The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

(note: this post is part of the Here Come The Puppets category here at the Midnight Diaries. Be sure to check out the full category for other selections from this spectacular program)

I wasn’t around when Fran, Kukla, and Oliver J. Dragon were entertaining American children on television in the 1950s and 1960s. This video was my first introduction to them, and remains some of the only examples of Kukla and Ollie that I’ve seen except for a YouTube clip here and there. Fran, an actual human woman who would interact with the puppets on the old tv shows, didn’t appear for the 1981 appearance. Burr Tillstrom operates Kukla and Ollie by himself. Have a look:

I’m going to take a break from talking about animation and talk a bit about comedy.

Recently, a friend and I have been discussing how comedy works. E.B. White is credited with saying “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies because of it.” But if you happen to be one of the few who are interested, and don’t mind risking a dead joke or two along the way, it can be a fascinating subject.

There’s a general theory that says that comedy comes from breaking the expectation of what’s supposed to happen.

“Knock, Knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Interrupting cow.”
“Interrupti–” “MOO!”

The more jokes you’ve heard the easier it gets to predict their punchlines. We already have our expectations set up by our foreknowledge of the typical knock-knock joke’s structured. (no knock-knock joke would work if you told it to someone who had never heard a knock-knock joke before) In the case of this particular joke, we expect to get all the way to “Interrupting Cow Who?” When we don’t get that far, one expectation is already broken. The second part of the punchline hits us when we recognize that the “Moo” is coming from the cow and, as a matter of fact, is a demonstration of the information we already had–i.e., this cow interrupts people. In a nutshell, that’s why this joke is funny.

Let’s go back to this Kukla and Ollie clip. There’s really only one joke in here, but it’s a good one and I laugh every time I see it. Most of the performance here is the joke’s set-up: Ollie likes to bite Kukla’s nose. The set-up is long and meandering, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I say it’s meandering because it takes us a little bit to even establish that Ollie wants to bite Kukla’s nose. It comes in during part of the conversation, when Ollie stops speaking and poises himself to bite Kukla’s nose.

The animator in me feels compelled to speak up here to mention the composition of the frame. It’s no accident that Kukla is leaning backwards and occupies only a sliver of the available puppet stage here, while Ollie is leaning forward and dominates almost the entire space. This helps us understand these two characters’ personalities–Kukla is easily intimidated by the dragon, even though they are friends. And the dragon is large large large, even though they are technically similar sized puppets.

Continuing on, we get a little mini-joke when Ollie denies that he wasn’t thinking about biting Kukla’s nose, when he clearly was. But we still haven’t had any big laughs. Part of this, I think, is due to the rather clumsy interaction between the character’s. Most of Kukla’s and Ollie’s performances are improvised, and I’m not always sure that’s helpful–it feels like the action stumbles a bit here because of it. “Let’s go down memory lane in dignity,” in particular, I feel comes out of nowhere. It could be a reference to something that happened earlier in the performance (before this clip began), but the whole idea of “going down memory lane” seems like Kukla was searching for something, anything, to say.

We also get a tiny laugh when Ollie admits “I spent a lot of money on therapy to get over that.” This isn’t a real joke, but I find it interesting because it’s one of several examples from this PBS special of puppets making reference to going to a therapist. I think that this must have been a big topic at the time, the late 70’s and early 80’s. Sure, people go to therapy these days, but the way it’s referenced here almost seems like a quick tap into a sort of ‘community joke’ that you don’t really need to set up or give a punchline to–we just laugh because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do with the subject. These days you might bring up Brittany Spears or 30 Rock and get a similar reaction: we know they’re funny (in different ways, admittedly), and good for a quick audience reaction.

Still, this gets us to the song, and that’s what this is all leading up to.

Clearly, a song like this isn’t likely to be improvised. As an audience, we know this and we can even recognize that its simple structure is the kind that is likely to lead to a punchline. Like a knock-knock joke, or a poem that begins “There once was a man from Cape Cod…”. We know where the punchline will be, so we can prepare ourselves for it. Not only that, some joke structures are so old, we begin to anticipate where they’re heading. We know that we’re probably going to get four lines of song here, and the fourth line will rhyme with some other line in the song and will contain a punchline.

We’re already stocked up with the knowledge that Ollie is trying to refrain from any nose-biting tonight and now we’re given a song where we expect a joke at the end of it. By the time we get to “sweet as a rose,” you can already hear some audience member’s chuckling because they’ve anticipated the joke. “It’s going to be something about nose-biting,” they have deduced. The song slows down long enough to give the entire audience time to catch up to this idea, and await the final line–it will be clever, but the audience will already have a pretty good idea of it already.

And that’s when we get the real punchline: “You can see it coming, can’t ya?”

With that one turn to the audience, Ollie gets a bigger laugh than he could ever have gotten if he had simply finished the song. (and really, was there any kind of finish that would be remotely funny as the last line of the song?) It’s the breaking of two expectations that brings the house down here:

Expectation #1: We will hear the end of the song and it will rhyme with “rose.” (we don’t, and it doesn’t)

Expectation #2: Ollie doesn’t know that we have already figured out where the punchline will be. (he does, and we haven’t)

This is an incredibly satisfying punchline. We have followed all of the set-up very carefully; so carefully, in fact, that we believe we know exactly what road we’re on and we’re probably feeling a bit of an inflated ego about it. We believe we’re smarter than the people on stage. When the character finally tells us “Yes, I’ve led you right to the place I wanted you to be and I knew it the whole time,” we get a great release for being shown that are actually aren’t smarter than the people on stage after all. The joke is on the audience, and we have foolishly walked ourselves right into it.

I love this kind of comedy. Even given the clumsy improv part, Tillstrom successfully implants the idea of the nose-biting into our minds without calling too much attention to it. His performance never screams “This will be important later! Try to remember it!!” He simply places it in a prominent point of the characters’ interaction and lets things move along from there.

Another of my favorite uses of this type of implant can be found in Greg Behrendt’s “Crybaby Spiderman” bit. You can find it on YouTube with a simple search, or on his comedy CD or DVD, Uncool. I won’t say anything about the routine for fear of giving anything away. But if you get to check it out, you’ll see the same kind of implant happen–and again, you won’t recognize it has happened until the end because of Behrendt’s skill at telling a story and only giving you as much as he wants to give you at any particular point along the way.

More about puppetry, animation, story, and performance next time. See you then!