Dave Barry Reveals Secret To Being Funny

writing.jpg

Lately I’ve been reading And Here’s the Kicker: Coversations with 21 Top Humor Writers on their Craft by Mike Sacks, and I ran across this little gem about writing funny via Dave Barry:

It’s a lot like a magic trick, in that there’s a very mechanical way in which it’s done. There are a lot of obvious and basic structural things you do with a sentence and with a joke and how you set it up on the page. And the trick is to do it in such a way that it doesn’t look like there was any effort involved–that it’s somehow magic.

He continues:

There’s a certain amount of inspiration, but there’s also a fair amount of work and repetition and practice and mechanics that are involved…

I’ve never seen it put that way before, but he’s exactly right! While cartoonists know the work involved in crafting cartoons, to pretty much everyone else it’s magic.

Cool.

Client Feedback on Great Art

Love this post over at Crestock’s blog – 10 Famous Works of Art (with client feedback).

Example:

The_Scream.jpgClient feedback:

From his expression, it’s not totally clear he’s screaming. We showed it to one of our HR girls and she said “It looks like he’s really tired and having a yawn.” So let’s add a voice bubble with text that reads “Nooooooo!” (for the text, use Comic Sans).

See the rest here!