Yeah, that does improve it. He mentions a few times in the The Prehistory of The Far Side that he sometimes dithered on what was too much to kill the joke vs not enough to let people get the joke, and here he should’ve scaled it back. Sometimes it was his editors too.

EDIT: Example:

Transcript:

In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t included the title to this vampire cartoon. It’s obviously redundant and only distracted from the humor.