One thing that I noticed while reading Persepolis was that owing to the work's visual content, the work was generally funnier than standard texts; I think this is because though humor is conceptive, it is also physical, it is also visual. This is the same principle that makes one laugh at a video reel of John Cleese doing funny walks but one barely snorts at a description of his outrageous postures. Had Satrapi placed the same tale in any other medium without visual context, I doubt the fragile humor would be well sustained. Perhaps this also speaks to the ability of the graphic novel format to "carnivalize" normal representations and make them more palatable to our senses. A good example of this is the graphic adaptation of Shakespeare's controversial Merchant of Venice by Gareth Hines, who carefully places the characters in deliberate postures to convey a certain degree of levity previously unnoticed. Take for example the following image:
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