CSotD: Incendiary humor and beautiful days
Skip to comments
Today's Pros and Cons brings up something I was thinking the other day, when I stumbled across a hearing on CSPAN by the Full House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
Which I always get confused with the Different Strokes Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, but I digress.
Anyway, the hearing made me think about how much patience it takes to be a polite, docile piñata at one of these show trials in which elected officials barrage you with transparently partisan speechlets only vaguely disguised as "questions."
About the time the poor schmuck in the hotseat was asked "Do you believe that you should step down as the Acting EPA Deputy Administrator, given that the law says your actions have no force or effect?" I was wondering if he could decline to answer based on the First Amendment, since he was being asked to explain and justify his beliefs.
Having long since given up hope that he'd suddenly leap across the table and just start slapping the shit out of everybody.
And having long since given the devil her due in regard to maintaining her cool under such incessant provocation.
Any American who accuses other countries of staging show trials needs to watch a little CSPAN.
For my part, I mentioned testifying in front of the Federal Trade Commission the other day, and let me tell you that a little of that goes a long way.
For a time, it looked as though they might fly me into DC, but, instead, they took the show on the road for a series of regional hearings, and, by the time they got to Denver, poor old Encyclopedia Brittannica was being revived with ammonia poppers, dowsed with water and then shoved back into the middle of the ring for more pounding.
You should not think that this meant my hour and a half or so on the stand was easy.
Quite the opposite, since, however they may have defended their client early on in the process, EB's attorneys had long since abandoned "If the law is with us, attack the evidence" and were by now firmly committed to "If the law is against us, attack the witness."
Not simply a matter of undermining the witness's credibility, that is, but a strategy of seeing if you can make him suddenly leap over the table and just start slapping the shit out of everybody.
Which apparently goes to credibility, and not in the way that you or I or the people who write scripts for Jack Nicholson would think.
Anyway, I was in no danger of being incriminated, but I sure as hell felt like I was being incinerated, and why anybody would put themselves through this on a regular basis is utterly beyond me.
A more pleasant memory
I'm often critical of cartoonists who ping memories that won't resonate with younger, or even middle-aged, readers, and today's Bizarro is not even for the younger end of the boomer demographic.
Then again, if you're going to reach into the Big Bag O' Distant Nostalgia, get it right, and Piraro gets it right.
That counts with me.
Here's how far back Hoppy goes: My older brother was a fan, but he lost the battle when my sister and I insisted on watching a new show called "the Mickey Mouse Club," which was opposite Hopalong Cassidy.
The Mickey Mouse Club went on the air 61 years ago, by which time Hopalong Cassidy was in reruns anyway.
My brother's bona fides at the time were true blue, or,
that is, black-and-white.
My sister dressed the part, but had not yet seen the Karen-and-Cubby option.
I didn't declare my position on such things until a few years later.
Speaking of getting it right
What makes Dog Eat Doug stand out from other strips featuring a dog is the small, real moments that Brian Anderson captures.
Sure, dogs drink out of toilets, and, when that joke was new, we could all get a laugh out of it: "Yeah, my dog does that, too!"
But it's not new anymore, and so dogs drinking out of toilets have joined dogs peeing on fire hydrants on the long list of the jokes we tell about dogs because those are the jokes we tell about dogs.
There's a whole category of pre-digested canine humor where the chuckle is one of familiarity, not surprise. It's like when you run into someone and they remark "Beautiful day," and you agree because, yeah, it is a beautiful day, but, still, that was only a polite exchange and not an actual conversation.
There are cartoonists whose entire careers are built on delivering polite, familiar images, gags of the "beautiful day" school in which we nod and agree and smile over gags that were once funny and inventive.
But it's been more than 30 years since Gary Larson's cows bemoaned their lack of opposable thumbs and, please for gods sake please believe me, there is absolutely nothing intrinsically funny about the term "opposable thumbs" anymore, and nothing remotely original in gags which cite it.
On the other hand, I have had a post office box for nearly a decade and, since my dog is only five, he has no experience of the letter carrier ever coming to our door.
And yet he adores the man, and not only goes bananas if we meet him anywhere on the block, but responds to postal carrier vans as if they were Good Humor trucks.
Like Sophie, he knows that delivery people carry doggy cookies, and so, like Sophie, he turns the cliche of the dog attacking the intruder on its head.
And turning expectations upside down is a chief element in humor.
So, message to cartoonists: If you're still doing "I hate the mailman" dog jokes, well …
Well …
Well, it's a beautiful day.
Yep, sure is.
So, vy not a duck?
BC not only gets a laugh for a very-stupid-but-very-funny duck-based gag today, but coincidentally fortuitiously accidentally drops it a few hours after Andrew Farago popped this very-even-stupider-even-funnier duck-based video onto his Facebook feed.
Timing is everything. The rest is dumb luck.
Comments 3
Comments are closed.