(the featured image is a comic my youngest son did a few years ago when he was much younger, I love it)
I’ve always been fascinated by jokes. When I was a kid, maybe early teens, I read an Isaac Asimov story that totally ruined all jokes for me – the story was called “Jokestar” first published in 1956 and in it, a “Grand Master” (an expert at asking the all powerful computer useful questions) asks the Multivac computer where jokes come from.
And it came up with an answer.
Skip this paragraph if you don’t want read spoilers for a 60 year old story:
To the best of my recollection, it categorised jokes as either puns (nice easy to create or variations of a theme (knock knock) and finally, wholly original completely impossible to create from whole cloth. Those jokes, multivac posited were clearly of alien origin and used by aliens as a sort of sociological experiment on humans. And now, having discovered this, the whole experiment would be rendered moot, and the aliens would no longer give us jokes.
It’s a silly story, notable maybe for the idea of a grand master – what we’d probably now call a “Prompt Engineer” (if we were wankers) and that it was written, it turns out, by a terrible sex pest. (Asimov, why???)
This story messed me up in one peculiar way, I couldn’t figure out where it was wrong about jokes – I didn’t believe the aliens explanation (that would be daft) but the general criteria and that some jokes do seem to fall from the sky fully formed.
In my later teen years (now I’m 56 the difference between being 13 and 17 seems like a twitch of an eye, but at that age it was the difference between being one human being and entirely another) I started collecting jokes. I couldn’t really make them up (how could you? every joke already existed and nothing new was coming) but I could remember a LOT of jokes. Often I’d have one setup and about three punchlines. Many were very … ribald (I was 17!)
To this day it feels weird the idea of making up jokes, but I think I do it all the time. But my brain just hasn’t wrapped itself around what it means.
I mean I was in the same boat with the word “composition” – it took me years and years and years before I really understood it. But even then, I may be wrong.
Writing
Yesterday’s blog post was warmly received, and that is very gratifying. Especially when some of the people who comment themselves are professional writers. My new business cards included the word “Comics” but they also included a drawing of a scifi character who doesn’t exist, so it turns out you can put anything you want on a business card, real OR fictional.
I will say, my mum, like everyone was just a luminous being of pure love. Sometimes she could be outright ferocious. I remember someone once trying to steal a bike, outside the house we were living in, they’d literally got on it while I was also on it, and my mum, despite being English had somehow become quite a hard Belfast mom, shouted to me “hit him Paul”. I think I was 11. All I really wanted was for my mum to tell the other wee shit to piss off and to take me home.
Anyway, that is to say, I’m going to keep faking being a writer until I believe it myself. So I’m going into a slightly different discipline from now on : ten minutes blogging as a warm up and twenty minutes of writing something. Thirty minutes in total. The morning blogs then may be silly slight willow the whisp thoughts and the actual serious business of writing might just be me typing redrum a hundred times in to a pages file. We’ll see.
Drawing
Yesterday got three pages of Terran Omega #2 pencilled and lettered. Hoo boy, the second issue it taking shape fast (did another page this morning) currently at page 8 and they’re al lettered. So part of what I’m going to be doing is sending the lettered version to a pal for some script edits, and suggestions. He’s also going to help me shape up other ideas I have.
Of course inking and colouring are the real time consuming parts, but they’ll come, they’ll come.
