Well, hello again, and welcome to another of these pseudoblog entries that I write when bored.

So, I will talk about humor again today. Not precisely how to write it, as there are a thousand ways to do so, a billion sources to draw inspiration from (Argentina alone accounts for half of those sources. We had a presidential candidate be compared to Pochita as slander —IN A COUNTRY WITH THE NORTH FULL OF CAPYBARAS, NO LESS— and a Chala-head-Chala adaptation to support that same candidate. Another candidate had an Evangelion rip off made during their campaign. At this rate, this novel will be considered Gritty realism by my country's standards.) .

But i want to talk about a commonality of many jokes, as i did the other day in the Forums of this same site: Many jokes are short stories. When you tell me a physicist and an Engineer walk into a bar, you are telling me a story with an introduction, a crux and a denouement. Like this setup, development and punchline are comparable to a three act structure, except that a joke's denouement doesn't aim to solve a conflict, necessarily, and that doesn't lead to us considering a joke open ended. The punchline concludes the joke. It closes the format neatly even if the building is still burning because the Mathematician reduced the problem to a previously solved one. In a normal story, it would be an open end. In a joke, we got out resolution, laughed at the mathematician and that's it, we aren't invested in it anymore.

This is no problem for a novel, specially if you are conditioned to not care about the characters (like here, where the only decent, deep, round character is thine eminence Lady Brunhilda.) These kind of jokes tend to be very parsimonious with a common narrative, as they can easily take a whole chapter and fill it while you coordinate smaller gags as a sort of ambience. They are often explicit in their punchline, but they don't need to be: the most recent Cutbastra chapter, for example, never addresses the Hierophant in the room. The pun is never said out loud, yet i assume most readers who are familiar with English sayings will get it. Of course, the chapter also features a sloth complimenting Cutbastra's member and then falling into a shredding machine.

The side gags don't only serve as a buffer if the main joke doesn't land: they also distract you from the incoming punchline. When doing fast paced humor, you don't want the readers figuring how the chapter will end out: Like a good detective story, the punchline, the culprit, must remain hidden until the reveal. Some jokes even work better by using the first punchline as a setup for a running gag (we have so many of those we must use scientific notation for them at RotR Co.), more so if you (readers) have almost forgotten the thing, if you don't have it in the front of your mind. You must have noticed this with last chapter, but i have no problem adding to jokes from even the first chapters of the novel. And this will be true past volume one (2 to 5 volumes are planned until the final fight against Chalazarian + possibly an interdimensional being of incommensurable power. It depends mainly on how many stupid ways to cultivate rottweilers I can come up with, really).

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I know it isn't best practice for webnovels, but i feel i am insulting readers' intelligence if i add recap, more so with the amount of info you'd need to include to fit a whole book of gags in one. I don't know how many jokes there are per chapter, but there must be at least 5 or 6 as a low limit. I don't know where a joke ends and the other starts sometimes, so counting is even harder.

Anyway, I digress.

Many jokes are a story, and those in Road of the Rottweiler aren't the exception. However, this easy setup doesn't need these levels of absurdity to work: Pratchett used it, the Simpsons use it, most comedians use it. Barring plays on words (that are a sort of orphaned punchlines that use the language itself as a setup) this must be the most common way to tell jokes, because it is effective as hell: humans love stories, and humor can exploit this fact very well. We have characters, we have situations, they are often nonsensical or absurd, but the story structure doesn't care. It's flexible, it's a playground, and i think that's how comedy should be: The first person to have fun with a joke must be its maker. I giggle while writing this, people. I laugh stupidly in the street or market when i come up with an absurd scene. And i am happy you are enjoying my jokes too.

Now, I bid you goodnight, as it's 2 am here and my brain is running out of thinking juice.