One of the secrets of comedy is that sometimes you want your audience to be stumped for a fraction of a second before they figure out what the joke is. It’s like pulling back a rubber band and letting it snap in their brains. The trick is make the punch line obtuse enough to cause that tiny pause, thus delighting the audience when they put the puzzle together. It’s like foreplay.
My comic on 3/2/06 was a good example of one that overshot the “tiny pause” mark by a large margin according to my e-mail, much of which included the question “what-the-hell?” I consider that a bad sign.
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How many of you still don’t understand this comic?