1. Much of this week was spent wrestling with the apartment people over the phone to clear up one snag or another. Nothing is settled yet, as of this writing, but I’m hopeful it will be soon. All indications are that it’ll go through fine, but who knows?
2. In spare time this week I’ve been formatting my backups of Narbonic, a webcomic that ran from 2000 to 2006. Narbonic, for those who don’t know, is a romantic comedy about a cutesy mad scientist and her henchmen from the era when trope-aware comedies were just starting to come into vogue and were still somewhat fresh and potentially funny. I intend to do a full write-up of it at some point, since it’s really a high-quality example of the breed with some very good character work and genuinely hilarious jokes (not to mention surprisingly intelligent and literate).
3. Anyway, this whole thing is purely for my own sake, to make reading my backups easier, though I still can’t help myself from trying to make it look ‘neat’ and ‘professional’. So, until I finish that write-up, this will stand as an example of my compulsively perfectionist tendencies.
And yes, the uneven spacing bugs me, but not enough to re-do it for hundreds of entries.
4. Trope-based, self-aware humor, where characters comment on storytelling cliches and make jokes out of them, was everywhere for a long time, though thankfully it seems to be somewhat dying out. It was an inherently short-lived set-up and, with a few exceptions (e.g. Narbonic, Megamind, etc), was always destined to age poorly. This for the obvious reason that the joke largely depends on the audience being familiar with the cliches and coming to expect them, and so laughing when they’re tweaked. But once everyone is tweaking the cliches, they aren’t cliches any more, which means you’re mocking a situation that no longer exists. Which usually isn’t funny and certainly isn’t clever.
To put it another way, the joke depends on the cultural environment, but the joke itself changes that environment. Meaning it’s only going to be funny once, if that.
This is part of why I don’t find the classic Simpsons episodes as impressive as they seemed at the time. The satire is largely couched in a world that doesn’t exist anymore.
5. In it’s laziest form, this takes the form of characters in a movie commenting on the roles they’re playing and ‘what a villain is supposed to do’ and the like. It’s usually not funny and serves only to jerk the audience out of the story by having the writer essentially come out and wink at them saying, “This stuff I made that you paid to see is pretty stupid, right?”
Interestingly, the great re-construction epic of My Hero Academia features a villain who does this very thing: commenting on comic-book cliches and his role as a supervillain and what’s expected of him, etc. Except there it’s not done for humor, but as an illustration of just how shallow, sociopathic, and divorced from reality the bad guy is. Because that is pretty much what would be required for this sort of thing to be believable
6. I watched a trailer for The Penguin, a spin-off miniseries from The Batman (which I haven’t seen) focusing on Colin Farrel as the titular villain. While I like Penguin as a character and think a gritty noir story about his rise to power could be cool, my constant thought while watching the trailer was “So, apart from the character names, which about this makes it a show about the Penguin, rather than a generic mob story?” I didn’t see any umbrellas, any birds, Pengers doesn’t seem to dress up particularly, no cigarette holder, no squawking laugh. Just Colin Farrel in ugly make-up doing a Scorsese role (the makeup is undeniably impressive, by the way).
If you’re not going to take advantage of the fact that these are Batman villains, what’s the point of even making it (besides the obvious name recognition of course)? A gritty noir story about an ugly gangster who happens to be named “Oswald Cobblepot” could be good, but it wouldn’t be anything we haven’t seen before. A gritty noir story about a bird-obsessed, umbrella-wielding grotesque who always dresses to the nines would have a bit more bite to it.
7. Despite being one of the top-drawer Batman rogues, I think Penguin has been kind of ill-served by the adaptations. Of course, Danny DeVito, for all his talent and charisma, was just living out Burton’s weird fantasies imposed upon the Batman mythos. Nolan skipped him entirely (even though you’d think he’d fit pretty well into the ‘gritty realism’ take). Paul Williams was great in the animated series, of course, though he didn’t get to make the same impact as, say, Joker or Two-Face or Riddler. I didn’t care for the ‘London gangster’ take from the Arkham games, which seemed to miss the point, even if they nailed his ruthlessness (but that’s more impactful if it’s coming from the wannabe fop and not the cockney thug).
