Parenting & Family Quote by Will Eisner

Eisner is doing two things at once: defending humor as a time-stamped cultural artifact, and indicting it as a quiet instrument of social sorting. By rooting comedy in “the mores of the day,” he strips it of its comforting myth as harmless play. Jokes aren’t free-floating; they’re negotiated in public, approved by audiences, editors, and markets. That’s why his example lands: The Yellow Kid wasn’t merely a pioneering comic-strip character, it was a commercial machine fueled by ethnic caricature at a moment when Irish immigrants were being absorbed into (and disciplined by) American urban life.

The line “predicated on what people thought was funny about the immigrant Irish” is blunt on purpose. It refuses nostalgia for early comics as innocent proto-pop culture. Eisner implies that mass humor often works like a social majority’s mirror: it reassures the in-group that its norms are the default, and frames the out-group as a set of readable quirks. “When you’re different in a society, you’re funny” isn’t a celebration of eccentricity; it’s a diagnosis of how power defines punchlines. Difference becomes comedy when it’s safe to laugh at, when the person being laughed at can’t easily laugh back.

Coming from Eisner - a foundational figure in modern comics who watched the medium mature from newspaper gags to graphic novels - the comment also reads as a warning to creators. If you want to be contemporary, you can’t just update the references; you have to interrogate who gets rendered “different,” and who gets to turn that difference into profit.