That kind of editing can be VERY tedious. The most complicated this I’ve every don’t was one of my blog headers, but the software options have greatly improved since then.
Dan (and @misterme987) perhaps it would be fun if I placed a “Difficulty Rating” on every cartoon, perhaps a scale from 1 to 5. Level 1 would be obvious comedy, Level 2 would be easy but require a degree of American pop-culture knowledge, etc; Level 3 would involve American-English idioms/sayings which might be unknown to English-speaker outside of USA. [I have already run into this issue with Indonesian friends—but they love the opportunity to learn new idioms and things which Americans find funny.] Level 4 would require something akin to university education or being very well read. Level 5 would require intensive knowledge of a particular field (e.g., philosophy, genomics, computer science.)
I really like to do the Level 5 material which is arcane but obvious to professionals in that field. That T-shirt I did about TEM-1 beta-lactamase is an example----combining “insider knowledge” with American pop-culture: a tourist trap T-shirt which read “I got the TEM-1 beta-lactamase kicked out of me at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan”
If I get this going long-term, I may solicit “inside jokes” from the scientists/experts here and generate esoteric cartoons from them. They would only be funny to people in those fields but that’s fine.
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This might be overthinking things, unless use ironically?
It would simply be a small circled number in a corner of each cartoon. The idea was prompted in part by a friend who said, "I wish there was a way for me to know if I’m stupid if I don’t get the joke—or it is an “inside joke” and I just don’t have the background knowledge necessary to figure it out. " (So if someone wanted “easy” jokes, they could just look at the level 1 cartoons.)
Another purpose is so that when I’m organizing my collection of cartoons, I know which ones are for general audience, which are for my friends overseas who don’t speak American English, and those cartoons which are only for very select audience.
The Level 5 cartoons would be sort of like Wordle or Wordosis or the NPR Sunday Morning NYT puzzlemaster exercises. I can’t recall where I saw this (perhaps it is with NYT crosswords???) but some syndicated crosswords or puzzles publish a very easy one on MOnday, slightly harder on Tuesday, and the hardest is on Friday or Sunday paper. So it is not really a new concept to “grade” a puzzle.
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Secret messages within cartoons make a good Easter Egg for the fans.
Also, consider “hover text” messages, like XKCD.
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I’ve got a Trump cartoon which has at least two or three “underlying jokes” behind the main one—so they kind of function as Easter Eggs. If I find myself creating a lot of political jokes, I will probably create a different title and trademarked persona for them. I was thinking of a name like “The Disgruntled Ol’ Codger.” where there would be a strikeout mark through the “Dis” so that it reads as “The Gruntled Ol’ Codger.”
Werner Klemperer was a first cousin once removed to Victor Klemperer, famous for his diaries which account for his experiences in Germany during the war. Victor was a practicing Christian, but was racially classed as a Jew by German law. He was spared the camps by virtue of his marriage to a gentile, but only barely. He was, of course, treated abominably.
I recall that my dad, who fought in the Pacific theater in WWII, could not stand Hogan’s Heroes or, for that matter, Stalag 17. I talked to him about why it was that these very light-hearted depictions of a horrible time were fairly popular even among members of his own generation, and his take was that people wanted to forget how awful it was, and that being able to joke about it made it easier for them. He had not seen the greatest horrors of the war – he’d been in the Navy and the closest he got to the action was moving wounded men and having shells and kamikazes fly over his relatively small ship – but to him it was all too horrific for him to have a laugh at Nazi prison camps.
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