’s hard to get more mainstream than King Features Syndicate. Generally speaking though, I never really saw it on a typical newspaper comics page.
Fun fact: Zippy the Pinhead was Ronald Reagan’s favorite comic strip.
“Also obviously, “it’s the last panel so make a joke now” should never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever be used as a punchline ever ever.”
I dunno, I laughed.
This comic, remixed by Willis in early 2014: http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/73891756144
Originally posted:
April 16, 1998