Unfunny Things
A collection of pretentious things from the web and elsewhere that are much less funny than they think they are.
Oct 1st, 2009 @ 12:27 pm
KC Green
Oh, KC Green. I should prefix this one with an admission that I’m not sure whether KC cynically cultivates his image, subconsciously panders to the hipster masses, or just happens to have been the right man at the right time. But he’s emblematic of the self-congratulatory ironic hipster humour disease that pervades the indie webcomic world, and he pisses me off.
It seems like I’m alone in this battle, sometimes. KC is admired by the ruthless personality assassins over at ED:
Has befriended or been otherwise pursued by all manner of indie webcomic royalty,
and is constantly sucked up to by his 2000+ Twitter followers.
His comics and drawings are passed around Something Awful’s PHIZ forum, where his blend of detached, geeky, self-deprecating absurdist comedy with a grotesque art style hits all the right buttons and gets a ton of praise.
Unfortunately, his comics aren’t actually very funny. Some are textbook examples of a promising buildup leading to a bland punchline:
Others survive solely on the fact he can draw funny faces, barely covering up piss-poor writing that’s derivative of damn near every other comic he’s ever drawn.
These kinds of comics are very marketable amongst the hipster elite. They’re offensive enough to be “clever and off beat”, but never incisive or original enough to really divide people. They’re somewhat inaccessible to the unwashed masses because of the non-sequitur humour, yet they’re protected from accusations of poor writing because “they’re just dumb and funny”. Horribleville in particular capitalised on the sure-fire winning combination of emotional warmth and sympathy with bland humour, leading everyone to declare it some kind of incredible introspection into the state of being a confused, uninspired artist with low self esteem. It’s no accident that this was the most popular of all his works. Not only can you, aspiring webcomic artist, identify with KC’s troubles, but you can prove to the world how clever you are because you can find a toilet joke funny at the end of your maudlin reflection!
It is indeed a difficult undertaking to nail off-beat, irreverent jokes one after the other. It is silly to dispute that. But to do a consistently mediocre job of it, churning out shit comics day after day while gleefully catering to an expanding fanbase all the while is not the way to go about it. No amount of modesty and occasionally genuine self-deprecation can forgive the fact that he churns out the same awful crap day after day and has seemingly no interest in evolving beyond it.
Postscript:
I have something of a stake in this battle. I am friends with people who are friends with KC. I have spoken to him briefly on Twitter and email. It’s my rough assessment that he genuinely lacks self confidence and has some personal issues, but he’s also the shit type of person that relishes compliments and quietly avoids the limited criticism he receives.
He’s not the only person in his clique that does this, and I can see why. It’s a smart strategy to build a following. This is where I have to repeat that I’m not sure if it’s cynicism, a subconscious desire, or whether he just so happens to have been born with personality traits that lead him to polarity in the current climate. No matter how you explain his success, though, he’s dishonest - just as resistant to critique as the eternally prideful Hapajap, and just as pleased by his fan base as Buckley.
Either way, I think it’s reasonable to deduce that KC’s humble persona is a pretension, and as most of his appeal derives from this, he’s a repugnant artist with a disingenuous body of work. Fuck him and the type of person he cultivates.
