On the 1st June, I started ‘The Funny Drawing Lab’ group in Leamington Spa with the aims of creating a group of local people who wanted to practice cartooning once a month. The first gathering only had 3 participants to the first session, two from my cartooning group of friends (‘The Leam Funnies’) and a chap from the Cotswolds, who had driven an hour especially to come. He pointed out that what I am doing is ‘niche’ and this has been interesting to ruminate upon.
Creating humour comics is ‘niche,’ because it is not generally included in arts classes, which appear to be almost always portrait drawing or life drawing, with occasional nods to drawing landscapes or still life. The drawing is always of something representational and there is no drawing from the imagination. For this reason, it has been difficult to market ‘The Funny Drawing Lab’ particularly as workshops for adults, and several friends pointed out that my cartoon logo looks like something for children,
The expectation seems to be that cartoons, fun, and the funny are the preserve of children. I have had interest from several parents asking if their children can join us, and I have pointed out that I do not have DBS checks and that my classes are designed for adults to find the fun and the funny through drawing – something that children are generally already good at and do not need. However, perhaps after the PhD, I will expand workshops to include children.
Nevertheless, one child attended The Funny Drawing Lab in Gipsy Hill, London on the 7th July. I was invited to give the final workshop of the day from 5 to 6pm. By this time, there had already been workshops on life drawing, comics panelling, and four sessions on creating zines with wikis, memory, poetry and collage. These workshops had attendance in the double digits, while my workshop initially had only one attendee who was 10 years old. This was fairly depressing considering the time, effort, and the 3-hour commute to get to Gipsy Hill. Luckily, the child’s parents took pity on me and joined the session, so we had fun drawing and discussing ideas. Their feedback was particularly interesting perhaps because they had not planned to come, including the comment,
‘Really fun; the idea of it is terrifying, but led by prompts became a really warm, friendly opening experience – everyone needs this!!’
Firstly, ‘the idea of it is terrifying’ has generated some fresh thoughts of how my workshops can be perceived as places of terror, despite their design as safe places to create. Perhaps the terror builds from the combination of potential concerns of not being able to draw, of not being able to draw from the imagination, of not having ideas, and of not being funny.
The latter could particularly be problematic for women in the face of fixed cultural discourse on ‘women aren’t funny’ – despite women being involved in cartooning since the eighteenth century and women comedians everywhere in the current one. There’s lots of troubling reading on this (see references below). Beyond this troubling discussion, humour is also perhaps challenging to create alongside women’s traditional roles as caregivers and the moral gatekeepers for society.
Of course, I agree with this participant that ‘everyone needs this!!’ and my own need for finding and building funny into my life is the foundation of this research. Yet, if ‘everyone needs this,’ how to market the workshops in a way that appeals to adults and does not terrify them?!…
…I have no idea.
References
Beard, Mary (2017) Women in Power. London: Profile Books.
Hitchens, Christopher (2007): “Why Women Aren’t Funny”. Vanity Fair 1: 54–59.
Kotthoff, Helga (2023) Gender and humour. The new state of the art. In the de Gruyter Handbook of Humor Studies
Lakoff, Robin (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.