Chewing Pencils

Matt Golding, the judge for our latest Group Drawing Project, wrote a piece recently to help aspiring gag cartoonists in their never-ending search for jokes. Matt has kindly agreed to let me reproduce the article here. Be inspired!

A laugh is a SURPRISE!

A laugh is reaction to an unexpected event. A cartoon works on the same principal. It takes a predictable scene and adds objects or words that don’t belong, creating a surprise. The bigger the surprise, the bigger the laugh. Let’s say an editor wants a cartoon to go with an article on umbrellas. A good way to start is to fill your brain with as many umbrella associations as possible.

For example… TYPES OF UMBRELLAS…beach, golf, cocktail, umbrella trees, …WHAT THEY DO…stop rain, give shade, catch water ( upside down )… PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH UMBRELLAS…Mary Poppins, Charlie Chaplin, The Penguin, G.P. pit girls, beach goers… POSSIBLE USES…parachute, jousting or fencing, shepherds crook, walking stick, picking up rubbish, … OTHER THOUGHTS…always blow inside-out, unlucky if opened inside.

Now that your head is full of lateral umbrella images and ideas, it’s time to go to work. We know that to create a cartoon, you must take a predictable scene and add something unusual that surprises. So we go to our list, choose a word and create a scenario around it. Then we add objects or words that don’t normally belong in that scenario, and we keep doing this until something funny or surprising happens. Most times, nothing does, but every now and then, a cartoon magically appears from the page.

As an example, let’s start by choosing Mary Poppins. Think of a predictable scenario, maybe her floating up from a house. Nothing funny or surprising there. But what if you took away her umbrella and replaced it with a cocktail umbrella, …now things are starting to happen. Replace the house with a corner bar …add a cocktail glass and a few wiggly lines to indicate an airborn drunkeness and you have a cartoon. You’ve upset the order of things and possibly just caught someone’s brain off guard.

Now let’s take a cocktail umbrella and create a new scenario. We have a man drinking a cocktail on a tropical island. Add something different, maybe heavy rain and an umbrella for our dejected holiday maker. The scenario is slightly unusual, but nothing funny is happening. But if we swap the big umbrella he is holding with the little cocktail one. A surprise. A laugh. A cartoon. Well done! Now email it to the editor and take the rest of the afternoon off…you’re a cartoonist!

I’ve included two more examples with a brief description of the process to help get the creative process across…
 
Combine the umbrella tree with the function of a normal umbrella and you have a lovely scenario that could only make sense in the heat of cartoon land’s midday sun. 

Start with the scenario of a man feeding the pigeons in the park. Add rain, add an upside down umbrella catching the water…all of a sudden you have a bird bath, and everyone is happy, most of all, the ever searching cartoonist.

Thanks to Matt for sharing his insight into process of generating ideas for gag cartoons. Now get to work and put together a submission for the project!

Click here to enter.