6 Things I Learned About Comedy From Looney Toons

There are lots of classic comedy icons I love, but any fundamentals I know about comedy, I learned from Looney Toons.

The way my mom feels about Star Trek, my dad feels about Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Because I was so young the first hundred times I watched classic shorts like “Duck Amuck,” “Rabbit Fire,” and “What’s Opera, Doc?“, I still constantly find new things to appreciate about them: phrases and dialogue I’ve know so long that I take them for granted suddenly explode like word time bombs. Wait a second, that’s really clever!

Dissecting the cleverness of Looney Toons may on one hand dilute the humour a little, but on the other, it provides the new pleasures of analysis. More importantly, it teaches me how to think about the slapstick, Golden Age of cartoons comedy that I love so much as both an audience member and a writer.

Here’s what I think so far.

1. Music and sound effects are key.

Click over to one of those cartoons, and instead of watching it, let it play while you close your eyes. Even when nobody is speaking, the music still tells you what the characters are doing: sneaking, pausing, checking warily for antagonists.

In Looney Toons, music and sound effects are like another character. They tell you what the other characters are doing and how they’re feeling, and they provide insight into characters’ states of mind (like when Sylvester’s music gets all dizzy after the dogs in the pound attack the face he foolishly poked through a hole in the fence).

They also add humour by implying what’s happening off-screen, as in this clip from “Canned Feud.” Even though we can’t see Sylvester fall down the stairs and crash land, we can tell exactly what’s happening after he steps through the door. And our imagined version is probably more vivid than anything the animators could draw.

2. Reversals of logic and unexpected subversions of patterns are also key.

Logical set-up and reversal is a big part of Looney Toons. Whether it’s watching Yosemite Sam saw off a diving board that Bugs Bunny is standing on and seeing the ladder fall down instead of the end of board or seeing a violent chase suddenly transition into the opposite, cleverly subverting the logic of a situation can be hilarious.

Bugs Bunny in particular loves to suddenly take advantage of a pattern to turn a scene on its head:

DAFFY: (pushing the gun barrel to point at Bugs) Wabbit season!
BUGS: (pushing the gun barrel to point back at Daffy) Duck season!
DAFFY: (gun barrel to Bugs) Wabbit season!
BUGS: (pushing the gun barrel in a circle to point back at himself) Wabbit season!
DAFFY: (pushing the barrel to himself) Duck season! Fire!
And of course Elmer does.

(here‘s the whole brilliant exchange, which is actually triple repetition of a repetition gag)

Random reversals and juxtaposition of disparate elements can be funny (like this or this), but randomness isn’t how these Looney Toons jokes work.

Just like Daffy, we allow the repetition to lure us into a false sense of pattern: the argument alternates rabbit-season-duck-season, in order. When you saw off the end of something, part of it will fall down. Each time a character comes back on the screen, he will have something bigger and more powerful than the previous character.

These set-ups feel anything but random. The humour and cleverness comes from the deliberate subversion of the pattern: sure, there’s a pattern, Bugs shows us, but we’re actually following the wrong pattern. We haven’t been specific enough, and he takes advantage of that.

3. Because both those things are important, so is timing.

Tempo sets up pattern as much as words and actions. The order and rhythm of music or sound effects tell us just as much as their melody or noise.

Besides, the viewer needs time to allow ideas and plot points to register. Reversing a pattern doesn’t work if the audience doesn’t have time to figure out the pattern in the first place. Watch any of the cartoons above sped up at 2x speed or slowed down at 0.5x, and see the difference.

4. Conventions matter…

I learned this not from the cartoons themselves, but from watching them with someone who’d never watched this kind of comedy before. She found watching Sylvester and Tweety frustrating rather than funny: for goodness’ sake, if the swing Sylvester was using to bypass the yard full of dogs was too low, sending him plummeting to the growling mob below, why didn’t he just try again with shorter swing ropes?

Of course, there are a few cartoons that actually do let the hapless protagonist (usually Wile E. Coyote) try to amend his plans over and over, and show something new going wrong each time, but the point is, I was perfectly happy to accept that Sylvester wasn’t going to re-evaluate and refine his scheme. I accepted that the convention of this particular cartoon was that he was going to try each idea once and then move on to the rest, for our amusement.

5. … But references don’t (as long as they’re salt, not the main dish).

A lot of Looney Toons and Merry Melodies make references to actors who are no longer as well known or songs that were popular over 50 years ago. No, I can’t always identify Hollywood caricatures from the thirties, forties, and fifties. But as long as that ignorance doesn’t interfere with my understanding of the logic of the story, who cares?

6. The characters’ motivations are what make things funny.

Despite featuring a bunch of characters who don’t talk (like the Roadrunner), whose whole shtick is acting nutty (like Daffy or Yoyo Dodo), or whose motivations are foreign to humans (like Taz or Gossamer), Looney Toons shorts always make clear what each character wants.

Some characters are defined by what they want: Sylvester wants to eat (usually Tweety); Wile E. Coyote wants to catch the Roadrunner; and Elmer Fudd wants to bag Bugs and/or Daffy. Others have recurring plots defined by their motivations: Daffy wants to get rich; Foghorn Leghorn and The Barnyard Dawg want to win the prank war on each other; and poor Porky just wants a relaxing vacation. Sometimes characters are duking it out to win the affections of an attractive member of the opposite sex, or pretending to in order to do the right thing.

Most importantly, every micro-motivation is clear. In the action building blocks that make up each scene, the audience understands exactly what each character wants at every moment — even if what he or she wants is to throw another character off guard. Actions on their own aren’t funny; they make sense only if we understand why these rabbits and humans and ducks are doing the things they do.