Fail quickly #2

The galling thing about this failure is that it didn’t even transpire very quickly. I drew it quite scrappily on one page while exiled from my desk, essentially doing a doodly draft, and then roughly got it into a shape in photoshop by simply shrinking five of the six pictures (and flipping the arm in the first picture, as I had somehow managed to put the bandage on the wrong hand).

I published it last night, but deleted it again after a few minutes because it was bumming me out.

The idea is reasonably solid. Basically, a dad is told to avoid knocking an injured finger, and manages to protect it from harm despite doing lots of manual things until he gets home, whereupon his daughter immediately smashes it with a sword.

There are at least three problems with the execution.

  1. The activities the dad is doing while keeping his finger safe completely fail to convey the centrally important idea that he is going to great lengths to remain uninjured. He should be balancing things on his head and closing doors with his feet, like a cartoon waiter with too many plates. Instead I’ve got him doing ordinary, perfectly convenient things, which unravels the premise.
  2. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to fit six panels with dialogue on a single landscape picture with A4 dimensions, but it was on this occasion that I finally twigged: it doesn’t work, or at least not as it’s presented on wordpress. The picture comes out too small.
  3. The drawing is ugly. I probably would have let this slide in the past, operating as I was with the pretext that I didn’t have any spare time and so couldn’t be precious about standards (which on some level was almost certainly an excuse I was giving myself in advance for being terrible). But in the last couple of months I’ve started to feel that my drawing is improving, if nothing else, and I just wasn’t happy to publish an ugly, inept picture without also providing a craven excuse for it (i.e. everything you’ve just read) which I have unconvincingly attempted to dress up as a thoughtful dissection of my own work.

Enjoy!

injury

 

You are wrong about: The US Office (and company)

carrellPeople seem to enjoy shows like Parks and Recreation, the US Office, and Modern Family, and it’s quite possible that you enjoy these shows too. But you are very wrong to feel that way. Let me explain.

The DVD extras for the film This is Spinal Tap – which begat The Office which begat The US Office, Modern Family, Life is Short, and any number of similarly presented sitcoms that you are probably wrong about – include a sort of parallel dimension movie made up of scenes from the cutting room floor. It lasts over an hour, and it’s as funny as the actual film.

These scenes were left out of This is Spinal Tap not because they aren’t funny, but because they’re not authentic. Similarly, there are deleted scenes from The Office which Stephen Merchant and Ricky Gervais omitted expressly because they were too obvious, too joke-like, to fit tonally with a show purporting to be a documentary (it’s a shame the pair didn’t maintain this standard for Life is Short).

Conversely, every other mockumentary sitcom you can think of doesn’t even pretend to appear to try and be even vaguely authentic, often supplying questionable pretexts for the fictional film crews to be present and producing characters that behave in conspicuously unrealistic, broadly comic fashion, and conveniently explain their motivations, intentions, and references to camera in a way that it would be quite wrong of you to enjoy.

These explanations to camera are dirty shortcuts, just as pretty much every device arising from the choice to make a sitcom in the documentary style is a cheat, existing purely to make exposition easier to impart, dramatic irony easier to create, and to set up an endless succession of cheap gags that follow a single not-very-funny template.

Exposition: in the normal rules of drama, the story needs to be explained in the situation, by characters in conversation and events on the screen. When a writer has a character provide story information in an unnatural way they are rightly ridiculed for it. The Austin Powers movies feature a character – Basil Exposition – who exists specifically to send up this kind of narrative shortcut (while cunningly also allowing the writers to take it).

But now, somehow, we’ve allowed a breakaway faction of slovely hacks to circumvent the rules entirely and have their characters look you right in the fricking eyes, whenever they want, and tell you exactly what’s happening and/or exactly how they feel about it. You should deplore this practice, even though you probably don’t.

Modern mockumentaries are also stuffed with a certain kind of gag that works like this:

a) Character makes a claim.

b) Footage contradicts the claim.

For example:

a) John (to camera): “I’m very dignified.”

b) John is upside down in a dustbin.

Or they can work the other way around, e.g.:

a) John (to his wife): “Yes, honey, I got the rollerskates!”

b) John (being interviewed): “I did not get the rollerskates.”

This is the cheapest kind of joke imaginable, relying on a simple collision of statements in every case, and each moment of airtime a show like Modern Family or The US Office pads out with pulpy gags like these is a deplorable waste of your time. The fact that you think you’re enjoying them makes them all the more insidious.

But wait a minute, you might say (perhaps out of a misplaced desire to defend your taste), all of the shortcuts and cheats described above might just as easily appear in a well-made mockumentary like The Office and This is Spinal Tap. That’s true, but the difference is that, by scrupulously adhering to the restrictions they impose on themselves in making a show that purports to be a documentary, their writers also earn the right to enjoy the perks – the easy exposition, the flatpack dramatic irony, the easy gags. The writers of The Office and This is Spinal Tap respect you.

The writers of Modern Family et al, on the other hand, despise you, because they know that you are letting them get away with inferior workmanship.

Like drug addicts or compulsive gamblers, they secretly want to be confronted and put on a better path, and they hate you for blindly enabling their depraved, corrupting rampage.

They of all people know that you are utterly wrong to enjoy the absurd proposition they are presenting, and you owe it to them – and to yourself – to admit that you are wrong.

The Pidgys

(This cartoon was somebody else’s idea, which is why it combines two things about which I know nothing: Pokemon Go, and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.)

pidgys2 copy