Match to Flame 234

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.

From The Complete Funky Winkerbean volume 15