hey kids it's grandpa carl again

EVERYONE pay attention, it's ME: Carl Z. "Ugly" Wheeler, blogging from a small room near, but not in, Kansas, with a quick bloggin' post.

1. I still love you all and as I promised in an earlier life, still intend to guest post when the fancy strikes me.

2. This is one of those times.

3. Also last week, when I sent rob a guest comic post. The one about kidneys.

4. Sometimes we used to talk about whether xkcd was copying other comics on the internet. Defenders of xkcd said, no, it's a coincidence, it's easy to make the same jokes and I am sure xkcd hasn't heard of this "penny arcades" or whatever the comic is you say he copied. And then I always used to say, "well, if it's just a coincidence, he sure is acting weird about it" with weird defined as "refusing to acknowledge it and shunning anyone who brings it up, instead of just explaining that it was a coincidence." There's certainly no way to prove that an author deliberately stole another person's joke, and it's hardly fair to assume foul play without evidence. So, what I did was set up a general procedure that I (in my unlimited wisdom) recommend to webcomic artists in this situation: If you publish a comic that is suspiciously like another person's comic, it's probably an innocent mistake. But if it's brought to your attention, acknowledge the similarities, link to the original if you want to be extra classy, and get it out of the way. Alas, xkcd has never once done this (if i am wrong on this let me know but I am pretty sure). It just makes me suspicious. If there's really nothing wrong going on, why not just do the online equivalent of laughing it off? Rather than the online equivalent of going to your room and locking the door?

The point I'm trying to make with all this is that the proper response, as odd and labor-intensive as it may seem, does happen fairly often, and it happened most recently at Amazing Super Powers, with the President Kid comic (check the post below the comic). As it happens, neither one of the comics are all that funny so I'm probably going to forget all about this soon. But while I remember: nice work, ASP. Nice work.

5. I read an article the other day about humor research, specifically if one gender is funnier than the other. It's an interesting subject, since men generally dominate the world of comedy, but people tend to be offended if you suggest that men are inherently funnier than women. I don't know what the right answer is (I can certainly imagine social factors that make it easier for a man to be funnier, which would mean that there isn't anything inherently different but there is still a difference). Anyway, it's an interesting topic and one that the study in this article makes no progress on because I think it used a terrible measure of humor.

The study had men and women write captions for New Yorker cartoons, and I guess the logic for this was that the New Yorker is a respected magazine, and every week it has a "write-a-caption-for-this-comic" competition, so let's use that. But that's a terrible measure of how funny someone is! Those cartoons are hard to write captions for! Why, most weeks (when I remember to read it) I don't even think the finalists they pick for the contest are all that funny. In each cartoon, the drawing is already there, so you're forced to work with what they have. And for a lot of drawings, there just won't be too many options! Anyway, I appreciate the fact that they are trying to measure humor quantitatively - something I have always thought was possible, and indeed, if you dig deeply enough, an idea this entire blog is premised on - but I don't think this is the best way. At the very least, give people tons and tons of cartoons (New Yorker and others) and let them see which ones they can come up with good captions for. After all, if your three cartoons are Guys in an Office, Guys Stuck on the Beach, and Guys At Nice Restaurant, you better hope you can come up with something that fits those, or else be deemed Less Funny in the eyes of these researchers.

The old Dysfunctional Family Circus was pretty funny, and that was based on writing new captions for Family Circus cartoons. But a lot of those were based on simplified drawings that could be somewhat ambigious; so you could have your captions cleverly come up with new descriptions of what was actually going on (as opposed to New Yorker cartoons, which are pretty much always just quotes from one person to the other). The point is, there are better ways to do this, but it's a good start.

6. Remind me to do this more often!