The blog of Richard Thompson, caricaturist, creator of "Cul de Sac," and winner of the 2011 Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Today's Poor Almanack


I've been wanting to do a cartoon about the Twitterverse ever since I heard the word, and figured it'd be something like the Blogosphere cartoon I did a year and a half ago. The plan was to end the cartoon with a link to a Twitter site that would, once you got there, provide the ultimate punchline. Well, that part didn't work, and I was so far behind when I got to drawing the final cartoon that I left out half the jokes I thought up (and they were classics, each and every one). And the cartoon goes off on a weird, pointless tangent about Twitterature, a word I made up after 120,000 people had already thought of it. A better cartoonist would've done a Twitterized version of Absalom, Absalom, but I've never read it and I'm lazy.

But what I'm left with is a stupid Twitter account with no ultimate punchline on it. Twitter seems to perfectly fit Dorothy Parker's implied definition of a fresh hell, but I figure let's keep our hells nice and fresh, so I'll try it until the banality and tedium of what I tweet becomes too starkly apparent. I read somewhere years ago that birdsong is really just a way for the bird to say, "bird here!" and all the music is just lagniappe, which can be extrapolated in humans to "Mozart here!" or "Leadbelly here!" or "Britney Spears here!" This doesn't have much to do with Twitter, but it is a little depressing.

8 comments:

Theophylact said...

Ah, Die Zwitscher-Maschine -- my favorite Klee.

Brian C said...

Great blog by Roger Ebert about twitter - http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/03/the_human_race_on_a_key_ring.html

Scoop said...

Love "microblogial"! Not much of a Tweeter myself but I'm your 4th follower...
-- A Post Toastie

Mike Rhode said...

Twittering now, Richard? Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, when are you going to do the strip?

here today, gone tomorrow said...

The big BIG news in the twitterverse this week was the contest between Mr. Demi Moore and CNN (who could get 1 million followers first - Ashton won), and that Oprah proffered her first tweet.

The world is coming to an end.

Oh, yes. And I set up a twitter account for my cat.

arcticcircle said...

Will your twitter account last longer than the newsprint the cartoon is published on, or its existence in cyberspace?

paul bowman said...

Cheer up man! Anything in which you've contrived to include a drawing of Wm. Faulkner is an immediate classic, punchline or no punchline.

Kid Shay said...

"Ringo here! You know, I play the drums."