This site, if it's still there, provides a list of the 10 basic jokes that you can rehash constantly and base a successful career around. It must be a good list because it's been compiled by the president of the APCA (Amateur And Professional Cartoonists Association). Let's have a look at that list now, with the examples the prez. has provided.

So, there's your whole career laid out for you, in ten jokes. So if you've just failed your fine art or psychology course, or you've been made redundant from your job as coal miner/children's entertainer and you want to kill yourself, don't! Cartooning is your easy way out. I bet the men who draw 'Mandy', 'Horace', 'Scorer' and 'Hagar The Horrible' all went through the same thing, and look where they are now- right next to the horoscopes on page 37 of the Daily Mirror.  

Ok, ignore that last sentence. I'm going to PROVE to you that you can make a successful career out of these ten ideas, and I'm going to do it over the course of this article. Jobs and possibly lives are at stake here, people. So, the first situation I'm going to draw a cartoon for is...

With the above example in mind, all I could really think of for it was ‘Cigarette smoking a man’, Car driving a man’, and, drawing inspiration from the world around me, ‘Crappy Internet site reading a man.’ That's not really much to work with.

So let’s look at the example, and see what makes it tick. Truckers throw beer cans out of the window… see, this is just simple observation comedy. A simple observation on the world around us, but with a quirky spin put on it by the cartoonist. So, as a basis for my 'toon I'm going to use the following routine that I've lifted wholesale from a popular stand-up act. The comedian was kind of sweating and shouting a lot when I watched him last night on the Paramount Comedy Channel, so you'll just have to imagine that as you read it.

...Hmm. I think you had to see it with all the shouting and the sweat. Although that joke may be a tad 'sizist', now that I've got some snappy obv-com to use I'm all set to put a ‘Reversal’ or ‘Opposite’ spin on it and condense it into a single cartoon!

...Now I need to think of how I'm going to do that. Coming up with ideas is often a laborius process.

Umm...

Fuck it, I’ll just draw this instead:

Cool, not bad. I decided that using this method, I would draw up my own amusing take on "Distortion or Exaggeration":

There’s something lacking, though. People tend to forget that cartoons are a visual medium- If a cartoon doesn't have entertaining art, then damn, you may as well just write the joke on a piece of file paper. So, I asked myself, what’s missing from this gag? What can I do to prop up the visual side of this cartoon? Hey, I’ve got it!

You'll notice the author specifically designates it as a ‘talking’ pencil, but he leaves us guessing as to what he intends the pencil to say. Judging by the high standard of the other examples, it was probably something like ‘Hello. Me need bandage now bad. Me sick,' or possibly 'I hate mondays.'

Someone suggested I could draw a leg having puppies, in reference to how dogs always try to hump human legs.

"In theory," I told them, "That’s a great idea, but with two tiny flaws.

After the tramp left, I started thinking about more inanimate objects, such my lamp, and then the moths that always fly into it and get burned.

So, what if the Moth tried to get revenge upon the lightbulb? I was pleased with my idea and drew it up straight away.

Then I looked at the cartoon five minutes later, and realised something wasn’t quite right with it. I made a few changes and suddenly the cartoon worked!

Seriously, what the fuck is this? However many different ways I look at it, I can’t solve the riddle of "Man ties handle of butter churn to mother in laws lower lip." If somebody, anybody has a clue what this was about, email me and put me out of my misery.

It’s possible that the newspaper-cartoon reading public just find mentally ill people funny, and this is his attempt to cash in on it. In that case, another example for ‘Using Props’ could be ‘Man in straight jacket cries and shits pants’, the props being the straight jacket and the pants, I guess.

Although, If mental illness really is what people are into these days, maybe the man who wrote the article should just drop gag cartooning altogether and draw an introspective comic about his struggle with Down’s Syndrome. And don't try to tell me he isn't a sufferer. If you spend your time typing shit like "Man ties handle of butter churn to mother in laws lower lip," you've probably got birth defects ON your birth defects. Let's move on.

