As an avid stumbler, I frequently find myself reading comics that are at the top of the comedy genius ladder. Some examples would include: AmazingSuperPowers, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and Perry Bible Fellowship. However, every now and then I am faced with a dud. A comic the lacks a real punchline or kept going longer than it had to. But.. Today I stumbled upon something.. Different. My friends, I stumbled upon this comic.

Now, upon first reading this comic. You may not notice just how unfunny it is. But that’s why you need to take into consideration a few basic rules of single panel comics.

Both the illustration and the caption should work together to contribute to the punchline of the comic. One way it can do this is by adding on a secondary punchline to a joke previously made in the illustration that most likely makes the first joke funnier. Does this comic do that? No. The illustration isn’t funny. It’s just a man being harassed about how he’s obviously removed a wedding ring recently. That makes us assume that this man is lying to this woman about his marital status. The caption simply confirms this.

Now, alternatively, the caption could completely juxtapose the illustration and blow away any preconceptions/assumptions/conclusions that the image has caused us to develop. Does this comic do that? No! As I said before, we’ve been set up to assume that this man is lying about his marital status to this woman. Therefore, it would be funny if the caption were to show that we’d actually gotten the wrong idea about the situation. Afterall, that’s the most basic formula of comedy. Something unexpected happening. Zach Weiner, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal sums this concept up here:

But, as I’ve previously stated, this comic fails to do even that. The caption simply explains the unfunny reasoning behind the illustration. I mean, really. It wouldn’t be hard to turn the joke around and give it an unexpected twist. Watch!

See? That’s not even funny. But at least it’s actually a joke now.

Anyway, after reading the comic, I felt compelled to put an end to what I’m sure had been a long and drawn out series of mindless, politically correct, bourgeois drivel that someone had incorrectly labeled a ‘comic’. So, I wrote an email to the creator.

“Hello there.

After reading your comic published on Monday the 29th I am requesting that you cease all forms of comedic-creativity for as long as you may live. This piece makes it clear that you have no understanding of the most basic rules of comedy and that you are potentially the least funny comic artist in the world. I would try and explain the concepts of juxtaposition and irony to you but in my heart I know that anyone capable of forging such a damp display of wit is already too far gone to be saved. The fact is simple, you are doing only bad things to the world of humour. Your work serves only to help in continuously lowering the bar of what is deemed amusing by the masses. If you have any respect for the medium that I’m sure you once appreciated then you’ll do the right thing and end your career here.

Thank you.”

________________________________________________________________

Within minutes I received my reply.

“Thank you for you e-mail. I have to say, that out of the hundreds of e-mails received about this cartoon, yours was the only one complaining about it. The other 400 or more liked the cartoon very much, and many people paid to have reprints of the cartoon.

As for the ending of Mr. McPherson’s career, his calendars and greeting cards continue to be top-selling items. Though obviously everyone’s sense of humor varies, yours appears to be simply out of synch with the millions of fans that follow Close To Home. Don’t you get that? Apparently not.

In the future, you need simply not to read Close To Home to prevent being bothered by it’s style of humor. If you do keep reading it, it clearly means that something about it appeals to you on some level.

Regards,

Chris Millis
Associate to Mr. McPherson”

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Well, everyone, there you have it. If “400 or more liked the cartoon” so much that they wrote in to compliment the creator and the rest of those “millions of fans” just sat back and laughed at a joke that simply wasn’t there then I guess I’m too late. Humanity is doomed. Comedy is dead.

But if you’re reading this; you are the resistance. Don’t let them win. Burn your newspapers. Burn them before the evil contained within their brittle pages can be released. Don’t read the funnies.

I repeat.

DO.

NOT.

READ.

THE FUNNIES.

- TomSka out

Yesterday, me, Bing, Amy and Mat tried to fake a viral video similar to the kind you’d find at FAILBlog. It finished up looking like this:

Now, about 4 out of 5 people can tell it’s not real and love nothing more than excitedly pounding “FAKE!!” into the comments box; but for the few people I managed to fool, even just for a moment, here’s how I did it.

Taking inspiration from a majority of viral videos (which are typically filmed on a whim) I used my mobile phone to film the video instead of an expensive camera. People have tried to fake virals by using high quality cameras and then compressing the video until it looks crappy, but you just can’t fake that blurry framerate and sound quality that you get from a mobile phone.

