What's so great about Erfworld?

[Antares]

It seems like the comic's entire sense of humor stems from the fact that the writer is giving everything stupid names... can someone please enlighten me as to what's so funny about it?

[Nebulious]

Erfworld definately isn't for everyone. It has an extremely subtle humor that's often very dry. There are also a lot of refrences that aren't as overt as orlies and Mr. Jenkins.

The main humor isn't in the different names and cutesy world. Those things are vehicles for plot and conversation.

[OOTS_Rules.]

I think that this is more like action than humor. Yes, Spidews and Cloth Golems equal action.

[NecroPaladin]

The humor stems not from the jokes but from the characters. Put a few odd personalities together, and you can find it funny even if they're not calling their ship "junk." The plot is compelling enough to keep me focused, and the Spidews can kiss my ass if they think they're the only interesting part of the comic.

[dakiwiboid]

I read Erfworld for the interesting art, the quirky characters, the inside jokes, and yes, the silly names. It's certainly not for everyone, but then, if you want a comic that's written for everyone, you can just read a daily newspaper.

[jami]

It seems like the comic's entire sense of humor stems from the fact that the writer is giving everything stupid names... can someone please enlighten me as to what's so funny about it?

Clearly, you have completely ignored the fingernail growing properties of Erfworld. Indeed, my own nails have grown considerably since drawing and reading the comic. They've grown so much that on a number of occasions, I've had to cut them. Yes, CUT them! Amazing!

[Shadow of the Sun]

Jami, is there no limit to how awesome you are?

[Khantalas]

Jamie: Making us laugh out loud until we rip out our lungs.

Rob does that, too, sometimes.

[Death, your friend the Reaper]

Jamie: Making us laugh out loud until we rip out our lungs.

Rob does that, too, sometimes.

But he needs to pick up his act, he is falling behind in points.

*Death makes a note on his page*

[KillerCardinal]

I read Erfworld for the interesting art, the quirky characters, the inside jokes, and yes, the silly names. It's certainly not for everyone, but then, if you want a comic that's written for everyone, you can just read a daily newspaper.

*Shudder*. Yah, the majority of those cartoons are the reason I read webcomics. My sense of humor seems to be understood a LOT more here than in the *real* world.

Anyway, I like the subtle humor that erfworld has, but even more so, I love the plot, and the way that the world is presented to us as we go along rather than just being told about where we are. Suffice it to say, if you ONLY want humor in your comic and don't care about anuthing else, I don't think that erfworld would be that good. However, if you want a GREAT story that is well told and humorous, erfworld seems to be giving that to us so far(and I expect that it will continue to do so).

Anyway, just my two cents.

[Azrael]

I... can someone please enlighten me as to what's so funny about it?

No. Humor cannot be explained. Ever.

Really. It can't. More explaining = less funny. Always.


Now, Inside jokes, subtle references or unclear plot points can be explained, and thus, an individual might then understand the humor. But if those elements are noted, logged and found to be unfunny, then no amount of explanation will ever help.

[Tokiko Mima]

What's so great about Erfworld?

from http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/criticism.html

VALUE JUDGMENTS CONSTITUTE the substance of aesthetic experience. I don't want to argue this assertion. I point to it as a fact, the fact that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic. I don't want to argue, either, about the nature of aesthetic value judgments. They are acts of intuition, and intuition remains unanalyzable.

The fact of aesthetic intuition, as distinguished from other kinds of intuition, has, for lack of a better word, to be called Taste. This word has acquired unfortunate connotations since the nineteenth century, for what are really irrelevant reasons. That great literary critic F.R. Leavis, while insisting on the primacy of value judgment, avoided the word for--as it seems to me--fear of these connotations. Instead, he resorted to "sensibility" or circumlocutions like "feeling for value" or "sense of value." (I may not be quoting with exactness, but I'm not misrepresenting.) I want to try to rehabilitate the word; Taste is the handiest term for what's meant, and somehow the bluntest--in part precisely because of the disrepute into which it has fallen. The word drives home the fact that art is first of all, and most of all, a question of liking and of not liking--just so. Liking and not liking have to do with value, and nothing else.

