A Waste of Time

I actually didn’t write this joke in response to the breakup of this last week, I wrote it probably over four years ago now and I always meant to draw it, but for whatever reason I didn’t.  I have a lot of old jokes that I just haven’t gotten around to yet, but for some reason this one kept occurring to me, maybe because I’ve dated so many douchebags that it always seemed relevant.  At this point, I wrote it so long ago that I couldn’t even tell if it was funny anymore, but it feels good to get it out of my system.  When I wrote it, I had some other name in there in place of Kim Kardashian, and I don’t really know anything about Kim Kardashian since I have better things to do with my time, but it’s a cheap joke and the joke is just to name somebody who’s famous for having a million relationships and who the world would be better off if they never reproduced, so she seemed like the person of the moment to fit that role.  Whoever I was thinking of mentioning four years ago, people probably wouldn’t even recognize their name anymore, those people come and go.

I also don’t know how many people would actually get the whole Johnny Carson Carnac thing, but I thought it was funny.  One thing my mom definitely instilled in me was a love of older actors and comedians than somebody of my generation might normally like, and when I was little we had a VHS box set of Johnny Carson’s favorite moments that I watched and I thought was hilarious.  I don’t know why the Carnac bits stuck with me, since the topical humor in them probably went right over my head, but I think it’s because it’s just such a great structure for a joke, the setup and then you say something slightly unpredictable, and it’s a good passive-aggressive way of saying something snarky, because of course you’re the one saying the joke, but you just say something generic at first and then you read the part that makes it snarky off of a card, so it’s kind of like a hey, I’m just reading this card thing.  It’s a great structure for a bit.  I don’t know if I actually wrote a good one here, but it made me smile, so that’s the what I’m going off of.

The parts of jokes I do that I’m most proud of are usually the little things that nobody probably notices.  What I was proud of on this was including the little bit Carson would do of tearing the envelope and blowing in it.  No idea why he did that, but it was part of the little ritual of the bit, so I would have felt remiss not including it, and it made the comic fit the four panel structure perfectly.  The hardest part of drawing the whole thing was actually making the rabbit’s face look like he was blowing into the envelope in the third panel, and I’m still not sure I did it well.  The rabbit’s face is designed to be very plain, so there are certain expressions and poses that just aren’t natural for him. But I wanted him to do that.  If you’re curious why the comics take so long sometimes, these are the things I agonize over :P