Match to Flame 233

I learned pretty early on to just trust my own instincts when it came to writing. As I mentioned back in Volume 1 of this series, I had purchased a book on writing gag cartoons, which I immediately abandoned and put aside as ineffectual for me. Part of that I’m sure was due to a contrarian streak, a trait I attribute to both nature and nurture. Rules tend to inordinately raise my hackles. However, watch closely as I totally contradict myself. Oddly enough, there was one rule regarding cartoon gag writing that I bought into early on. A cartoonist named Orlando Busino said in an article that a punch line should always be the last word in a sentence. If, for example, “elephant” was the punch line, the line should not read, “ . . . and the elephant was the first to go!” but rather, “ . . . and the first to go was the elephant!” For some reason that made quite an impression on me, and I followed it rather religiously for a long time. I’ve now come to realize that you have numerous other options. For example, you can bury a gag in the middle of a line by simply having a character tell the elephant joke as something the character saw on television and then follow it with a conversational word or three. It’s a much more naturalistic way for that to occur since, in life, nobody talks in punch lines. While I’m on the subject of rules, let me share a few other thoughts on the subject with the caveat that they will run contrary (there’s that word again) to the accepted wisdom on writing, and the keepers of accepted wisdom would have me pilloried in the square for having the temerity to share them with you. 

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean Volume 15