Now comes The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out, a collection of distantly related comics drawn in an old-timey style. The book’s premise is that the comics, written by cartoonist, walrus hunter, spy, hobo and retired U.S. senator Aloysius Gamaliel Koford, first appeared in newspapers between 1912 and 1914. None of this is true, of course, and the book is probably (definitely) the work of “Aloysius’ great-grandson,” Adam Koford, who is real. 

Written in that distinctly “Icanhascheezburger” speak, the book is a series of single-frame escapades involving the hobo-cat duo Kitteh and Pip, all of which take place in the early twentieth century. There’s no real plot, just a series of recurring themes, such as Pip’s obsession with “Caturday” and things being invisible (Invisbl everything? Kitteh: No, itz snow”) References include Lord of the Rings and Lovecraft.

Hodgman writes in his introduction that the production of the original online Lolcat pictures is a “challenging hobby” that is “much, much harder than just sitting down and drawing an old-timey picture of cats.” This is apparently him joking, calling attention to the superficial creation of this viral phenomenon and the often-underrated artistic street cred of cartoonists. (Hodgman later calls Koford a genius.) But in fact, Koford’s cartoons do, in the end, leave the question of what work is being done by their creation. They reference things, yes, and are occasionally stand-alone funny. But an original Lolcat picture, when done right, is without question a kind of work, a situation and a funny punchline in the form of the caption.

Or a triangulation of sorts: the photo of a cat doing something-which we find all the more funny because the notoriously uncooperative animal is clearly not in on the joke-and the creative affixing of the anthropomorphism, just so, enchanting the scene so that now that cat jumping is actually riding an invisible bike! Then there’s the play between the facial expressions that are so spot-on, almost intelligently human, and the grammar that butchers the sentiment and reminds us that cats are cats and not as smart as us, that if they could talk and think out loud, well, those silly guys would still never master grammar. I mean, c’mon, they’re cats.   

So, like Chuck Norris facts, Lolcats succeed so frequently because they are an inherently silly premise that ultimately serves as a blank canvas. And the work with the online Lolcats has always been in the painting onto that canvas, even if there is no drawing being done. But with Koford’s cartoons, since the raw material is not the reality of a digital photograph but whatever he decides to sketch, there remains the question of what work is actually being done, of what the point of Koford’s cartoons are if they’re not to be consistently, well, laugh out loud funny.  

 

What is done is something subtler. At first glance they appear to be a cartoonist having a little fun, meshing the old Krazy Kat style with this new Lolcat speak. But, Koford’s cartoons also raise a deeper question: just how do we categorize this current Lolcat phenomenon in the ever-thickening file cabinet our cultural legacy? Especially as these files now become electronic, where will these less-than-serious artifacts end up, say, when we are as far removed from Lolcats as we are from the original old-timey cartoons? 

So when Koford sketches pip chasing after a spool and saying “I Love Where Dis Thread Iz Going!” we groan at the pun, and then realize how unsettling it is to hear this almost hyper-timely speech applied to characters in hobo cloths. And because these characters are using this i-can-has way of talking the scenes become not merely pat, linear jokes about how things are different now from how they were back then. These are not Plugger cartoons.

No, a project centered this boldly on something so recent and possibly transient has the effect of eviscerating any linear humor-time continuum, of asking, where will Lolcats-and cartoons and memes and humor, and possibly even the recently overdone concept of fake-premise humor books, for that matter- be when Koford is, as the fictional creator of this book is supposed to currently be, 117 years-old?  

This is, I guess, what they are doing. It’s kinda cool. Still, call me new-fashioned, but I like the original (newer) version of Lolcats, where they just make silly faces.

Denver Post  journalist John Wenzel covers comedy. It’s his beat. So he’s not completely the worst at it. He also has pretty good taste in comedy, and in the course of his reporting, he’s even stumbled upon something worthy of a book, Mock Stars.  The book talks about a do-it-yourself trend in comedy that, over the last ten years or so, has led to a “hipster-leaning offshoot” where standup, sketch, videos and everything else you can think of in comedy have become more independent from the practical constraints and indirect artistic limitations of mainstream venues. (Let’s not call it a “movement” until it all moves away from traditional comedy clubs entirely, which may or may not ever happen.) 

Wenzel traces the similarities between indie music and indie comedy. And like a band you’ve never heard of, he thinks you really need to check this out. This comedy is for anyone “who finds most mainstream comedy boring, irrelevant, insulting, or worse-soul destroying,” Wenzel writes. Or for those who have “grown numb to the litany of ways white people are not like black people.”

Stylistically, indie comedy leans toward the absurdist, painfully self-aware or cynical as well as comedy that “challenges the audience to come to it, rather than offering safer, low-calorie humor.” Wenzel writes how there was a time after the ‘80s comedy boom when, for many people, the idea of going to a comedy club, with its cheap laughs, expensive covers and often racist or sexist undertones, was one of the least cool things you could do. That’s a sentiment and a caricature, or stereotype really, of comedy that persists today-somehow simultaneously with the equally untrue notion that all comedy is “cutting edge,” saying what no one else will. For the reader who either thought that most comedy stinks because it’s lame or that the stuff he or she has seen is the best and all that’s out there, this book will be an eye-opener.

Indie comedy is more likely to appear in your local rock club than comedy club, Wenzel writes, though it can really happen anywhere. And don’t confuse indie with underground. Indie comedy exists off some people’s radar, but it’s become more often something parallel to the mainstream. Oh yeah, and the most important shibboleth and shared sentiment of indie comedy, according to Wenzel: It’s for people who like Mr. Show.

Wenzel’s depiction of the development seems at its strongest not when he claims music and comedy go well together on the same bill-which is entirely true with strong, disaster-avoiding caveats (daytime shows with bands who differ ideologically from the comedians are hard!)-or even when he shows how this independent comedy had its roots in some comedians being fans of certain bands and eventually collaborating. Rather, it’s when he highlights how indie music’s propensity to take chances with its audiences, its sensibilities and the actual infrastructure of indie music, the smelly-yet-backhandedly welcoming clubs, cheap beers, the cynical-yet-open-minded crowds who frequent them, have very often perfectly suited the performers who have come up this way in the last ten years. The book is a series of portraits of those people: David Cross on Mr. Show, his tours around the time of 2001 and the album he released on an indie music label; Patton Oswalt’s “The Comedians of Comedy” tour; and even MTVs Human Giant and Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, which Wenzel holds up as that sensibility of indie comedy-developed at a handful of amazing self-produced comedy shows in LA, Boston, San Francisco and New York-continuing to show up on national television.