Being able to keep going for a long time is one thing, but it is what you spend that time doing that counts.
On this page I file some problems with entertaining that are not necessarily specific to parodying. I am (or, more specifically, my old characters are) guilty of many of them.
Puppeteering is what you get if you are controlling your characters too much, or vice versa, as was the case with me, even though they claimed I was controlling them. Whatever the case, characters should have minds of their own, so that whatever explains what they are doing does not require breaking the fourth wall.
Examples of puppeteering include:
Oh, thanks for waking us up, cartoonist.Excuse me? Everyone can wake up on their own!
thanks for waking us up, cartoonist.(This is one of the reasons
Terror or Tragicexplains that I am unconcerned because
no such captain is a risk we have in reality.)
To pander is to get too focused on a particular individual or group and make your work suit them at the expense of everyone else. The Comic Five were notorious for pandering to the exact individuals who made up my audience, insisting that only songs all my readers had already known for years could be parodied. Even worse, they would cover anything all of us knew, no matter how poorly it suited them, and even if literally nobody but us knew what it meant.
A rip-off artist tries to create when they have no ideas and consequently come out being derivative. It is a difficult matter to address politely, but it is certainly a concern for me, especially due to my experience with characters who had no imagination whatsoever and therefore needed me to come up with all their ideas for them. Particularly irritating to me was that the Five had no respect for the material they were using, or indeed, anything else. They just borrowed from things my readers knew because that way, they did not have to be capable of original thought to get attention. Hence all the ways known PotC canon was contradicted.
A stickler stubbornly refuses to give up what they are doing. They may insist on exploring everything there is to something, or returning to the same well long after others have abandoned it. As long as sticklers are not forcing their own continuation, their dedication is admirable. Sometimes, however, sticklers take things too far. A stickler who stops putting out entertainment and starts putting out demands to be given more material has gone too far. So has one who is unwilling to cease something that has become very repetitive and therefore has clearly gone on too long.
A burned out entertainer is someone who is no longer in the right mood to keep up the job to amuse. The Five probably fit this description, judging by how repetitive they got, as well as by their horribly dispassionate methods. An even better example, however, came late in the original run of the comic strip Bloom County. At that point, it went through a phase where strips about people doing experiments that required making animals suffer became a prominent theme, with little if any funny content to speak of.
I studied the second to last of the original Bloom County books, The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos, to learn about what happened when the cartoonist for that strip burned out. My friend remembered it being a point where none of the strips were funny - where, in fact, they got to be of a disturbed nature. Though the book is ancient (the strips in it were from 1988), I can speak to anyone who can access a copy that one can learn from it as I did. But I have to note that because that was what my friend made it sound like, I opened the book thinking the whole thing was going to be like that - and have to warn you not to do the same.
It starts out more or less fine, and stays that way for quite a while. At first the strip is just making fun of politics and other controversial things, as usual. While there were some weak points and dated strips that have not aged well, that part was not too bad, and even made me laugh a few times. Eventually I started to wonder if I even had the right book.
On page 54, however, the cartoonist lost it. He decided he needed to say something about animal rights, and got all heavy handed about saying it. It was as if he forgot that his job was to write jokes, quite frankly. (I took a paper clip and closed pages 54-7 off. I also, with the help of paper, scissors, and more clips, erased pages 67, 71, and the bottom of page 72.)
I would say the moral of the story, for entertaining, is to think about whether that is really what you are doing. As for the readers, however, check back sometimes, and possibly get rid of things. Turned out the negative had overwhelming presence in the memory of my friends, and the book was something to salvage, as it turned out the unpleasant strips only made up a small percentage of the volume.
A content misplacing entertainer is one who uses the wrong vehicle for what they are delivering. The disturbing Bloom County strips described in the above paragraph are a good example of this - the cartoonist there did have something to say, but if you ask me, he really should have relayed his anti animal testing messagings through some means where you would you what you were getting. If people want to read things like that, they will check out news and other nonfiction media. If they are reading a comic strip, chances are they are trying to get away from that sort of thing.
As for my own example, the Five, they used their strip for everything, including many things they should not have. This included things like telling jokes about video games that were much less appropriate than the LEGO game they were supposed to be about, talking (or, rather, complaining) about the difficulty I was having as a cartoonist, and informing my readers of things they could or needed to do (which had no need to be written down in a permanent fashion, by the way).
The parodies were similarly indiscriminate about what they contained. Old War
is a good example of them going completely off topic - and I call that one of their better parodies. You can see why almost all their work remains unreleased.
Guideline deficiency is having unstructured work, with what could be considered an incomplete set of rules, and therefore not having a clear sense of direction. This is, of course, what every entertainer starts out with, because you are in an experimental phase. Guideline deficiency is only a problem if it continues for months or years after you start, past the point by which you should know what works and what does not by now.
Limitations, if done right, can be very useful for sparking creativity. Otherwise, you end up like the Five, who had an unwritten but evidently very long list of things they had to avoid (probably none of which they had ever even tried) but no rules about what they could do, which was why they kept thinking of the same thing over and over. Rule 12, Keep parodies relevant to Pirates of the Caribbean,
is a good example of a rule that helps narrow down options.