My thoughts on the humor in this comic
This is a rather silly webcomic about palindromes. Not as clever as I’d like my webcomics to be. But the script resulted in a work Slack conversation where I was being goofy. Perhaps the context of a work Slack chat makes this a bit more funny. But I figured why not toss this into a webcomic?
There’s something about how palindromes seem to carefully composed. They are perfect constructions of balance. Writers of palindrome sentences surely must take lots of sweat and tears to produce a single sentence—tossing out all the other sentences that don’t have perfect balance.
And then you got this webcomic where palindromes are just created by flipping the word backwards and sticking it in front of the original word. Completely lazy. Completely the opposite of how a palindrome would be painstakingly constructed. So I find some humor in that.
Ending reaction phrase
At the end, Etym says “Too hot to hoot!”—which is a palindrome. Originally, I had “cleverrrrrr”—which doesn’t really make any sense, other than a silly commentary.
I thought perhaps a palindrome reaction might be humorous to mark Etym’s reaction. A google search for palindromes list resulted in this handy page by Ralph Griswold on arizona.edu.
“Too hot to hoot” is kinda funny. Weird phrase. But a fun interjection. Other sentences I considered:
- Sit on a potato pan, Otis.
- Did Hannah say as Hannah did?
- Mad? Am I, madam?
- Niagara, O roar again!
- I moan, Naomi.
- Live not on evil.
I kinda stayed away from the sentences that have a name. I have yet to name the Worm, and I don’t really want to start naming him something random like Otis.
uoyknahtthankyou
If you want to express your appreciation via text, you can say:
sknahthanks
That looks like it would be fun to say!
Or you can start your emails with:
ollehello
If someone says thank you to you, respond with:
emocleweruoyourewelcome
I love that person reading this word has to go through a bunch of gobbly-gook syllables before finally getting to the meaning of the word. This long palindrome reads: emo clewer uoy!--oh wait--you're welcome. HOW CLEVERRRRR!
Please use these silly non-sense palindromes.
esaelplease
Sparxmind pointed out that these fake palindrome look like German! I should have made Etym’s response be a German palindrome.