I like bears in cartoons. Today I was reading about the animation studio UPA and it turns out Mr Magoo’s first appearance was alongside a mischievous bear in the short “Ragtime Bear”. Here it is.
UPA’s story is pretty fascinating. Especially how their staff kept getting turned over to HUAC as communists – by Walt Disney of all people. Walt’s alleged anti-Semitism has no firm basis in history, but reading When Magoo Flew it’s clear he was no fan of what the USA quaintly referred to at the time as “communism”. (Though Walt wasn’t exactly running a studio from the sea floor and asking new employees if a man was not entitled to the sweat of his brow. Bet he would have if he’d had the chance though.)
Then again, for a capitalist in 1950s USA it probably made good business sense dobbing in a rival studio as a haven for communists. In Walt’s case, there were also some convenient personal vendettas to settle.
At any rate, reading “When Magoo Flew” I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for UPA. Certainly, modernist cartoons aren’t for everyone, but the tack that UPA took – no talking animals, no brutal violence, a modern graphic look – distinguished them from their peers and won them a few Oscars to boot.
Speaking of funny…
I read a couple of good books on joke writing yesterday which complemented one another surprisingly well.
- The Serious Guide To Joke Writing by Sally Holloway. Sally is British. The book details how funny things can be written about anything from puns, wordplay, stream of consciousness and something she calls the Surrealists Inquistion, reframing particular subjects and topics from different points of view. Her background is writing for topical weekly comedy shows and teaching – practical chapters relate classes she’s taught with particular methodologies and exercises, and theoretical chapters relate everything from background brain processing to how to motivate yourself to write about comedically unlikely subjects. Useful and actually pretty encouraging – it’s nice when people leave their detritus lying around in plain view as though to demonstrate wading through your own crap looking for gold is part of any worthwhile creative endeavour. (Which it is.)
- Step-By-Step To Stand-Up Comedy by Greg Dean. Greg is from the USA. Greg’s book is more about stand-up comedy than writing comedy for other people to perform, but a solid first chunk of the book is given over to his own joke-writing methodologies. Starting pretty much with “this is how a joke works”, he goes on to show how those jokes can be collected, assembled, refined and performed. The joke writing section is not as broad or detailed as the one in What Are You Laughing At? but this is OK as Greg’s much more concerned with synthesis (making up new stuff) than analysis (accounting for current stuff). Even though I’m not planning on getting into stand-up anytime soon, this was still a worthwhile read.
“The Serious Guide” is broader and deeper in terms of its methodology and a bit gentler while “Step By Step” makes the reader more conscious that jokes are individual elements of a whole. Added to the different cultural and working backgrounds of the authors, this makes the two books an interesting double-bill.
Some of the Amazon reviews of the English book complained that it began with puns and wordplay, and they wondered if cultural differences could be coming into play. As an Australian (whose inherited culture is at a point somewhere between the UK, the USA and Australia), I’d say that would appear to be the case. There’s a slightly aging middle-class sense of humour amongst the British that cherishes a good pun with inordinate amounts of affection – personally I tend to stare blankly at most verbal puns and visual puns make me groan a bit as well.
So. Reading so many different books on comedy has left me with three different perspectives on what it’s all about. That’s fine. I like differing perspectives on the same thing – I’m a pluralist at heart, the same as nature – and it’s interesting to see what changes and what stays the same between the different points of view. Conciseness, specificity, triplets, a set-up establishing some tacit understanding which is surprisingly subverted by a punchline – there factors are pretty consistent.
Where it gets really interesting for me is relating this sort of stuff back to my favourite cartoons and seeing what sticks. For instance, what is Tex Avery up to in Bad Luck Blackie which has common ground with Eddie Murphy’s Aunt Bunny falling down the steps (NSFW audio)? I wonder…