Webtoon

For my humor project, I decided to make a webtoon-style comic, which is a long scrolling comic instead of a horizontal strip or comic page style. My influences were The Sound of Your Heart, probably the most famous Webtoon series ever, and Gintama, which is the anime that I’m watching right now. In my comic, I used a lot of absurd humor, blue humor, situational irony, and some dark humor. Enjoy!

Reading my comic out loud

Satire Comparison Essay

This unit, we read a few satirical plays and Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. For my satire comparison essay, I chose to compare Slaughterhouse Five and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. Here is my essay:

Satire Comparison Essay

In the past couple of years, there have been multiple large-scale, progressive movements for civil rights and equality. Most people associate these ideas with the modern 21st century world, but satire about inequality has been popular for centuries. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde pokes fun at how Victorian aristocrats act. Jack tries to propose to Gwendolen, but Gwendolen’s mother, Lady Bracknell, and Jack’s friend Algernon both stall Jack. Lady Bracknell tries to ensure that Jack is from a wealthy or fashionable family and Algernon pretends to be Jack’s invalid brother, Ernest, leading to some conflict. In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut follows Billy Pilgrim as he jumps through time, telling a story about World War II and the absurdity of life. Both authors use caricature, absurdity, and triviality to satirize and criticize groups of people that are not only useless, but harmful to society.

One humor device that both of these works use is caricature to exaggerate and ridicule systems that cause injustice. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde criticizes the bourgeoisie using a caricature of high society: Lady Bracknell. Lady Bracknell wears fancy hats and is utterly obsessed with rules and formalities that, at the end of the day, don’t matter. One of the scenes that readers see her in is when she is confronting Jack, who wants to propose to Lady Bracknell’s daughter, Gwendolen. After Jack says that he knows nothing, Bracknell says, “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. What is your income?” (13). With this, Wilde is satirizing how the upper classes benefit from (or maybe rely on) the ignorance of the general public. Bracknell said that if people are educated, they will rebel against the upper class, which is symbolized by Grosvenor Square, a very expensive residential area in London where mostly aristocrats reside. Immediately after making that very serious comment, she asks Jack, “What is your income?” which satirizes how the focus of the upper class is nothing but being rich and maintaining the appearance of wealth. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut satirizes the glorification of war by showing, like Wilde, caricatures of the people he is criticizing. The most prominent example of this in the book is Roland V. Weary, who is fat and smells like bacon, which is an American caricature, and is obsessed with torturing people. One of these torture devices that Vonnegut draws a lot of attention to is Weary’s gutter-knife. He writes, “Weary made Billy take a very close look at his trench knife […] It had a ten-inch blade that was triangular in cross section. Its grip consisted of brass knuckles, was a chain of rings through which Weary slipped his stubby fingers. The rings weren’t simple. They bristled with spikes” (37). Vonnegut makes a reference to how Weary is fat, which happens almost every time the character is mentioned, which enforces the idea of Weary as a caricature of Americans. His knife is also needlessly aggressive. A normal knife would be flat, with a regular handle, but Weary’s knife is triangular so the wounds it makes won’t close up, and the handle is unnecessarily spiky. Weary and his knife are an exaggeration of violence and glorification of war and make Americans look ridiculous and excessively cruel. Both authors use caricature to call attention to the worst aspects of the groups that they are criticizing, and how both aristocrats and people who glorify war really do not have much empathy.

