Comics just aren’t funny anymore. Either that or when I was younger, I had a terrible sense of humor.
So today as I was eating lunch, I started digging through a stack of the past few weeks’ newspapers. As I started to look through the Sunday comics, I realized just how incredibly uncreative American cartoonists have become: the majority of the strips were either just plain not funny, or made you want to say, “What the fuck???”
To substantiate my claim, I encourage you to open up a newspaper and take a look for youself. Some specific strips I would like you to take special notice of include:
- Hi and Lois
- Mort Walker’s Beetle Bailey
- Hägar the Horrible
- The Family Circus
- Garfield
I can assume with some high certainity that most people are familiar with at least one of the above names; most of these cartoons have been around for quite some time now. The names listed above are also quite commonly printed in newspapers all across the United States.
Anyways, here are some examples (sorry if some of it is cut off):
Although we see the humor in this cute little 8-panel, it's not very laughable. An 8-year-old could definitely come up with something wittier.
I think Mort Walker had cartooner's block.
Again... cute, but not clever?
This one probably left more than just a few people scratching their heads thinking, "Um, say what?"
Because most of these strips have been around for such a long time, sometimes I feel as if it’s the legacy that is keeping these strips in the papers, rather than the actual quality of the strip itself. Why can we have a present-day Calvin and Hobbes? What ever happened to the genius that made The Far Side so big? Nowadays, the only panels I can bear to look at are those belonging to Dilbert or Foxtrot. To stick to the “tried and true” is a good philosophy for approaching a wide variety of situations in life, but what happens when the aforementioned “tried” does not continue to remain “true?”
This is when we thank our lucky stars to be blessed with the phenomenon many refer to as the Internet. Gaining popularity, web comics have become viral and infamous to all who have taught themselves how to navigate the World Wide Web. It has gotten to the point where I am legitimately surprised to stumble upon a person who has never seen or heard of Cyanide and Happiness, or xkcd:
A good friend of mine sent this by me just earlier this week. I do appreciate a good math joke every once in a while.
Sometimes, I feel as if things done via the Internet are done better than things done the old-fashioned way. Web comics gain popularity by being funny, thereby increasing the likelihood that it will be passed or forwarded on. It also makes it easier for genuinely creative people to put their ideas out there, and get noticed.
Technology truly is a wondrous thing.
