you talking about how rorschach veers into comedy reminds me how out of costume he asked for a copy of the new frontiersman from a newspaper vdndor and then turns around asking the guy not to forget which causes him to spit take.
Right, legitimately, this is a major element of what I was talking about regarding Rorschach's sense of humor- not just this specific interaction with Bernie, but Rorschach's entire secret identity.
In Issue 6, we learn that Rorschach is explicitly an atheist. He doesn't believe in signs or portents- he views things like reading into a two-headed-cat as purely a function of human meaning-making- and while he strongly suspects that the world is going to end, everyone paying attention also thinks that, and that it'll end for completely mundane reasons. (Refer to Detective Fine's aside in issue 5 that Russian tanks in Afghanistan are a much more concrete portent of war than anything astrological.) Before the world ends at human hands, Rorschach is resolute in his belief that nothing is hopeless while there's still life- living for tomorrow despite the threat of the world ending today- and he's pretending to be a guy who behaves as though he believes exactly that, but in a way that makes him come across as a hypocritical, thoughtless loon unaware of the contradictions in what he's saying, not worth taking seriously. He's LARPing as a guy who's got basically his exact opposite outlook and response to the state of the world. He thinks he's so fuckin' funny.
Viewed through this lens provided by issue 6, this "Today for sure. Keep my paper for tomorrow?" exchange is recontextualized as some combination of him being dryly ironic for his own amusement, him LARPing as the kind of whack-job who would sincerely say something like that with no self-awareness, and having a laugh at Bernie's expense for falling for it. And the jumpscare at the end can support any of those readings. He interacts with Bernie constantly, he knows Bernie won't forget, he knows how big a part of Bernie's self-image is his own reliability as a newsseller- so it's ambiguous why he's doing this thing that he's clearly using his cultivated Rorschach stealth skills to pull off. He could be trying to shore up his impression as a weirdo neurotic. He could get a kick out messing with Bernie- he clearly gets a kick out of terrorizing Moloch with the fridge ambush and the subsequent fakeout, his fondest memory is of ambushing the Underboss. His mind goes to these places. And he could also just seriously be this obsessed with securing his copy of the New Frontiersman- he holds the paper in terminally high regard, so maybe this is an element of his real self shining through! You are, on some level, what you pretend to be.
One of Watchmen's recurring themes is that superheroes are on multiple levels a joke. Comedian identifies their efforts as a joke in the face of the real horrors of geopolitics, and Nite Owl identifies their efforts as a joke in the sense of being comical overkill in the context of the street crime that they're ostensibly good at addressing. Laurie thinks that the melodrama shaping the course of her career makes her a joke, and Ozymandias's big plan for saving the world involves the largest practical joke in human history. But on another level, there's an element of humor intrinsic to the concept of the secret identity- a practical joke played on the world at large, pretending to be someone wildly different from yourself so that nobody suspects what you're really capable of. Nobody thinks that Klutzy Clark Kent is Superman, nobody thinks dizty Bruce Wayne could be Batman, and nobody thinks nebbish Peter Parker could be Spider-Man. Rorschach is, notably, the only one of the second wave of heroes who successfully embraces that element of contradiction in disguising his identity. The rest don't have one to begin with, or had a fortune with which to protect theirs, or had government backing with which to protect theirs, and Dan just gets flat out made by the cops the exact second he sticks his head up in costume. Rorschach's joke is working, and it works because it's a joke- nobody, including the audience, picks up on who he is until the entire thing is taken apart from the other end when he's captured in costume.
On every level, Rorschach is the book's idea of the uncompromised vision of the figure of a superhero, and you can't be a superhero if you don't have a sense of humor with which to crack one-liners. You can't be a superhero unless you spend a substantial amount of your time and talent playing head games with your loved ones and with the press.
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