Wow!! Thank you, art@apcartoon.com! Thanks to your advice, I managed to come up with a cartoon that SUCKS SHIT! Who are you kidding with these tips? Not United Cartoon Feature Syndicate. You know what they said to me when I sent them this? They said FUCK YOU. They said FUCK YOU and they sent a letter to all the other publishers warning them not to accept any of my work ever again. Thanks for wrecking my career, genius. I can't wait to see what your next pearl of wisdom will do. Probably get me kicked out of University.

I’m going to assume that ‘Man ties handle of butter churn to mother in laws lower lip’ falls into the category of puzzle cartoons, where you have to work out what the fuck it means, but otherwise I’m stumped. Going by that example above, other possibilities for this could be Man clutching bleeding chest stumbles through park at night. Or Black man with rope burns around neck crosses street to avoid KKK headquarters. I must have missed something, because those aren't very funny. I'd be kind of unsettled if I opened the Mirror and saw Bruised woman sitting in trashed apartment doesn't answer door for ex-boyfriend next to Scorer casually referencing Nazi War criminals.

In that case, let’s assume the humour of the Squirrel example comes from the ‘man bites dog’ role-reversal. For example, you could have a peg-legged cat looking at a fish in a bowl he wants to eat, except the fish is a piranha. See, the pieces click into place, and you realise that it was the fish that gave the cat the peg leg- clever!! I think Gary Larson already did that one, but that's ok. Now I've distilled this into a formula I can make my own laff-guaranteed 'puzzle cartoon':

Ok, now we’re in business, right? I’ve got a solid, original idea, backed up with clear, bold artwork and it’s innocuously FUNNY. So I sent it off to Cartoon Features Syndicate, and two weeks later the postman came. I hastily picked up the letter he delivered, could it be the reply?!

YES! I recognised the CFS logo in the corner of the envelope, this was the real deal! I opened the envelope clumsily, almost ripping the letter inside! I gathered my whole family into the front room to watch me read the letter. This would be a turning point in my career! Nervously, I started to read, out loud.

‘Gosh, well, I shouldn’t let a little setback like this discourage me. I mean, Charles Schulz was rejected hundreds of times before he got lucky with Peanuts.’

‘There’s some more on the back!’ yelled a tramp.

I continued to read.

Fuckers. In case they hadn’t noticed, the afro-american man comes out on top in that cartoon and the rednecks are portrayed as the idiots. Not that that matters to me now, typing this from my current orbit around Saturn and all.

This one was another tricky one for me, as I couldn’t think of a phrase that people commonly say as I haven’t had any physical contact with another human being for the last two months (see above). However, I do know that I can give myself a cheap thrill by using photoshop to change the words of other people's cartoons:

SUBSTITUTION

For this, I thought of how people will misplace their affections, such as at Christmas time where people worship Santa Claus instead of Jesus Christ, who the festival was named for. So, I thought about, say, substituting Santa Claus for Jesus dying on the cross, or a small kid praying to Santa - pretty powerful, huh? This is a subject I feel strongly about, and so I thought I’d pull out the stops to show the world my take on the issue, in the classic 'editorial cartoon' style.

Unfortunately, living in a capitalist society the syndicate made me tone this ‘toon down a little so that it wouldn’t harm potential merchandise sales around the holiday period and they wrote some new dialogue for me too, but I think the underlying message is still there!

This was the theme of a Jerky Boys prank I once heard, except instead of a swimming pool it was his recently deceased mother, so it resembled a joke. Also, the swimming pool in my town does have a turn buckle on the gate, so what the fuck?

Ok, so how about a cartoon featuring the writer of that guide ‘changing location’ from his desk in his stupid house to the bottom of the sea and drowning like a motherfucker? I don’t care. Everything that can be said and done in cartoons has already been said and done. You think you can ever top something like 'Monsieur Fromage'? Yeah, right. I'd rather find anthrax in my morning paper than another ugly, humourless three-panel nightmare like the one you're likely to come up with.

Here's a bonus cartoon I dug out for you. I've been trying to get this goddamn cartoon published for about 5 years now, but they all told me it wasn't 'topical'. I tried to explain that 'Cosovo' could be changed to say anything- 'Iraq', 'Global Warming', 'Taxes', and that Clinton could be changed to look like any US president, but they still wouldn't buy it.

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