Another humor device that is present in both books is absurdity. In The Importance of Being Earnest, the most absurd character, Lady Bracknell, makes the most absurd requests. To Algernon, who has a made-up friend named Bunbury, she says, “Well, I must say, Algernon, that I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die […] I should be much obliged if you would ask Mr. Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on Saturday, for I rely on you to arrange my music for me” (9). It is really absurd how Bracknell could ask Algernon for Bunbury to not have a relapse of a disease, and that the reason for her requesting this is so Algernon can arrange her music for a dinner party. Earlier, she also mentions that Algernon’s absence would make her dinner table asymmetrical, which is another very useless and superficial reason why Bracknell requests that Bunbury not die. It is possible that Lady Bracknell actually knew that Bunbury didn’t exist, but it is highly unlikely because her character isn’t really astute, and it is clear that her character is meant to be a caricature of high society, which isn’t known to be particularly smart. Bunbury’s existence and Algernon’s personal selfishness aside, Lady Bracknell’s expectation that Bunbury can control his health for her relatively unimportant dinner party is very absurd. This ridicules the selfishness of people in high society, who care more about appearances and entertainment than actual people and their wellbeing. In Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut’s use of absurdity is a little bit less lighthearted. The part of the book that has the most absurdity is on Billy Pilgrim’s science fiction, fantasy planet, Tralfamadore. On Tralfamadore, the toilet plunger aliens explain to Billy how the universe ends: “We blow it up, experimenting with new fuels for our flying saucers. A Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears […] He has always pressed it, and he always will. We always let him and we always will let him. The moment is structured that way” (117). It is really absurd that someone could press a button and make the universe disappear, but what is more absurd is that the Tralfamadorians see the disaster and let it happen. The explanation for many of the disasters on Tralfamadore is simply “it had to be done.” The message that this gives is that it is impossible to prevent disasters, and there is nothing that can be done. A lot of the Tralfamadorian view of time is Billy Pilgrim trying to find a justification for the war he experienced because it was so horrible, and only realities that are absurd can justify war. Though the aliens on Tralfamadore may represent a very fatalist view of earthly disasters, it also points out that war is simply unjustifiable with any kind of reason or logic. In both works, the authors use absurdity to point out the lack of logic in the upper class and in those who try to justify war.

The third humor device that both works use is triviality. In Slaughterhouse Five, there is the famous “So it goes” quote, of course, but Vonnegut also uses triviality to ridicule Naziism and glorifying war. About the Nazi Campbell, Vonnegut writes, “He wore a white ten-gallon hat and black cowboy boots decorated with swastikas and stars […] Billy Pilgrim had a boiling case of heartburn, since he had been spooning malt syrup all day long at work. The heartburn brought tears to his eyes, so that his image of Campbell was distorted by jiggling lenses of salt water” (163). This shifting point of view draws the attention away from the fact that there is a Nazi at Billy’s camp trying to recruit people, and it trivializes it. Describing the Nazi’s image as “jiggly,” such a funny word, also trivializes the presence of a Nazi. Though it may seem sort of insensitive to take Naziism so lightheartedly, the trivialization ridicules Campbell and emphasizes how stupid Nazis (and those who glorify violence) look and are. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack and Algernon get into an argument because both of them are deceiving Cecily and Gwendolen by saying that their name is Ernest. It is in this scene where the conflict comes to a climax and Jack seems the most agitated. Algernon, however, is eating muffins. Jack scolds him for being heartless and Algernon says, “I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins quite calmly. It is the only way to eat them” (41). Algernon trivializes the situation where both men are doing something quite mean to the women they love by being so carefree and eating muffins calmly. He even values keeping his cuffs butterless more than the predicament that they are in. In this scene, Wilde uses triviality to point out again that people in the upper class, like Algernon, care more about themselves and their appearances than what actually matters: how they treat other people. 

Though these works are wildly different in style (Wilde is very elegant while Vonnegut is anything but) and subject, both come together to criticize systems that lead to injustice. Readers might laugh a little bit at caricatures like Lady Bracknell and Roland Weary, but ultimately they recognize that these characters represent the groups of people who misuse and abuse their power and make others’ lives worse. With humor, Wilde and Vonnegut point out that the rich and powerful or the powerful and violent are really inhuman and lack logic and empathy. These ideas are definitely echoed in movements like that to defund the police, which would take power away from the police who may be unnecessarily violent, and the current call for the United States to no longer fund Israel’s military. Whether or not these injustices will actually be solved, only the Tralfamadorians can tell. For now, we can laugh at how dumb powerful people are.