It's as though the shying away from the use of the word, Taste, had been a portent of the present general tendency to shy away from what it, or its synonyms, means. There is a reluctance nowadays to express value judgments in criticism--at least in criticism of painting and sculpture, and maybe of some of the other arts too.* I mean outspoken value judgments, judgments that can be discussed. Implied judgments abound, and have to: they decide usually (though by no means always) what items, or occasions, of art critics give their attention to. But implied judgments don't get discussed enough, they don't get put on the table. Art will get explained, analyzed, interpreted, historically situated, sociologically or politically accounted for, but the responses that bring art into experience as art, and not something else--these will go unmentioned.

Need they be mentioned? Only in so far as it's art as art, and not anything else, that's to be talked about. Sure, art can be talked about as something else: as document, as symptom, as sheer phenomenon. And it does get talked about that way more and more, and by critics no less than by art historians and by philosophers and psychologists. There's nothing necessarily wrong in this. Only it's not criticism. Criticism proper means dealing in the first place with art as art, which means dealing with value judgments. Otherwise criticism becomes something else. Not that it is to be so narrowly defined as to have to exclude interpretation, description, analysis, etc.; only that it must, if it's to be criticism, include evaluation, and evaluation in the first place--for the sake of art, for the sake of everything art is that isn't information or exhortation, for the sake of what's in art's gift alone.

To experience art as art is--again--to evaluate, to make, or rather receive, value judgments, consciously and unconsciously. (A value judgment doesn't mean a formulation or statement, a putting of something into thoughts and words; a value judgment takes place; the thoughts and words come afterwards.) The critic happens to be under the obligation to report his value judgments. These will be the truth, for him, of the art he discusses. It will also, most often, make for the greatest relevance, and greatest interest, of what he says or writes. Though I grant that the issue of what's interesting here may be a moot point for a lot of people.

I realize that I'm simplifying. But I'm not oversimplifying. I'm stating flatly what hasn't been stated flatly enough, or often enough with emphasis. But then the primacy of value judgment in art criticism used to be taken so much as a matter of course that it didn't have to be stated, much less stated emphatically. The last great art critics I'm aware of--Julius Meier-Graefe and Roger Fry--simply assumed it, just as E.D. Hirsch's literary critics did. And it is still assumed, as far as I can see, in music and architectural criticism, and in literary reviewing as distinct from "serious" literary criticism, as it isn't in art criticism or even art reviewing. Which is why I don't feel I'm laboring the obvious when I harp on the primacy of value judgment in the present context. Didn't the late Harold Rosenberg say that Taste was an "obsolete concept"? Didn't another reputable art critic refer recently to the weighing of the quality of specific works of art as "art mysticism"?

To be sure, value judgments of a certain kind--more than enough of them--are to be met with in the current art press. But they are not aesthetic value judgments. The values invoked are those of sheerly phenomenal newness, or of "objectness," or "information," or "process," or of purported demonstrations of the hows of perceiving and knowing, or of acts and things by which our notion of what's possible as art is expanded. The critics who take these values or claims to value seriously ipso facto exclude any appeal to aesthetic value, whether they realize it or not. To judge from their rhetoric, more often they don't. I said earlier that implied value judgments abound, and I meant value judgments that were properly aesthetic, for better or for worse. I want to correct myself somewhat. Being for the new simply because it's new, or being for a certain kind of art simply because it's in vogue, doesn't entail an aesthetic value judgment. Nor does rejecting what seems old-fashioned simply because it seems that. (Categorical judgments are in any case never truly aesthetic ones.) What's involved here is something I'd call aesthetic incapacity: the incapacity lies in letting irrelevant factors like newness and oldness shut off aesthetic experience, inhibit the operations of Taste. This amounts to, has amounted to, a kind of judgment on aesthetic experience itself. And it's this judgment, this disparaging judgment, that seems to control too much of what's offered as criticism of contemporary fine art.

Of course, there's more, and should be more, to art criticism than the expressing of value judgments. Description, analysis, and interpretation, even interpretation, have their place. But without value judgment these can become arid, or rather they stop being criticism. (A bad work of art can offer as much for description, analysis, and interpretation--yes, interpretation--as a good work of art. It's possible to go on as long about a failed Goya as about a successful one.) As Meier-Graefe and Fry show us, description and analysis can carry value judgments with them, implicitly and otherwise. The literary criticism of F.R. Leavis shows that too, eminently. Donald Francis Tovey, in writing about music, shows it comparably. (It takes nothing away from Tovey to suggest that music, of all arts, seems most to compel the critic to evaluate as he describes or analyzes.)