We used our latest stunt dummy Blondie (the predecessor of dummies Jenny and Albi) for the actual falling body.

Blondie circa 2008

Blondie, although being the one prop that made this video possible, was no doubt the reason the film ended up looking so fake. The shoulder joints in the duct-tape + newspaper body weren’t loose enough and made the body too stiff in places and too floppy in others.

Then we come to the editing. A lot of people have their own theories on how it was put together, my favourite of which being that Mat managed to run down the stairs and swap himself with the stunt dummy in the 2 seconds spent running and towards it. The video is actually just made up of 2 simple cuts and sound sound engineering.

The first cut is here:

00:11

This pan cut is here so that we could dress Blondie in Mat’s clothes and prepare the throw.

The second cut is not at 00:15 seconds, when Blondie passes through the shadow as many people have theorised but actually 4 seconds later after we’ve run over to the dummy.

Blondie

Mat

The audio of the video, such as the laughter and impact noise, was mostly made up of sound from various other takes. I also recorded Mat jumping off a small wall going “oh fu-” (heard at 00:14) in an attempt to put a little life into the tumbling torso. Of course, this swear could easily be misinterpreted as a contribution from a bystander.

The final element I added to the video was the inclusion of an opening title from Windows Movie Maker. I did this as an homage to all the amateur videos put out on the web (although it also serves to lower your technical expectations of the video before it’s even begun, hopefully making it easier to believe it’s real and unedited).

So yeah, that’s the surprisingly intense reasoning behind a stupid video of a guy jumping off a ledge and missing his mark.

I’ll fool you all next time though.

- TomSka out

p.s.

I must admit, I’m disappointed in people for not noticing Amy’s disappearance midway though the video. You guys fail.

I’d like to tell you that this film isn’t based on true events. But it is.

Okay, actually, none of it ever happened; except for the part where people’s privacy was invaded and their photographs were downloaded without their knowledge.

LifeHack is based on an old pastime of mine in which I’d use the Peer2Peer software Limewire to download the photographs of people foolish enough to share their ‘My Documents’ folder. In fact, the photographs you see flicker past on the screen of the laptop are photos of real people that I’ve downloaded. Now, before you try and get me arrested, it’s (theoretically) totally legal. None of the images are copyright material and the people (even if they didn’t know it) put the files up for download themselves.

Although, making a blog to showcase said photographs may have been a step too far

Anyway, I always kinda hoped I’d uncover some sort of crime whilst LifeHacking and save the day somewhere in the world. Alas, the most incriminating thing I ever found were photographs of dead middle easterners taken by US Soliders. However, through this desire to fight crime, LeafNode was born.

The fake operating system I created in flash for Leaf’s laptop

Played by crew and classmate Chris Rankin, LeafNode is a smarmy hacker who is prone to staying indoors. To create this character, I needed to find/buy a lot of props. Some of which Chris provided himself and some that I had to buy. This included the scarf, cape, comic and cans of energy drink. I spent around £40 on getting Chris to look the way I wanted.

Chris IS a prefect, you know.

I worked with Emma Price (camera), Dawn Papworth (boom mic) and Chris to create the film. We also had the help from around 14 extra cast members to bring life into the movie.

From left to right: Chris, Emma, Megan Walker and Dawn

I must admit, a few special thanks and apologies are in order:

Thank you, Mat Johns for allowing me to set you on fire for a shot we wound up cutting out of the film. I hope you enjoy your scar! (think of it as a ‘tom-scar’ lololol)

“Totally worth it”

Thank you, Richard (and Emma) for providing all your guns and police gear for the film as well as allowing me to tape your wide-angle lens to my camera for the party time-lapse shot.

A big apology is in order for Dawn, our sound recordist. Because of a big mess-up during editing, mostly all of the audio was lost and I didn’t have time to rerecord. Hence the film winding up sounding more like a music video than a short film.

I don’t have any more photos of Dawn so here is an artists rendering of Dawn (thanks again Richard). Dawn likes dragons.

I’d also like to thank Amy who took over and slept in my bed the night before the deadline so that I wouldn’t be able to stop editing and fall asleep.

Overall, every part of making this film was fun. I enjoyed working with a large group of people, trying new filming/editing techniques and generally riding the adrenaline rush that only comes from trying to meet a deadline and create a good movie at the same time.

Thank you everyone who helped make this possible!

Especially you, Calum!

- TomSka out