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Time for another meeting of Jane’s Book Club! I am heartily recommending “Scott Bateman’s Sketchbook of Secrets and Shame.” It’s a collection of the most strange and wonderful little cartoons. If you don’t know the name Scott Bateman, I think you’ll recognize his cartoons when you see them: tiny little boxes containing static human figures, generally looking grave or worried and saying the most hilarious things. Sometimes they’re looking off to the side, as if to assure themselves that no one is listening in. The impression you get is that these statements are deeply confessional on the part of the character. Sometimes it’s a deep confession about shallowness, like this one: “I’m building a time machine just so I can go forward ten years and see VH-1’s ‘I Love the ’00s’.”

Some of the jokes are very traditional in structure, like: “You know your neighborhood’s getting too gentrified when you run out of a place to dispose of a dead body.” But most are very strange, like the haunted-eyed one that simply reads, “I suffer from moral fibrosis.”

It can seem like a challenge, especially in a spec pilot, to write jokes based on character, when the characters are brand new. You don’t have established traits to poke fun of. But these cartoons manage to be character-based jokes, and there isn’t even an actor fleshing out the role — just a sketch with an uncomfortable look on its face. There’s something about a quick reveal of an obsession or a fear or a transgression that creates an instant connection. I’m going to be thinking about these cartoons as I play with some dialogue over the weekend.

Lunch: A nice post table-read buffet from Chin Chin. (Is that a national chain?) There were noodles.