But what about the extra aesthetic contexts of art: social, political, economic, philosophical, biographical, etc., etc.? The historical moment? Don't they have to be brought in? And how can aesthetic value be kept enough in sight in such contexts? It doesn't have to be. For when such contexts are brought to the fore it's no longer criticism that's being practiced. It's something else, something that can be valuable, something that can be necessary. But it's not criticism. And let those who occupy themselves with such contexts not think they're doing criticism; or that they're rendering criticism proper unnecessary.

I want now to enter a plea for the discipline of aesthetics. It's become routine lately to refer disparagingly to aesthetics, and there may be some justification. When you see the aesthetical lucubrations of a philosopher like Nelson Goodman treated with respect by others in the field you want to throw up your hands and conclude that anything can be gotten away with here, just as in art criticism. But that's not the whole story. Certainly artists don't need to be acquainted with aesthetics. However, it might be of help to those who teach art--acquaintance, that is, with the right kind of aesthetics, the kind that shows you what it's possible to say relevantly about art or aesthetic experience and what it's not possible to say relevantly. Acquaintance with this kind of aesthetics would most certainly be of help to a critic. It might lead him to keep more firmly in mind that aesthetic value judgments can't be demonstrated in a way that would compel agreement; consequently, that in the last resort it's his reader's or listener's taste that he has to appeal to, not his reason or understanding. The critic might also be brought, with the help of aesthetics, to see more clearly what his own experience only too often doesn't bring him to see at all: namely, that content and form can never be adequately differentiated, since the term form is always somewhat indefinite in application, while the term content is of no definiteness at all. An awareness of this might head off a lot of vain controversy. (It might also keep someone like Joshua Taylor, in his recent The Fine Arts in America, from referring to the "intense concern for content, not method, that characterized" the "procedures" of the Abstract Expressionists. This is also what comes of taking artists at their word.)

Some critics would also do well to consult a dictionary oftener. They might look up the word gestural, for example, and discover what a solecism they commit when they talk of gestural painting. Is it conceivable for a painting to be made by means of gestures? Can a material object--or for that matter, a poem or a song--be created, fashioned, or altered by gestures?

It "signifies" that the appellation art critic has been narrowed down now to one who criticizes contemporary and recent art alone. When you deal with art further back in time you get to be called an art historian rather than an art critic. It was not always that way; it wasn't that way for Julius Meier-Graefe, or Roger Fry, or André Lhote, all three of whom wrote about past and present indiscriminately, and it was only ignorance that called any one of them art historian. Now it's also become assumed that an art historian proper is not to engage in criticism, not to express value judgments, but keep to scholarship and interpretation. As a consequence, painting and sculpture of the more than recent past get less and less evaluated or reevaluated, less and less criticized as art. There are exceptions, but that's just what they are: exceptions.

The case doesn't appear to be the same with music. There the productions of the past continue day in and day out to be evaluated and reevaluated along with those of the present, and to a great extent by the same people, whether musicologists or just plain music critics. Nor is the situation that much the same in literature either, despite all the truth there is in what E.D. Hirsch says. Literature of the past still does get discussed often enough in terms of aesthetic value. And while most literary scholars proper may not come near contemporary or very recent literature, literary critics still range between past and present with their value judgments, and do so as a matter of course, taking it for granted that without keeping an eye on the past it would be impossible to keep Taste sharp enough for the present. Of course there are exceptions here, but these are mainly reviewers, not literary critics proper, and not taken seriously--as, alas, their counterparts in the field of art are.

The difference for current art writing stems, I feel, from what's become the entrenched assumption that modern, modernist painting and sculpture have broken with the past more radically and abruptly than any other modernism has. The assumption is wrong, just as the notion of a radical break as defining modernism itself is wrong. This doesn't make the assumption any the less prevalent, as it has been for a long time. I remember Paolo Milano--an Italian man of letters and as cultivated a person as I've ever known--telling me back in the 1940s how surprised he was to gather from a review of mine in The Nation that I saw modernist art as not fundamentally or even phenomenally different in kind from art of the past; that was new to him. (His remark made me realize that originally I myself had made the same assumption to the contrary and had come to abandon it only unconsciously. In that Nation review I'd not at all made a point of indicating this change of view, I hadn't even known I was indicating it.) Anyhow a large consequence of this assumption of a radical, epochal break between the visual art of modernism and that of the past is, finally, the further assumption that the former has made value judgment, made Taste, irrelevant in dealing with painting and sculpture.

