What is Flush Twice?
Flush Twice has been around since May of 2003. It started out as a JOTD (Joke of the Day) website. New jokes were published every weekday. Over the years, good jokes were increasingly hard to come by, and eventually they got so rare that I just stopped trying to publish them.
Since 2004 there has also been an eponymous comic. I still occasionally publish a new one on Saturdays. It’s also rare anymore, but sometimes it happens.
Here lately I’ve been posting a “Link of the Day”. For the time being, I will be featuring a new website from my enormous collection of bookmarked websites every weekday. None of it is solicited promotions, and no one is paying me to feature their site. These are just websites that at one time I thought were interesting enough to add to my bookmarks folder.
I highly encourage using some kind of ad blocking extension before clicking on any of these links. You’ll also hear me say this phrase a lot about these posts: “They can’t all be winners.” But it’s better than just leaving the site abandoned.
The jokes were generously provided by friends and visitors such as yourself. I want to express my eternal thanks to everyone over the years who helped contribute to the collection.
So what is it that makes a joke funny?
It all boils down to a sudden shift in perception. The story starts you thinking one way, then the punchline turns that thinking on its ear. The art of the joke is to craft a short story that isn’t overly contrived, then deliver a punchline that suddenly shifts your perception about the story you were being told.
Many of the jokes on this site are offensive, and I make no apologies for it. Offensive jokes work by making the reader uncomfortable through the use of a taboo subject thus enhancing the underlying humor. Without the offensive element, the joke would simply not be as funny.
(Just thought you might like to know.)
Just wondering how much of these comics were boilerplate characters/poses, requiring little more than speech bubbles.
It doesn’t matter how trivial the effort was (thinking “stare dad” comix). What matters is that it’s FUNNY.
Let’s be real. Speech bubbles are practically an art in and of themselves. The script needs constant tweaking to fit into the allocated space, the balloons and tails have to fit around the scene without covering the important stuff, and you have to make sure there is no ambiguity with the order in which they are read. This is actually trickier than it looks!
Sometimes, like yesterday’s strip, I’ll copy-paste a character like Brandon in the first and third panel, and Dewey in the last two panels. That is definitely a boilerplate move, but it was a script that did not require a lot of expression past “relaxed” and “deadpan”.
Technically, it has all been boilerplate since around 2005. I was originally drawing stick figure comics, but when the characters “evolved” I started making and using templates (from scratch) that contained various torsos, arms, legs, heads, faces, and hair. This practice became even more pronounced back in 2011 when the characters started using actual hands and feet.
Like a paper doll, each character needs to be “assembled” before use. It is a fairly straight forward process, though surprisingly time consuming. Certain things can require blending or non-trivial modifications to achieve the right appearance, and I also do a lot of behind-the-scenes template editing too, but this is a system geared to achieve a clean standardized look.
And I’m very much aware that my method has some excruciatingly obvious limitations, but hey, this is a hobby, and I’m trying to have fun with it.
Pax,
-f2x