Cartoon physics

7 p. 12, 1994 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in its journal helped spread the word among the technical crowd, which has expanded and refined the idea.

[3] O'Donnell's examples include: The idea that cartoons behave differently from the real world, but not randomly, is virtually as old as animation.

More recently, it has been explicitly described by some cartoon characters, including Roger Rabbit, Bonkers D. Bobcat, and Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, who say that toons are allowed to bend or break natural laws for the purposes of comedy.

Doing this is extremely tricky, so toons have a natural sense of comedic timing, giving them inherently funny properties.

In 1993, Stephen R. Gould, then a financial training consultant, wrote in New Scientist, said that "... these seemingly nonsensical phenomena can be described by logical laws similar to those in our world.

In 2012 O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion were used as the basis for a presentation[6] and exhibition by Andy Holden at Kingston University in Great Britain.

This was later made into a film with the artist as an animated cartoon character and shown at Glasgow International Festival in 2016,[8] Tate Britain[9] in 2017, and Future Generation Art Prize[10] at Venice Biennale in 2017.

Live-action shows and movies can also be subject to the laws of cartoon physics, explaining why, for example, The Three Stooges did not go blind from all the eye-poking, and the burglars in the Home Alone series survive life-threatening booby traps.

For those not familiar with the Road Runner cartoons, Mr. Coyote had a habit of running off cliffs and taking several steps on thin air before noticing that there was nothing underneath his feet.