As I said in the beginning, even when it comes to current and recent art, criticism is ceasing to be criticism proper, ceasing to judge and assess. Look at the magazines devoted to contemporary visual art and see how more and more of the articles that fill them are scholarly or would-be scholarly, would-be high-brow in the academic way: explicative and descriptive, or historical, or interpretative, but hardly at all judicial, evaluative. Notice the proliferation of foot and tail notes, and how they attest to recondite reading, most of which has nothing to do with art as art. Meanwhile the value judging is pocketed off in the spot reviews (where even so, there's always a certain coyness enforced by the art magazines' large dependence on art dealers' advertising--for which, things being as they are, the magazines can't be censured). On the other hand there's now and then the laudatory or apologetic article about a given artist or artists which has to contain value judgments. Yet these are couched less and less in aesthetic terms. Aesthetic quality as such is no longer enough to warrant praise; other, extra aesthetic values have to be invoked: historical, political, social, ideological, moral of course, and what not. But what's new about that?

What's new is something else. That the value in itself, the autonomous value, of the aesthetic wasn't asserted so often in the past, at least in the Western past, doesn't mean that we're permitted to keep on doing the same. We've eaten of the Tree of Knowledge. The more ruthless examination and cross-examination of inner experience, the more searching introspection, that have gone with the advance (if it can be called that) of rationality have shown well enough that the aesthetic is an intrinsic, ultimate, and autonomous value.* Art for Art's Sake has helped, and so have 200-odd years of aesthetics, both of them giving much and taking away enough. There's no excuse now for not realizing that when the absolute value of the aesthetic is doubted, the reality itself of the aesthetic is doubted, the absoluteness being inseparable from the reality. Just as this reality is there and can't be thought away, so the status of that value is there and can't be thought away.

Bearing this in mind can make the doing of art criticism--of any kind of aesthetic criticism--difficult. It means writing about art as art before anything else. And it does seem easier to write and talk about art as something else. I know it's easier for me. But it doesn't catch my interest much when I read or hear that kind of writing or talk. Almost, if not quite, I can do without it.

[ZekeArgo]

Huge booping post

Damn, what is that an x4 crit from a Wall of Text? Forged from the Wordsmith's Hammer no less.

Anyway in response to the OP: Erfworld has a "different" sense of humor than most other comics. As stated by others it's very dry, not to mention extremely referential to pop and world culture.

If you aren't one to pick out those references, or appreciate that type of humor, then you aren't going to enjoy the comic. Simple as that.

[agentx42]

Forged from the Wordsmith's Hammer no less.

I loved that essay, even if it felt like I had to scale a 40-foot wall to get to the end. In all earnestness, that was a fantastic treatise on art criticism and I'm thankful for the post.

[Tokiko Mima]

I loved that essay, even if it felt like I had to scale a 40-foot wall to get to the end. In all earnestness, that was a fantastic treatise on art criticism and I'm thankful for the post.

I'm glad! I really was trying to answer the OP's question with my 4x Crit on the Wall of Text spell. Seriously, the answer is in there. Some people will want to read that and learn to get what Erfworld is about, and some people won't and I think that compares fairly well with enjoyment of Erfworld's humor. It's a matter of taste!

[Tarvok]

As for me, it isn't so much that I find Erfworld funny. In fact, it's not really all that funny. What we have here is a tale of opposing armies, the "protagonists" lead by an incompetant buffoon who happens to have bound to an artifact, advised by a non-nonsense "croakamancer," who have summoned a gamer to solve their dliemma.

I find the characters compelling. I am genuinely interested in what happens next. I don't particularly care much for one side or another (let's see, shall I root for the "evil" moron or the "good" pretty boy noble?). However, I am interested in the conflict nonetheless. There is simply something compelling, and I look forward to seeing just what changes the arrival of Mr. Parsons wreaks upon Erfworld.

