Sorry for all the long heavy stuff -- I don't know if I'm particularly funny, but I try really hard all the time and I'm bad at turning it off.
I think a lot of the jokes people are suggesting are potentially funny, but because they're based on references, memes, puns, etc., I know how they're going to turn out as soon as I see them. If I'm a viewer and I know what joke I'm being told and I have to wait for it to end, I'm likely not laughing very much at it.
There's also humor where the fun is in relating to other people who are involved in the jokes -- The F-Plus is about this, Candid Camera is about this, "It's Always Sunny" is about this, but I'm not sure you can make catharsis happen in a five minute cartoon.
I think we need to figure out what we want to say about Dozerfleet, then how we can make it surprising to a viewer who already knows the stuff we know about Dozerfleet. Some themes I see a lot in what people are suggesting:
- the plot should be that Dozerfleet is really unlikeable, and his friends desert him
- we should reference something the F-Plus did
- we should reference something I like personally
- we should do something absurd, like have dinosaurs on unicycles or have everyone speak English really badly
I think you could turn each of these into something pretty good, but you have to not deliver it exactly as written. Evidence suggests those are the jokes everybody already expects, so when you start one everyone knows what's going to happen and it's probably only going to be mildly funny. I think we should throw in plot events that people won't expect, after those things happen. For instance:
- Dozerfleet is happy to be alone and have no friends, because he can write his own friends on his wiki. Only for some reason they hate him and he can't stop them from hating him.
Even after you do something like that, you can't really get complacent. It's probably not enough to just say "his wiki friends didn't like him, the end" -- you have to follow that up with something funny too, like "one of his wiki friends starts a rival wiki about how much Dozerfleet sucks." Even if you've already told a joke -- once you've told the viewer what he's going to see and you're giving him that, no twist, I think you've turned things into "wait for the joke to be done, mildly amused" instead of "this is hilarious, I had no idea this was going to happen." (This was a pain in the ass for my Liberal Crime Squad topic, because people kept requesting specific things and getting mad that they didn't see exactly those specific things.)
I think to make this stuff work we need to figure out what we're going to say about Dozerfleet Founder, and then take that unsurprising stuff and come up with plot points that convey it in a surprising way. When we present this guy, the audience won't know much about him, so if we present evidence that vaguely suggests he's not Dozerfleety in a particular dimension, then reveal it in an event the audience wasn't expecting, I think that will be a surprise.
Example (from doc, by me, sorry): imagine Dozerfleet Founder getting demoted to last chair in band. That's unsurprising: we kinda know his work ethic is bad. But then he finds out that the other guys who are last chair in band are now his friends, and they're into revenge and stuff too, and suddenly he likes them. I think that's actually a surprise: we would have expected him to shut himself off from those people because they're different from him, and he's sheltered and anxious. Characterization-wise, this conveys that he has a similar personality to people we think he doesn't like. We probably knew that, but weren't thinking about it, because the rest of the story set us up to think he was going to be miserable and alone. I think a surprise like that could be pretty funny.
Oh yeah, the other thing -- I think that a lot of this reference humor and stuff will look a little desperate, especially since spoofs and stuff are very style-over-substance when you don't write them into the plot. I think that if you do a few things that look desperate, everything else looks desperate too. If you do a lot of stuff that's not relevant to your main humor source, I think you just get people into a frame of mind of expecting things to go nowhere. Think of how much good humor you've seen that would legitimately be improved by adding a dinosaur. (don't give the snide memey "dinosaurs make everything better" kind of answer -- actually think about whether the joke is still funny)
Even look at really goofy comedians like Monty Python: substitute a velociraptor into "Self Defense Against Fresh Fruit" or "How Not To Be Seen." Those are both skits about hypocrisy/sanctimoniousness, where something absurd happens too. If you throw absurd things in that don't involve hypocrisy/sanctimoniousness, I think those skits are much more difficult to interpret.
Hopefully this helps dudes who have similar opinions on humor to me, and doesn't offend dudes who don't.