Cartoon Autopsy: Mouth Full and Barking

People are at a table eating a meal and one of them is speaking unintelligibly because his mouth is full of food. The idea here was that this was supposed to be a captioned cartoon making a joke about cartoons and captions. The basic structure of a cartoon is usually an image and then a caption of what one of the characters is saying, but sometimes in real life the things people say are unintelligible, so the idea was “what if the caption was unintelligible?” The set up is a familiar scene of people eating a meal, and the punch line is the caption, which is basically just gibberish. I imagine viewers first taking in the drawing, then reading the meaningless caption, then looking back at the drawing and realizing the person on the left has a mouth full of food and that is why the caption is gibberish. 

But the ultimate question is, “Is it funny?” In my opinion, no, it is not. It’s probably more confusing than anything. I imagine most people reading the caption, not understanding it, and just being like, “What?” 

It’s what I call a “first step” kind of joke. A first step joke is basically a joke that’s kind of obvious, it’s like the first thing you would think of, just surface level. It doesn’t hit on a deeper level and make you think or connect to it in a meaningful way. The more I do these cartoon autopsies the more I realize how many of my cartoons are first step jokes. To be at the level of a New Yorker cartoon, or even just a decently funny cartoon, there has to be some other angle on it. It has to take us in some other unexpected direction, hit on some other concept, or say something about the human experience in a way we didn’t see coming.