''Triple Take'' is an American

comic strip A comic strip is a sequence of drawings, often cartoons, arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions. Traditionally, throughout the 20th and into the 21st ...

by Todd Clark and Scott Nickel that featured three separate punch lines in each daily installment. The strip was syndicated by

King Features Syndicate King Features Syndicate, Inc. is a American content distribution and animation studio, consumer product licensing and print syndication company owned by Hearst Communications that distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editoria ...

and ran from April 4, 2005, to August 26, 2007. Clark provided the majority of the writing with Nickel drawing the strip and contributing gags.

Triple punchlines

At its peak, ''Triple Take'' was syndicated to 40 newspapers. When it ended, the strip was appearing in 29 papers. The idea for ''Triple Take'' came from the late

Jay Kennedy Jay Malcolm Kennedy (April 18, 1956 – March 15, 2007) was an American editor and writer. The author of ''The Official Underground and Newave Comix Price Guide'', he was a long-time editor at King Features Syndicate, eventually rising to the posi ...

, comics editor at King Features, who developed the strip with Nickel and Clark. In 2005 press release, Kennedy commented, "What separates ''Triple Take'' from other comic features is that it delivers three different

punchline A punch line (a. k. a. punch-line or punchline) concludes a joke; it is intended to make people laugh. It is the third and final part of the typical joke structure. It follows the introductory framing of the joke and the narrative which sets up ...

s in one strip. Ask any cartoonist who has labored all day on one punch line and they will tell you how difficult it is to create three ideas for one gag. It takes true talent. This is a business where your talent will get you far. You don’t need to 'know someone' or have 'a connection'. If you have the talent, you’re made. These men (Clark and Nickel) have the talent.""King Features Introduces Triple Take". April 4, 2005
Kennedy died in a drowning accident in March 2007 at the age of 50. In the same press release, Nickel noted, "We get three chances to make the reader laugh. If we’re successful at least two out of three times, we have a better batting average than most major-league baseball players. And we do it without steroids! Everything is fair game. Pop culture, history, everyday life… we pull inspiration from everywhere. And with no regular cast of characters, the range of subjects can span anywhere from aliens to pirates or even alien pirates!"

References

External links

American comic strips Gag-a-day comics 2005 comics debuts 2007 comics endings {{comic-strip-stub