What's your advice for writing comedy in comic form?

@baasinsimple Dumb Marsupial
Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:01:33 +0000

@baasinsimple wrote:

For the most part, keep it character driven it's so much easier in the long run because you always have a slight idea of how the situation will play out for the character and there's always subtext in a character driven comedy about that Character and their personality. There's also the fact that if you make it character driven you can make the mundane funny so if your always at the end of your rope when it comes to thinking about a scenario you could be pretty much covered.

Here's a scenario: two acquaintances that have known each other for a while have an argument over American toilets and Japanese toilets. If we go by the gag-a-day format, it'll be less work and you can have like two good jokes in there, but immediately there's no patience for any sort of build-up because we don't know the characters. We just assume their friends, we read it, then go about our day. Now putting this in a character-driven story, we name the characters, Flint and Ito, not only now do these people have an identity, but from past episodes we learn that 1) these two are extremely different from each other 2) these two aren't friends but they're comfortable around each other. Flint is calm yet argumentative jackass that can never agree with Ito, and Ito is't argumentative at all, but Flint always finds a way to get him going and Ito can be kind of sensitive about his nationality. With that information alone we can affirm several things within that one argument. Flint and Ito have fights over dumb shit, Flint is a lovable asshole, This might be an odd spot of national pride for Ito. We could probably infer this alone on the scenario and this leads to subtext that, alone makes the gag more funny despite being a dumb argument.