Henderson's 'Magic Whistle' comics don't blow

The Magic Whistle Blows! is a hilarious humor collection from a man who hates humor. Compiling material from Sam Henderson's weekly comic strip in the New York Press and longer pieces from his comic book, both entitled The Magic Whistle, the book beats one comedic dead horse after another until, somehow, each gag rises, Lazarus-like, and makes us laugh once more before collapsing into dust.

COURTESY ST. MARTIN'S GRIFFIN

Most of Hender-son's short strips recycle the sort of stupid stories that everybody in college received from long e-mail chains during freshman year. Familiar jokes about sex, drugs, and asses abound, presented through either themed clusters of one-panel gags or trotted out by one of Henderson's recurring characters. The dirty old man in "He Aims to Please," for example, tries to pick up a woman by claiming to be gay. When she replies, "Then why are you trying to have sex with me?," he delivers the punchline—"'Cause I need to make extra sure I don't like girls!"—and the woman, predictably, faints backward out of the panel, with only her feet visible.

"Dirty Danny," another recurring character (this one based on New York illustrator and provocateur Danny Hellman) spreads cheap sex jokes throughout the land like cancer. He decorates birthday cakes with slogans like "bite my ass" and "get a boner, nephew." He stirs alphabet soup until the letters spell "boobies." More important than the dime-store joke insertions, though, are the positive responses Dirty Danny receives. A bystander calls Danny's soup stunt "a delightful erotic tour-de-force worthy of Chaucer," and when Danny rewrites Hamlet's soliloquy into a series of masturbation references, he's met with bravos. The overblown praise here offers a clue into just how little Henderson thinks of this kind of joke, and of the easy incongruities and inversions that often pass for humor on sitcoms, late-night shows, and other comics. As Henderson himself puts it in a self-deprecating strip at the book's center, "I do comics which are intentionally unfunny because by using unfunny jokes, that makes them funny."

Other portions of the book turn away from Henderson's satirical inflation of cheap humor, and directly attack or explain the use of such material. In an all-text piece called "HR Bill #9999F: Reform in Humorology," Henderson asserts that "we live in an age where irony, iconoclasm, and irreverence are now the standard and `Post-modernism' is an excuse for recycling tired old material," then goes on to attack such premises as "implications of unwanted anal intrusion," "psychotic postal workers," and "victims being `toast.'"

The quality at issue here is that of contemporary humor's laziness: jokes based not around skewing the world in a new or novel way, but of trotting out time-worn references and formulas. Tony Hendra of the National Lampoon once observed that "a shared cliché always gets a laugh," and we can see this in operation all over, from the repetitive jokes and meta-awfulness of a talk show's opening monologue to the non-stop stream of "subversive" pop culture references vomiting forth from The Family Guy.

In a stroke of genius, Henderson echoes this laziness by drawing his stupid jokes in an energetic, scribbly style that calls to mind notebook margins, cocktail napkins and the world's more artistic toilet stalls. Everyone is out of proportion, with eyes like flounder and no clearly-defined clothes to speak of. It looks like it was dashed off in five minutes on the way to doing something else. It reads fast, and this, coupled with its seeming thoughtlessness, lends the strips a kind of manic energy that elicits a laugh before the brain's safeguards can kick in.

This looseness, however, conceals an exquisite sense of comic timing that is displayed to its best effect in Henderson's long stories. In these stories, Henderson typically subjects an Everyman character to an escalating series of humiliations, until the character either triumphs through a sudden accident of fate, or is completely destroyed. In "Gunther Bumpus," for example, a man locks himself out of the house. He tries to squeeze in through the pet door. He gets stuck. He stays there all night. In the morning, two beatniks walk by and draw a spiral on his buttocks. Henderson times the events in the three-page story so well that each event builds from the others, yet arrives unexpectedly enough to trigger a laugh.

If there's a flaw in The Magic Whistle Blows!, it's that it incorporates the laziness in Henderson's art into its design. It sometimes feels disorganized and sloppily put together, as if the designers couldn't quite figure out how to format Henderson's multiple strip sizes. The cover looks messy, like a third-grade knock-knock joke collection, and while this may be intentional, it doesn't come through as well as it does with the strips. Some panel borders get cut off at the top of the page, which is inexcusable. Despite these quibbles, though, The Magic Whistle Blows! stages one of the funniest mass executions of bad jokes in a long time.

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