JIM'S JOURNAL

I'm a big fan of the comic strip Jim's Journal which ran from 1987-1997. My gag is probably too out-of-the-ordinary for Jim, but that's what happens when another comic strip enters the Frog Applause Zone. Click here for pronunciations from friends!

I own every Jim's Journal collection, including this Treasury. I own dozens of cartoon collections, most of them are from AMP. 

From "The Pretty Good Jim's Journal Treasury" (1999, Andrews McMeel Publishing), p. 110:

A COMIC STRIP THAT ISN'T FUNNY?

With Jim's Journal I was trying to parody other comic strips and the comic-strip art form itself. I tried to create a metacomic, one that pointed out the absurdity of the fact that newspapers allot space every day to cartoonists who have nothing to say.

Producing Jim's Journal was kind of my way of saying that I don't really like comic strips all that much.

When I set out to parody the form, I thought a good way to start would be to deconstruct standard observational or character-based gags, which were the part of comics I disliked the most--I never thought they were funny. So I set out to communicate the same gags, but in the most unfunny way possible. If such gags were conveyed in very plain language, as a mere existential accounting of the facts, employing no comic timing, poor drawing, and uninteresting subject manner, I thought that would be kind of unexpected and funny. Better still if the strip appeared to say something subtle and true about life, because then it would actually subvert its nominal purpose and transcend the medium.

Creating humor by making fun of other humor is what I call "anti-humor." Not a lot of people appreciate or understand anti-humor. In fact, a lot of people will get really angry when you try it on them. They just want to laugh, they don't want to be part of a humor experiment.

Normally, when people don't like a comic strip, they just ignore it and read other ones. But Jim's Journal inspired actual anger. Furious readers wrote letters to the editor. One group of students on the campus of Kansas State University actually began selling "Kill Jim" T-shirts.

That's the power of anti-humor.

Readers who didn't get Jim's Journal thought it was an absolute waste of space--even worse than, say, a comic that was trying to be funny and failing. In their minds, Jim's Journal wasn't even trying. They thought, Where's the punch line? Why is the drawing so crude? Why is the newspaper even running this!? When, in fact, that illogic was the very thing that was supposed to be funny.

But I know everybody has a different sensibility, so it never bothered me that some people hated Jim's Journal so passionately. To me, it just meant they didn't appreciate anti-humor.

I like anti-humor, when it's done well, I think it's a much more power conduit for a message than regular humor. Some examples of anti-humor I like are Andy Kaufman's stand-up act in which he got up on stage, didn't tell any jokes, and just read The Great Gatsby, and Marcel Duchamp's "In Advance of the Broken Arm" (1915), which is a famous work of art displayed in highfalutin art museums, but is just an old snow shovel. (I guess that's more like anti-art, but it's the same principle.)

~Scott Dikkers

UPDATE April 29, 2011:
MY LOVE FOR "JIM'S JOURNAL" IS ALL OVER THE INTERNET BY NOW. AND VLAD IS NOT HAPPY.
Read about it here.