Oddly enough, I think Burgess Meredith might still be the definitive on-screen Penguin for me: the ruthless, cunning, elegantly fowl criminal mastermind.
Serpent's Den 
3: Is it just me, or is this strip giving off a serious Foxtrot vibe? That fourth strip, in particular: if you’d told me that someone had found one of Bill Amend’s unpublished strips and redrawn it with her own characters in place of Jason and Marcus, I would totally believe that that was the result. (Not a complaint, I hasten to add. As far as I’m concerned, Foxtrot was the best thing to come out of the comic-strip industry in the 1990s, and anyone who can channel it this well has my full support.)
4: The secret of enduring trope comedy, I think, is that at least one of the characters has to believe utterly in the tropes. Don Quixote, the Thermians from Galaxy Quest, and apparently this Narbonic girl: because they all have such rock-solid confidence of their convictions, the stories they feature in don’t feel jerry-rigged by a malicious writer, but just the sort of thing that would naturally happen in the company of such lovable weirdos. (The other approach, as you’ve noted about Megamind, is to quietly transform the story from a satire on the tropes to a sincere homage to the spirit behind them. But that’s a trickier approach, and requires a rather more specific kind of story, so naturally you don’t see it as often.)
6: Gritty noir? The Penguin? I can’t see it. Sure, he’s a crime boss, but the whole point of him was to be a goofy crime boss – deliberately goofy, perhaps, but goofy all the same. (I remember how I once made him describe his rise to notoriety in one of my own fanfics: “I was just losing my organization to the gimmick brigade, the same as all the other bosses, and I figured I might as well try joining what I pretty clearly couldn’t beat – so I revived a childhood passion for ornithology, souped up a few umbrellas, and suddenly I was feared again. Strange town…” That’s about the most serious he can be without losing something of himself, I think.)
7: Well, of course. Apart from the character being particularly suited to the tone of the Adam West show (see above), come on, he’s Burgess Meredith. I think I’ve mentioned in this space before how thoroughly he can elevate a show by his mere presence, even when it’s already something as high-gloss as The Twilight Zone; give him the broadest caricature among the Batman villains, let him infuse it with his own irreducible dignity, and you’re almost bound to end up with something immortal.
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7. I almost went on a ‘Burgess Meredith is awesome’ rant, but it was getting late.
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“[T]he joke depends on the cultural environment, but the joke itself changes that environment. Meaning it’s only going to be funny once, if that.”
I hereby dub this “The Breitenbeck Uncertainty Principle”.
I think there’s a difference between being meta and being self-aware. Meta is good if your purpose is actually to be meta, either for some other end or for satire or tribute (or both, as in a really good parody). Otherwise it breaks suspension of disbelief and should be avoided. Self-awareness is okay as long as it doesn’t conflict with the purpose of the story and is not self-conscious. Sometimes – though not by default! – in certain sorts of stories, it can actually help if played carefully. (Say, if the plot is improbably coincidental and you can’t come up with a way to make it less coincidental and more the logical result of the setup, you can at least have the characters react to the improbability the way that people in real life would to those events occurring in real life. Or if the story is controversial because of how it treats controversial things, you can have the things start to be recognised as controversial in-universe. Examples like that.)
Now, where most 21st century examples of either one fall down is, they are self-aware about being meta, which is almost inevitably self-conscious – I suspect it might even be self-conscious by definition.
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The aughts and the very early 2010s were sort of the heyday for webcomics, as far as I recall. (Disclaimer: I was never big into it at the time but a family member was, so, that’s what I have memories of.)
Back then, you had a lot of hand-drawn doodles instead of refined effects and multi-layered tablet paintbrushing or whatever’s popular on DeviantArt these days. Even the better drawn stuff was often still drawn more or less the way newspaper comics are.
And there could be premises like “A boy discovers an elf who lives in his suburban neighborhood and can turn a color that happens to be invisible,” or “A young woman visits an animal utopia, it actually is a utopia no sinister twists, instead the twist is that the government/civics and most social conventions are humourously random” – and then they would just… write something pretty close to slice of life for those characters and setting.
There didn’t have to be a point to it and it didn’t have to be fanfic (or worse, official seboots and requels written like not very good fanfic).
I think writing and reading these was how young-adult Millenials entertained themselves before they were radicalized.
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