This example will make no sense to you if you don’t know the hyper-elaborate comics of Chris Ware, or the computer-drawn rude cats of Chris Onstad’s Achewood, but read this anyway (and the two strips after) because it’s funny. Now Ware is kind of an easy target for that kind of thing because he’s pretty successful and very idiosyncratic; plus, Onstad could draw a comic about drywall and have it be funny. But it’s weird how appropriate the style is in this case: it’s about 50% Ware and 50% Achewood, but it’s hard to separate them out, because compression and diagrammatic layouts work really well as a delivery system for Onstad’s deadpan goofiness. I bet he would do this kind of thing more often except people would think he’s just doing Ware again.
On the other hand, not to beat a dead horse but holy shit is this old Ted Rall strip ever bad. I was trying to figure out why I hate it so much. I don’t think it’s because he can’t draw or letter at all; that could’ve made it funnier (like in the 3rd of those Achewood strips, where there’s a big colorful title but it’s in the most godawful computer font possible). I think it’s just the bitterness. Even if you didn’t know that Rall hates Ware, that strip just reads as "That guy is unnecessarily weird and mannered and makes no sense, unlike me and other sensible people; if I just point that out, he’ll be brought low.“ It’s the equivalent of the schoolyard bit, ”Hey, this is you! Check it out everyone, this is Franklin! ’Duh... I’m so smart. Fiddle-de-dee, I’m the king of nerds.’“ There’s a limit on how funny that can be, because the schoolyard is treacherous: if you add any flourishes of your own that aren’t just literal mockery, and especially if you give any sign that acting like the other guy is genuinely fun in itself, then you might get made fun of too. To be funny, you have to risk being weirder than the other guy.
Maybe this is a good rule of thumb for parody in general? Bring something to the mix, something that not just anyone would’ve thought of, that strikes sparks from your target instead of just thumping it. Veronica Geng was the master of this in prose—my favorite parody of anything ever is her piece “Record Review”, where Robert Christgau reviews the Watergate tapes using every awful rock-critic gesture in the book, and reaches heights of baroque ambiguity that the real Christgau would’ve envied while being unaware that what he’s reviewing isn’t music. And if you hang out at small-press comics shows, you may have seen Jesse Reklaw’s dead-on faux-Maus stories; not only are they great mimicry, but you learn something about the Berkeley dope trade—and he manages to imply that Art Spiegelman is the kind of guy who would take the exact same approach to even a trivial and not-so-admirable story, but that’s not necessarily such a bad thing because it’d be funny if he did. And Shaun of the Dead is a good horror movie because it’s a really specific character comedy. And so on.
I predict that Airplane will live on when Airport is dust in the wind; even in some unimaginable future utopia where no one’s ever seen a bad disaster thriller, they’ll be spitting soda out their nose at Airplane, even if they don’t get it. But if you took the same surreal gags on their own, without the bathetic suspense narrative, you’d just have a banana peel without a clown. It looks easier than it is.