Learning to be funny

Dabbling in gag cartoons

Apr 01, 2024

When I die, there are a few things I’m certain of:

I want my body to be cremated. (I don’t want to take up space)
I want people at my funeral to wear whatever they want and whatever makes them comfortable. (I hate dress codes)
I want people to remember me as a kind and funny person. (I hope that’s the kind of person I am)

Black and white drawing of someone leaning out of a memorial wreath saying "tell them how I made you laugh" to someone standing at a podium, giving a eulogy. — Me at my own funeral

In the past year, as I’ve started emailing people to say “I’m an illustrator, please hire me,” I’ve come up a with a few words to describe my work. Playful and humorous are two of the main ones.

These feel right especially after I noticed a pattern in not only what kind of feedback I was getting, but also what feedback was the most validating to hear.

It wasn’t that my art was beautiful or impressive. People aren’t going, “wow, how did you do that?!”

The best reaction is someone laughing or being amused by something I drew.

Black and white drawing of a kid saying "haha that's silly" while pointing to a drawing of a smiling poop sitting on a toilet. A person is holding up the drawing and peering around it and says "thanks" — Example of an ideal interaction between a viewer and my work

I’ve been getting more curious about single-panel / gag cartoons lately. (Think New Yorker-style cartoons with a single image and caption). It’s kind of surprising that I never felt the urge to make these kinds of cartoons before but something unlocked in my brain recently and now I think about them often.

The well-defined format has opened up a new channel for me to direct ideas into that I didn’t have a place for before. And those ideas? They’re dumb jokes.

With comic and illustration ideas, I’ve had a bad habit of letting them stay strictly in my head, where I mull over them for way too long. Sometimes years. I build things up more than I should and ideas become overly precious.

With joke ideas, I’ve been writing them down more consistently instead of letting them just be fleeting. This helps me not forget them, but also stops me from feeling so precious about them either.

I think I want to eventually submit them to publications. The New Yorker only accepts submissions that haven’t been published anywhere, including social media or personal blogs. But in the name of not being precious about things, I’ve decided to share what I’m making while I’m still learning to craft a good gag instead of stashing them just to submit to one extremely well-known publication. Seeing my collection of joke ideas in my sketchbook grow makes me hopeful that I can keep coming up with new and possibly even better ones and that I’m not wasting the couple of good ideas I’ll ever have.

Here are some sketches and final drawings of a silly origami joke I shared on Instagram last month.

Photo of a sketchbook with multiple drawings of a man with a moustache holding a man made of origami. The origami man has a face and moustache drawn on and is sometimes life-sized. — Sketches working out the visual and caption of this origami joke

Black and white cartoon of a bald man with a moustache sitting at a desk with folded sheets of paper on it. He is holding a small figure made of origami with a moustache and face drawn on. The cartoon is captioned: "So that's when I started putting the mi in origami" — First take on this origami joke

Black and white cartoon of a bald man with a moustache standing in a living room. He has one arm around a human-sized figure made of origami, with a moustache and face drawn on. The cartoon is captioned: "And then I started putting MORE of the mi in origami" — Second take on this origami joke, which I made into a sort of sequel after looking at my sketchbook again and not being sure which visual was funnier.

I’ve been listening to the

Is There Something In This?

podcast. The hosts present joke ideas to each other and work them out aloud and I find it even more enjoyable than I thought it would be.

They basically go back and forth asking “what if…?” morphing their ideas into tighter, punchier jokes.

It’s encouraging to see how other people finesse a joke and to be reminded that they can just start as a little seed of something instead of coming to you fully formed as if you’re some sort of prophet of giggles.

Some little belated news: I have some illustrations in the latest issue of Kazoo Magazine! It feels special and fitting that my contribution was for the Weird Issue.

kazoomagazine

A post shared by @kazoomagazine

That’s all for now! Thanks for reading :)

Jaclyne Dreams of Drawing

Discussion about this post