funny and stupid comics — how to spot the good ones, in steps

dave sent a four-panel comic at lunch and mom called during panel three. the timing was nobody’s fault. the comic ended with a microwave joke that landed harder than it should have. how to read funny and stupid comics without dismissing either word in the title is a small craft. steps, with footnotes, are below.

i should say upfront that i’m not a comics critic. i don’t own a sketchbook, i don’t go to conventions, i don’t know the names of the people who draw the strips i open at lunch. i’m just a reader who has, over years, developed a working theory about which strips are actually funny and which strips are panicking. there’s a difference. you can feel it. this is the cluster pillar i keep coming back to when i write about what stupid actually is, because the comic page is one of the few places where stupid gets to be load-bearing and not just decorative.

dave’s text said “this you, basically”, which is what dave always sends. dave works in insurance, which is the most important thing to know about him. he forwards comics with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about a forwarded comic in his life. i don’t know where he finds them. i suspect he subscribes to something. i have not asked.

then mom rang. she had asked on sunday whether i was still reading nothing, in that voice. i told her i’d read a few things. she said okay in the way mothers say okay, which is not okay. she knew. mothers know. it’s their power. it cannot be defeated.

step one, the funny is the load-bearing word

here is the first test. read the comic with the word stupid covered up. is it still funny. if yes, you have a real one. if no, you have a strip that is using stupid as a coupon for a laugh it didn’t quite earn. the good ones don’t need the coupon. the great ones tear up the coupon in panel four.

i looked it up later — meaning, i sat at the desk and stared at the strip for longer than the strip deserved — and the strips that survived the cover-up test all had the same shape. small premise. one weird detail. a beat. a deflation. the bad ones had a punchline that was just the word idiot in a bigger font. you can do that with any drawing. that’s not a comic. that’s a label.

if you want a sibling test, the stupid quiz i once tried to take seriously works on the same logic. if you remove the joke and you still feel something, the thing is doing work. if you remove the joke and the page goes blank, the joke was the whole thing, and the joke was thin.

step two, the microwave panel is canon, allegedly

dave’s comic, the one he sent at lunch — i’ll spare you the redraw — was a four-panel about a man putting a fork in a microwave. the seventh microwave i have killed is on a list dave keeps for what he calls science. he is not a scientist. he is, again, in insurance. there is no science in insurance. the list exists anyway. it has dates. it has small annotations.

FORK PANEL. MICROWAVE PANEL. LIGHT PANEL. SHRUG PANEL.

the genius of dave’s comic is that the third panel — the flash — is silent. no caption. just yellow. the fourth panel is a guy looking at the reader with an expression that says well, i have done my part. the comic doesn’t tell you he is stupid. the comic shows you a person committing to a small bad idea. the joke is the commitment. the stupid is the result. those two things are not the same and a lazy strip would have collapsed them.

this is, by the way, exactly the kind of thing the simpsons figured out in year one. homer doesn’t say i am stupid. homer commits. the show is a thirty-five year archive of commitments. the funny carries the stupid. never the other way around.

step three, dave forwards, mom asked sunday

step three is about delivery, not content. who sends you the comic matters. dave forwards me twelve a week. eleven of them are mid. one of them lands. the ratio is fine because dave is filtering for me, not for the comic page. when mom asked on sunday what i was reading, she was running a different filter. mom doesn’t forward comics. mom asks if i’m okay in a voice that already knows the answer.

two filters. two ratios. neither one is wrong. but if you only get your comics from one source you are reading inside a single taste, and a single taste is how you end up convinced that a strip about a guy yelling at a coffee mug is the height of the form. it is not. it is a guy yelling at a mug.

step four through six, the residuals

i’m grouping these because they all do the same job: they tell you the comic was thinking past the laugh.

step four — the second read. a great funny and stupid strip rewards a second pass. a thin one does not. you re-read and the punchline is just the punchline again. with a real one, the second pass shows you the seed in panel one. the cup was on the wrong side of the table the whole time. the dog was already wet. the title was already lying to you.

step five — the residual feeling. ten minutes after you close the tab, do you still have something. a small pressure behind the eyes. a phrase rattling. a genuine reconsideration of cupholders. (HT14 — cars should have 1 cupholder. six is greed. — has lived in my head since a strip from 2018 i can’t find anymore. the strip was three panels of a cupholder full of receipts and one panel of a man weeping. that is craft.)

step six — the inventory. a strong comic gives you new objects. one of mine still lives at home, on the floor — the third yoga mat, under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving — and it got there because a strip i can no longer attribute described, in two panels, the exact yoga mat trajectory in english. it added the mat to my life by naming it. comics that don’t add anything to your inventory are decorative. they’re posters. they’re not comics.

step seven, the close

the last step is also the simplest. did the comic earn both words. funny and stupid. not funny because stupid. not stupid because funny. both, side by side, doing different jobs. dave’s microwave strip earned both, and it did it in four panels and a yellow flash, while my own kitchen back home holds the receipt for a real version of that joke. mom called during panel three and i still laughed at panel four. that is the test. nothing else passes.

most strips that try to be funny and stupid comics get one and not the other. they’re funny but the stupid is just a costume. or they’re stupid but the funny got cut for time. the rare ones — i’d guess one in twelve, going by dave’s send rate — earn both. those are the ones worth saving. those are the ones worth forwarding. those are the ones that justify the entire comics page existing on the internet, alongside seven advertisements for a watch i will never buy.

verdict, funny and stupid comics earn both words

the verdict on funny and stupid comics, after all this — after dave’s text, after mom’s voice, after the cover-up test, after the second read, after the inventory — is that the order is the order. funny carries the freight. stupid is the cargo. when a strip flips that and tries to make stupid the engine, the train doesn’t move, it just makes noise. the strips that move are the ones that drew a small careful situation, then committed to one bad decision inside it, and trusted you to laugh at the seam, not at the label.

that is also, i suspect, the entire job description for a comic. the job is the seam. the funny is the load. the stupid is what falls through.