Learning how the sausage is made is never so delightful as in Funny Stuff: How Great Cartoonists Make Great Cartoons by Philip Witte and Rex Hesner. The writing pair, who dissect cartoons on the website CartoonStock, "believe something magical happens when a cartoon succeeds." In Funny Stuff, Witte and Hesner share how that magic is created by taking readers through topics that include types of humor, illustration styles, captioning, ideation, cartoon clichés, and more.
The book begins by defining single-panel gag cartoons, which is the cartoon style the coauthors focus on in the subsequent pages. Gag cartoons are perhaps best known as the type found in the New Yorker, a style popularized by Bob Mankoff, former cartoon editor of the New Yorker and founder of CartoonStock (he also provides the book's foreword). From there, the elements of what makes a great cartoon are categorized and lightly analyzed. Humor, for instance, is bucketed into seven categories, including satirical, slapstick, and absurd, with examples of each.
Witte and Hesner's intent is not to "crush the humor out of the cartoons," and they succeed at keeping their commentary entertaining, digestible, and informative. The more than 100 cartoons featured in Funny Stuff illustrate the authors' points. The only fly in the ointment is the final chapter, where an attempt to talk about the lack of diversity in gag cartooning falls a little flat. Nevertheless, for gag cartoon enthusiasts, Funny Stuff is a comprehensive guide that helps readers understand what makes them funny and offers a peek at the process behind the scenes. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator