Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, October 19, 1995                   TAG: 9510190012
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JOEL ACHENBACH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

AS ALWAYS, GAGS ARE ALL IN THE TIMING

A: Strangely enough, the most common gimmicks in cartoons are things that are exceedingly uncommon in real life. For example, how often does the average human being, in his or her lifetime, actually get stranded on a tiny desert island with a single palm tree? No more than about twice, right?

Gag writers who come up with a joke about someone crawling across the desert know that they can mail the joke to a cartoonist with the simple heading ``desert crawler'' and that the cartoonist will understand the premise. Other perennials include the hunter boiled by cannibals, Noah's ark, cavemen inventing the wheel, and perhaps most popular of all, Heaven and Hell.

These situations have, at first glance, little to do with everyday life. But what makes them popular among cartoonists is that they are perfect for making jokes about real life. A cartoon with cavemen is invariably about modern human beings. A cartoon with a desert island is about the universal experience of loneliness. The desert crawler speaks to human longing.

We spoke to Harald Bakken, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and a longtime cartoon gag writer, and he said, ``What those things do, the desert island, the guy marooned in the desert, is that they touch on very universal human emotions.''

Bakken says, ``The heaven gags tend to be about guilt. Fear that I won't get in, won't get accepted. Or desires. Like a woman who arrives in heaven and there are all these elaborate desserts that say zero calories, zero cholesterol. She says `Now I know I must be in heaven.'''

The gimmicks help set up a joke by juxtaposing an exotic setting with a mundane sentiment. That's sort of what humor is, a sudden and surprising clash of contexts. A caveman writing a polynomial equation on a cave wall is the start of a joke simply because the setting and the action are in conflict.

The other reason the same gimmicks crop up is that they are immediately recognizable. A cartoonist can't afford to make the reader pause a long time to figure out the premise of the joke. Hell is immediately recognizable. And everyone knows about Adam and Eve and the snake and the apple. (Though we always forget what, exactly, the apple represents. The theory of gravitation?)

In real life, Freudian psychoanalysis is in decline, in part because it's so expensive to lie on a couch every day talking to a shrink, but in the cartoons you still see people doing it. If it's a chicken on the couch, says Bakken, the psychiatrist will say, ``How long have you had this compulsion to cross the road?''

You could also imagine a cartoonist on the couch. The psychiatrist might ask, ``How long have you had this compulsion to do cartoons about psychiatric patients lying on a couch?''

Q: Why don't skyscrapers ever fall down?

A: We had assumed it was because they were firmly plugged into the earth, like candles on a birthday cake.

Never, never, never assume anything.

Skyscrapers, in fact, can sit right on the surface of the ground without falling over. As a general rule they're not wedged into the ground, at least not in any manner that keeps them from falling over. They're literally just resting on the planet without anything holding them up.

The main reasons they don't fall over is because they have a big base, and are so darn heavy.

We spoke to Hugh Lacy, a civil engineer with Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers of New York City, which specializes in building foundations, and he said that skyscrapers usually sit on bedrock. Where the bedrock is deep beneath the surface, steel piles, like stilts, are sunk into the earth to reach the bedrock. The weight is distributed beneath the steel columns with reinforced concrete footings.

But some new buildings, Lacy said, don't sit on the bedrock, and instead have a ``mat'' foundation that spreads the weight over a wide area of firmly packed earth.

Now you can easily imagine that something a thousand feet tall would just fall over in a heavy wind or during an earthquake. This is something engineers have to guard against. But it's not as big a problem as you'd think. You need to imagine what actually happens when something tips over.

Let's say you had a really strong wind blowing from the south. Two bad things can theoretically happen. First, the northern side of the building could be compressed and crushed, and the building would fall. But these buildings are made with incredibly strong steel columns - they just don't compress like that. So the first worry can be discarded.

The second possibility is that the south side of the building would be lifted into the air, and the building would topple over intact. But how could a giant steel-and-concrete building lift up on one side?

Lacy said we can imagine that the weight of the building normally rests on the ground in the shape of a square. The weight is spread all over the square: thousands of pounds of pressure everywhere. When the wind blows from the south the weight shifts a bit toward the north. But for the south side of the building to lift in the air, the weight on that side would have to drop from millions of pounds to less than zero. An entire side of the building would have to become weightless.

Not even a biblical wind is that strong.

So there's nothing to worry about. Tall buildings are safe. Though, in a hurricane, we plan to avoid the ones with the ``mat'' foundations.

- Washington Post Writers Group