We hold comedy to a different standard from other forms of entertainment. We expect art to be truthful, and if it is not, then we reject it. But comedy, or at least a comic universe, cannot be truthful, because comedy is based on the unexpected, and must in order to be stable constantly go against truth.
In particular I am thinking of the medium of comic strips. In a comic strip, we expect something funny to happen every time, so what we get is a universe that could never be real or even truthful (Prince Valiant, Mark Trail, Funky Winkerbean (?), et al don't count.) Discounting clever observations that are funny because they are true in just the right way, truthful comedy is not funny. It is bland. At the other end of the spectrum, no truth at all, all zaniness. Who cares? All good comedy has a straight man. It's hard to fit a straight man into the small limited panels of a newspaper comic. If not the universe itself, then what?
In fact, strip comics are a terrible medium for humor. Occasionally you get a genius of the form, like Bill Watterson, who railed against the small formats forced on artists by newspapers at the time because he realized the inherent limitations if the medium were this way. These types are few and far between. I-- I'm getting Deja vu or something-- something about a chart, or a diagram, with that and Garry Larson and something else, demonstrating the spectrum of-- the great newspaper comic artists? How they handled the-- the things. Hmm. Well, I'll be sure to share it with you if it comes back to me.
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