Due to the limitations of the form and the drudgery of churning out one strip after another each day in perpetuity, comic strip artists will occasionally (some more occasionally than other) craft a comic strip whose joke requires such an obvious set-up that any humor that may have been there is sucked completely out of the page. Today's installment of Curtis, a comic that is rarely funny even when such shenanigans are not being used, demonstrates a textbook application of this technique.
Ray Billingsley achieves a rare two-fer in this strip, he constructs a joke that requires knowledge of eastern religions and underground artists (knowledge that as far as I know has never been required to understand Curtis) and links it together in such a contrived fashion that it is painfully unfunny.
3 comments:
I don't think this strip is "painfully unfunny," but probably groan inducing is probably more appropriate. This strip also it makes me wonder who makes up the target/majority audience of "Curtis." Do you think it is supposed to appeal to kids (African-American in particular), or to all of us apes in America? Either way, I doubt either of those demographics has a large awareness of R. Crumb, etc. In fact, all this does is show that Curtis is a big time perv.
I honestly have no idea who the target audience is for any comic strip. Septuagenarians and ironic hipsters are probably the only groups of people who care about comics in significant numbers. Perhaps the reference to R. Crumb was a nod in the direction of the hipster contingent.
As far as I can tell, you fall into neither group, and yet you're a loyal comic reader. Could you explain?
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