August 27, 2009
How To Read Nancy
How To Read Nancy (pdf) by Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik:
Ernie Bushmiller had the hand of an architect, the mind of a silent film comedian, and the soul of an accountant. His formulaic approach to humor beautifully revealed the essence of what a gag is all about – balance, symmetry, economy. His gags have the abstract feel of math and Nanc[y] was, in fact, a mini-algebra equation masquerading as a comic strip for close to 50 years.
Austin points out that they plan on republishing it as a book. Also, don’t let the typos distract you from the content. Mark Newgarden hosts a superior version you can download here (pdf).
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And, as a friend once said to me, “Aunt Fritzi is a babe.”
Wow. I wonder how much of the layout of the strip as reconstructed here was intentionally planned by Bushmiller, and how much was simply intuitive, the result of a master plying his craft every day for years and years. Fascinating either way.
The typos were sometimes puzzling, none more so than this sentence:
“And we do kilos something about them.”
The “kilos” sentence was the only sentence I couldn’t make out. I looked at the keyboard to see if there could have been a finger shift. I thought about replacing just one letter in the word and even tried to think about it as a phonetic or transliterate word. None of these yielded results.
I think somebody OCR-ed a handout on that PDF — I’ve read a copy before that wasn’t so typo-ridden. Let me see if I can dig it up…
Thanks for posting this!
I’ve had this PDF on my site for a couple of years now and only discovered today that what I posted was somebody’s ersatz re-formatting of our original essay: complete with a fair amount of typos..I have no idea what the “kilos” reference is about either.
I’ve replaced it with a new PDF which is direct from the printed source. It’s a bigger download but its the real deal.
Please go to http://www.laffpix.com/howtoreadnancy.pdf to get it.
Feel free to repost and replace this one -and stay tuned for the book version!
Mark Newgarden’s We All Die Alone is among my most prized books in the library that’s taken over my home office. The man is a true comedic genius — in theory and application.