Wait what's the joke
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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It's a funny subversion, personally it tickle my brain to recast everything I know about Charlie and the Chocolate factory in a turnip twist with a Wanky being as flamboyant as always and the kids being WAY less into it. i like to picture the parent being there and being enamored with it.
It says a lot about society.
"Subverting expectations" is like jazz.
A good jazz musician knows the rules of music. They choose which ones to bend and which ones to break. When a couple of rules are broken here and there it's pleasurable and exciting.
When too many rules are broken, it's Yoko Ono.
Sure, but I think this is not Yoko Ono.
The core of humor is doing something unexpected. "Willy Wonka makes turnips" is unexpected. The same is true with "Charlie doesn't like what Willy Wonka makes".
The problem is that both of those things are telegraphed really early, thus defusing any surprise they could have delivered. By the last frame we expect Charlie to have a bad time at Willy Wonka's factory, and he does.
This comic is making animal noises into a microphone and Chuck Berry wants to slap the shit out of it.
You are not thinking with portals.
Yep, it's definitely that and not the fact that this is a dogshit comic.
Nosiree.
Have you ever seen like anything from Monty Python? i'm genuinely curious I know comedy is, obviously, subjective, but this comic has a distinctive quality and it's hard for me to see it labeled as "shitty".
Yeah, I've seen all of Flying Circus and all of their movies.
Monty Python did absurdist stuff, but they didn't violate core principles of timing and surprise. Jokes recurred or dragged at times without overstaying their welcome.
A piece of absurdist humor still needs to be humorous. Being weird doesn't absolve something from being boring or pointless.
I don't know what to tell you, if Monty were to do this it'd be dragged longer, the stern granpa would be histerically yelling and beating Charlie the whole way through and 8 minutes into the sketch an oompa loompa would walk in a suit and reference a line from 6 sketches before.
But I guess everybody truly is different and that's ok, I guess. Maybe.
That's the thing, I feel like this comic didn't drag on long enough. It ended too early to tell us the full joke.
Yeah, and there would have been a bunch of punchlines throughout.
Storytelling of any kind is about setups and payoffs. The comic has two actual, decent setups and zero payoffs. In fact all of the praise for the comic comes from people (including you) who explicitly said what made them laugh was what they "imagined*.
It's the creator's job to actually provide a good payoff at the end. Yes, threads can be left hanging. Yes, things can be left to the imagination. But in this case specifically both of those strategies are abused to the point that the only way this comic is even passable is if readers are extremely charitable and provide their own ending.
I think you are wrong is all I can realistically come up with.
You don't need a punchline and an author has no duty. I would also argue plenty of stuff from Monty Python (and we are referencing ancient classical stuff by the way) have no punchline and make the lack of a punchline part of the comical experience.
Just look at this thing, there's a stern father reprimending Charlie saying "IT IS WONDERFUL AND YOU ARE GOING". Granpa on the brick of death is staring into the void filled with the dream of visiting the turnip factory!
You must laugh GODDAMNIT!
Here's a joke for you: A man is ROWING down a RIVER. He gets to the waterfall, and when the goes over the edge he yells "RADIO!!!"
So did I just disrespect you and waste your time, or do I get a pass because it's so random and it subverts your expectations of how a joke could be structured?
Being weird, or quirky, or SuBveRtInG eXpEcTatiONs doesn't give anybody a pass for their creations not working on a basic level.
You entertained me, because of the context. If you were able to draw it and contextualize it maybe setting it in a well known fictional universe, mixing it with themes of the wonder of a coming of age, the machination of the industry, the generational gap and a sense of rythm in the way the narration is paced and represented, I would probably find it brilliant.
In the second subversion, it’s still a chocolate factory but Charlie is allergic to chocolate
This felt like a 2 part comic without the 2nd half
It's just funny (to me) thinking about if it wasn't chocolate but instead something undesirable. Now if it was beetroot...
Its not funny, there is no joke.
By the amazing Kate Beaton!
Love love Hark! A Vagrant. And a lot of the other comics are way funnier, especially the historical ones. The comics about "marauding women on bicycles" (like this one) crack me up. I still think the "strong female characters" series is one of the funniest things ever.
I wish Beaton would keep doing Hark! A Vagrant, but given what her family went through and her sister's misdiagnosis and death from cancer, I understand why she finished it up. Her graphic novel/memoir, Ducks, was one of the best books I read last year.
Yeah Ducks was incredible. It gave me a completely different persepctive on available post-secondary options that resonated as my eldest step-son is navigating college. But I love going back to my Hark! A Vagrant books for some historical sillies.
You are incorrect in your assessment.
Her Gatsby comics are the funniest things ever.
"What baby" 😆
Ungrateful little shit
Turnips are ok. I prefer beets.
I think that turnips were kind of more filling the place that potatoes did.
Then the Columbian exchange happened and suddenly Europe had potatoes and turnips got kind of displaced.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/08/christopher-columbus-potato-that-changed-world/
Before Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the European diet was a bland affair. In many northern climes, crops were largely limited to turnips, wheat, buckwheat and barley. Even so, when potatoes began arriving from America, it took a while for locals to realize that the strange lumps were, comparatively speaking, little nutritional grenades loaded with complex carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins.
“When [Sir Walter] Raleigh brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the leaves,” Qian said.
Eventually, starting with a group of monks on Spain’s Canary Islands in the 1600s, Europeans figured out how to cultivate potatoes, which form a nutritionally complete — albeit monotonous — diet when combined with milk to provide vitamins A and D. The effects were dramatic, boosting populations in Ireland, Scandinavia, Ukraine and other cold-weather regions by up to 30 percent, according to Qian’s research. The need to hunt declined and, as more land became productive, so did conflicts over land.
Frederick the Great ordered Prussian farmers to grow them, and the potato moved to the center of European cultures from Gibraltar to Kiev. "Let the sky rain potatoes,” Shakespeare wrote in "The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Their portability made them ideal to transport into the growing cities, feeding the swelling population that would be needed for a factory labor force.
“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said.
“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said.
I'm thinking coconut. Definitely hurts more
Oh, that's a good thought.
Hmm.
I guess it depends on how you measure "impact". I think that coconut would probably win if you talk impact on specific societies -- I mean, there's less of a replaceable staple food -- but the potato has had larger impact in terms of scale; more people in the world rely on the potato.
Then they started making alcohol out of them.
I'd probably prefer parsnips.
Turnips are awesome. We get fresh ones where I live like 2 weeks a year :-|
It's OK - we all have off days.
