CSotD: It takes brains to be this dumb
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Brewster Rockit generally specializes in really, really dumb jokes — the kind I really like. But once in a while, Tim Rickard provides one of these Rockit Science specials.
I admire someone with the courage to do a couple of weeks of strips about a planet of talking donuts and then suddenly throw in a Sunday with facts and figures and geeky kind of real information. It takes some guts to bust format like that, but it also is a kind of lesson in something besides astronomy: That the best dumb jokes come from people who know what they're talking about.
"Beyond the Fringe" and "Monty Python" had Oxford and Cambridge origins, while the Lampoon crowd began at the Harvard Lampoon. Which is not to say that street smarts can't come into it, but there's a difference between the Borscht Belt comedians and this crew, and it's like beer and wine: One isn't "better" than the other, though most people have a preference, and you'd have to be pretty thick to not see the difference.
Though, to hammer on the metaphor, some people simply don't like dry wine or dry humor.
As my mother would say, "More for the rest of us!"
In the above example, you could simply enjoy the ridiculous premise without knowing the actual people or their writing, but there was more there for those who got it.
Wikipedia gives a rundown of where some of these silly people got their start:
Jones and Palin met at Oxford University, where they performed together with the Oxford Revue. Chapman and Cleese met at Cambridge University. Idle was also at Cambridge, but started a year after Chapman and Cleese. Cleese met Gilliam in New York City while on tour with the Cambridge University Footlights revue Cambridge Circus (originally entitled A Clump of Plinths). Chapman, Cleese, and Idle were members of the Footlights, which at that time also included the future Goodies (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie, and Graeme Garden), and Jonathan Lynn (co-writer of Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister). During Idle's presidency of the club, feminist writer Germaine Greer and broadcaster Clive James were members.
That's as good a lineup as either of those soccer teams football clubs.
I have no idea what Rickard's background is, but today's strip shows that he knows some astronomy and strongly suggests that he'd make a good teacher if he hasn't already been one.
The distances of outer space are incomprehensible. That is, you can say it takes so many years for the light from a particular star to reach Earth but, since we don't have a real understanding of how fast light moves, it really means very little. And if you swap for a comprehensible speed, the gazillions you wind up with are equally beyond our ken.
Inner space is a little more graspable, though people who have laid out a solar system model in proper scale realize that, unless you are on the vast flatness of West Texas, it's hard to put a manageable Sun in a place where the spot where the pea that represents Pluto is visible.
But the driving distances Rickard lays out are within our experience and grasp. And when I say "our," this is a good example of how something that is, on the surface, geared to youngsters, can give adults an insight into something they had never quite recognized.
I'm sure tomorrow we'll be back to stupid puns and ridiculous jokes on the R.U. Sirius.
However, I now know how long it takes to drive to the ISS and, after a week of coverage of an iceberg the size of Delaware, it's good to get an insight into how small, rather than how humongous, our world really is.
An hour to the edge? Is that all?
Perhaps we should stop thinking we can throw crap into the atmosphere forever without messing it up.
Also on the learning curve
Today's Between Friends is such a lovely double-edged dagger that I'm almost tempted not to comment at all and just let you soak in the parallels and comparisons.
I've been using the expression "I might as well be talking to the dog" for some time, but Sandra Bell Lundy brings it delightfully to life here, and, yes, I've certainly been the dog, too. It's a bit of serendipity that Kim has both the dog and the college age son and is the intellectual of the trio of women, because the gag couldn't work otherwise.
It's a nice updating and personalizing of the old expression about old dogs and new tricks, but the fact that the frustrated teacher becomes the frustrated student takes it to a far more significant level, as does her choice to limit it to two panels, rather than muddy it by trying to work it into a multi-panel plotline where this happens and then that happens.
Meanwhile, you will learn nothing from today's Loose Parts except perhaps to slow down as you scan through your comics, because this one took me a minute — read the caption, see the sign on the wall, look again at the guys around the table.
Which is to say that, even though it's a really, really dumb joke, you have to be at least attentive, if not actually smart, to get it.
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