[happyturtle]

I don't read Erfworld for the funny. I read it for the story. I love the story.

[sethdarkwater]

Is it funny- meh. Is the story all that great- its ok. Hows the art- Inconcivable! For me, I wasn't interseted untill parson showed up in the comic. Yes I get the inside jokes. Some of which only the oobernerdy can keep up with, but they are only ok. Good for an under my breath chuckle. After parson came on board the characters began to flesh themselves out, and I like that. ANd as I sais the artwork is so cool in all its outlandishness.

[Nightwing]

the answer is nothing. its not funny.

[kirbsys]

It seems like the comic's entire sense of humor stems from the fact that the writer is giving everything stupid names... can someone please enlighten me as to what's so funny about it?

All I can say is that there are people who woldn't find OOTS funny, there are people who'd think Monty Python was boring, and as you've proven, there are people that dont like Erfworld. There's different types of humor, and not everyone likes every type.

[Xiander]

I personally found a great amount of humour in the first frames of the newest comic, not because of people with funny names or because of an overelaborate verbal reference, but simply because the sheer absurdity absurdity of seeing a blonde man wearing a plate amour and a hat best suited for the upper class, sitting on a rolled up flying carpet, makes it funny in my opinion.

[Khantalas]

the answer is nothing. its not funny.

The answer is everything. It's hilarious.

See the futility of either of those answers?

Besides, it grows fingernails! Jamie said so himself!

[KillerCardinal]

All I can say is that there are people who woldn't find OOTS funny, there are people who'd think Monty Python was boring, and as you've proven, there are people that dont like Erfworld. There's different types of humor, and not everyone likes every type.

Very true. I love OOTS and Erfworld, but am one of the few geeks that I know of who really doesn't see the charm in Monty Python. It all comes down to personal preferences.

[Khantalas]

...but am one of the few geeks that I know of who really doesn't see the charm in Monty Python.

Heresy! It's not a gaming session until someone quotes Monty Python!

And how come I don't see you at the EGS thread?

[KillerCardinal]

Heresy! It's not a gaming session until someone quotes Monty Python!

Ahh, some of the quotes are good, I just don't like watching them.

And how come I don't see you at the EGS thread?

Ah, mainly because I hadn't seen it. I've mainly been reading the OotS and Erfworld thread. Just found the EGS thread though, so I'll be looking at that soon!

[Cobra_Ikari]

Erfworld is awesome. If you don't see why...I guess the comic is just lost on you. As Azzy says, explaining it would destroy it.

What is EGS?

[TinSoldier]

What is EGS?

I assume that it is "El Goonish Shive", a comic that I do not read.

[Cobra_Ikari]

Ah. Damnable acronymity! El Goonish Shive is pretty good, IMO.

[KillerCardinal]

EGS is El Goonish Shive. It is on my rotating list of 3 favorites. I go between Erfworld, OotS, and EGS as my favorites. It rotates because sometimes I like one more than the other, but those three are always on top!

[Alfryd]

There are also a lot of refrences that aren't as overt as orlies and Mr. Jenkins.

Yeah, I kinda had the same objection to futurama. Groening gave a little promo to the effect that people who loved sci-fi or hated sci-fi would love the show since it included all these references to stale sci-fi tropes. Of course, he kind of forgot a significant demographic there.
All the people who don't give a frack about sci-fi.
Plus, just referencing something hackneyed and lame doesn't make you ironic, it makes you hackneyed, lame, and vindictive. It's like whenever people mock Star Trek TSG/TOS, because mocking Star Trek is like kicking a crippled puppy. We know it has deep flaws. But we love it anyway.

Anyways.
I'm just wondering how large a demographic are both heavily invested in fantasy wargaming and... whatever the hell it is Erf references under my radar. I am moderately nerdish.

...a blonde man wearing a plate amour and a hat best suited for the upper class, sitting on a rolled up flying carpet...

That was a carpet? ...I'd assumed it was a log of some kind... Not that it makes a vast difference at this juncture.

Some people will want to read that and learn to get what Erfworld is about, and some people won't and I think that compares fairly well with enjoyment of Erfworld's humor.

I don't get it. I must be missing something.

Jami, is there no limit to how awesome you are?

I don't get it. I really must be missing something. Why... why would... why would fingernails be involved? I am confused.