CSotD: You just don’t get it, do you?
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Kieran Meehan specializes in the clueless and "Pros & Cons" is one of the strips I most look forward to every morning.
Stupid is funny when it's fictional. But, of course, the humor comes from hitting just the right level of exaggeration, the point where you laugh at the absurdity of the situation depicted because you have been in actual situations that weren't all that far from it.
Too close, too painful. Too far, too silly.
Today's stupid suspect gag is funny, largely because of his cheerful excitement over being placed in a line-up. But it reminds me of a situation I ran into that was funny if you didn't know the suspect, not funny if you did.
I did, and, even so, it was a real head-shaker.
It was a case of two young men around 16 or 17 who were facing burglary charges based on stealing a relatively expensive bicycle from an apartment. One of them was kind of a thug, but the other was a nice kid whose grandmother had been raising him but had sent him out to the country to see if his uncle could do any better.
He played on the high school football team and seemed to stay eligible, so I have to think he was pulling C's and he was basically a cheerful kid who always said "hi" when you ran into him, if not a whole lot more.
It was a pretty low-level crime, so we just ran a brief, but I knew the kid well enough to care about him, so I went out to the run-down motel where the thug lived and talked to the two of them.
And the kid told me he was innocent, that he hadn't stolen the bike. He just held the apartment door open while the thug wheeled it out.
He got six months in the county lock-up. Some time later, I was talking to a couple of deputies and asked how he was doing, and they started laughing, because as they were processing him in, he had asked when the bus came in the morning to take him to school.
That, admittedly, was pretty funny, but there's another level of not getting it that isn't funny at all.
A number of years ago, I interviewed a suspected murderer, a story most significant for my getting a subpoena for my notes, but more memorable to me because of what he said that convinced me he'd done it.
As I noted in that latter link,
The real tipoff came when he was recounting for me his various stays in
the joint, and he said he got out of prison one time and then had his
parole revoked on a domestic assault complaint because he found out his
girlfriend had been unfaithful while he was locked up. The "tell" was
that he recounted this along with the other seemingly minor scrapes of
his life, as if it were perfectly understandable and only technically a
violation — like saying he'd been locked up for unpaid parking tickets.
It wasn't the fact that he beat up his girlfriend. It was that he didn't
seem to consider that to be something he should conceal in telling his
life story to a reporter. He was a likeable, articulate fellow, but
there just happened to be this line between normal behavior and
sociopathic behavior that he honestly could not see.
That, to me, is a lot scarier than some gibbering, slavering, chain-saw wielding maniac in a hockey mask.
Most of the people in our jails aren't there for murder. And they aren't all dumb enough to think the school bus is going to come get them every morning.
But they just don't get it.
And, really, it's a matter of stepping over the line, because a substantial part of our nation's economy is based on people having irresistable urges that stem from unrealistic expectations.
We count on people expecting that cosmetic surgery, a nicer car or the right aftershave is going to bring them love and fulfillment, and we actively feed the ever-constant dream that you can become successful and even fabulously wealthy without a whole lot of effort.
So we promote big-ticket quiz shows and we encourage people to buy lottery tickets.
But some people don't see the line we've drawn, and so they rob banks.
wotthehell, arch, wotthehell.
Which fits in nicely with …
Tank McNamara notes that young men who are sheltered from reality all their lives by those who profit from their talents sometimes don't get it. And it's not the actual criminals and sociopaths, the Aaron Hernandezes or Ray Carruths, that we're talking about.
It's more on the damn-fool level, which sometimes has tragic consequences but is more often simply so foolish and mundane that you can only shake your head in wonder that this person got that old without developing any sense at all.
But, again, if you stop thinking of them as names-in-the-news and think of them as people, the humor fades.
I suspect this link isn't supposed to be here, but you can try it. However, if you have both scruples and Netflix, you can legally go there to stream ESPN's documentary, "Broke," about how incredibly wealthy young men manage to lose it all.
Don't expect a lot of laughs. There's nothing funny about young people who make hundreds of millions of dollars for other people, often destroying their bodies and shortening their lives in the process, and never figure out how to hang on to their slice.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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