The Paris Review

Kate Beaton makes comics about the Bröntes, Canadians, fat ponies, the X-Men, Hamlet, the American founding fathers, Raskolnikov, gay Batman, Nikola Tesla, Les Misérables, Nancy Drew, Greek myths, and hipsters throughout history. Little is spared her lively pen and waggish, incisive wit. Born in Nova Scotia, Beaton studied history and anthropology, discovering through her university’s newspaper that she could put her knowledge of people, places, and dates to work in a humor column and, later, in comic strips. In 2007, she launched Hark! A Vagrant, which now receives more than a million hits each month. Her new book, of the same name, lampoons Kierkegaard, lumberjacks, Marie Curie, Jay Gatsby, Anne of Cleves, Oedipus, and everyone in between.

Do you remember the first comic you drew in college?

It was about Vikings! Vikings invading the school campus. It was a how-to guide for dealing with this breaking news. The Vikings were very interested in biology class, apparently. In comics, everybody is an expert in their own sense of humor, so either you’re funny to someone else or you’re not. And it’s putting yourself out there quite a bit for someone who is a little bit shy, which I was. I didn’t put my name on the first comics I submitted in case people hated them. You don’t want to be that person who’s unfunny. Trying to be funny and not being funny? That’s awful.

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In 1962, Olympia Press editor Maurice Girodias published Terry Southern’s story “New Art Museum in Hamburg Blown Up” in the first issue of the short-lived literary magazine, Olympia (it ran for only four issues). Southern’s trenchant and funny piece was in excellent company: the issue also featured ten episodes from William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine, poems by Lawrence Durrell, a selection from Southern’s pornographic novel, Candy, and a suppressed chapter from J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. This was not a publication to be taken lightly.

Southern’s story was relegated to “long-lost” status before his son, Nile, proposed it for inclusion in Gabriel Levinson’s forthcoming anthology, A Brief History of Authoterrorism. We’re pleased to welcome it back after nearly fifty years.

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Forlorn Funnies, the title of cartoonist Paul Hornschemeier’s periodical of short prose comics, aptly characterizes all of his work: bleak subjects leavened by drollery and gags reigned-in by finely drawn anxieties. The author of the graphic novels Mother, Come Home (2003) and The Three Paradoxes (2007) and two collections of shorter work, Hornschemeier recently published Life with Mr. Dangerous, a graphic novel he began serializing in Fantagraphics’s comics anthology, Mome, in 2005. The story concluded last winter, and the novel, which tells the story of a young woman adrift in bad relationships and obsessed with a little-known cartoon show, appeared in book form last month. I spoke with Hornschemeier from his home in Evanston, Illinois.

The story was serialized in Mome over a period of five years. Was the story whole in your mind when you started, or did you create it as you went along?

With most of my stories, I have key scenes in mind and I almost always have the beginning and end done right from the start. With this one, I definitely had key emotional notes I wanted to hit, and I knew how it ended and the set up. But it was strange in that I was both writing it as I was going, and, as it was coming out in Mome, I was going back and editing the story and inserting new pages. So in the book, there are thirty pages that weren’t in the serialized format.

What was needed that wasn’t already there?

I could see there were beats I hadn’t hit that I wanted to go back and reemphasize, pacing issues and characterization issues that I wanted to resolve. I produced that graphic novel really differently than my other graphic novels. Mother, Come Home was very act 1, act 2, act 3, and they were written very much as acts by themselves. And The Three Paradoxes was as close as possible to what a full screenplay would be, because it was so complex, with interlocking narratives. But this one was just a huge, jumbled mess.

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We are very pleased to announce our lineup for the Spring Revel, which will be held on April 12 at Cipriani 42nd Street:

The Paris Review Spring Revel
Honoring James Salter

Featuring

The Hadada Prize
presented by Robert Redford

The Plimpton Prize for Fiction
presented by Ann Beattie

The Terry Southern Prize for Humor
presented by Fran Lebowitz

Yves-Andre Istel and Kathleen Begala
Benefit Chairs

Stay tuned in 2011 for ticket and table information, as well as some excellent James Salter coverage on the Daily.

Last summer, Writers Digest Press published And Here's the Kicker a book of interviews I conducted with twenty-one humor writers, including Buck Henry, Bob Odenkirk, Dick Cavett, Harold Ramis, David Sedaris, and Marshall Brickman. Although he’s not a writer, I interviewed Ben Glenn II, a TV historian and expert in the history of canned laughter for the book. As I was talking to all of these people whose work produces laughter, it seemed appropriate to include at least one expert in producing fake laughter.

How did canned laughter come about?

The concept actually goes back at least five hundred years. History tells us that there were audience “plants” in the crowds at Shakespearean performances in the 16th century. They spurred on audience reactions, including laughter and cheering—as well as jeers.

How about more recently?

Canned laughter was used to a certain degree in radio, but its first TV appearance was in 1950, on a rather obscure NBC situation comedy, The Hank McCune Show. Remarkably, there are a couple of clips from the show on YouTube. Shortly after the show’s debut, there was an article in Variety noting that the show’s canned laughter was a new innovation, and that its potential for providing a wide-range of reactions was great. Of course, that eventually came true.

How odd did the laugh track sound to those early TV audiences?

I can only imagine that it seemed odd to viewers, but using a laugh track held many advantages for television producers. The most important was that it made it possible to film exteriors and on location. It gave producers freedom. For example, scenes from Leave It to Beaver were shot outdoors on RKO’s—and later Universal’s—back lot. With the laugh track, a studio audience was no longer absolutely necessary.

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