CSotD: What can’t be taught must be evolved
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Keith Knight gets it. Better than that, he spreads it.
Keefe brands himself as a hipster in his cartoons, lightly moving through the social world, observing it with a sly and skeptical eye, partially immersed in trends and partially watching from the sidelines, but he's also a son, a sibling, a husband, a neighbor, a father, dealing with all those roles, partially immersed and partially observing.
Hardly a ground-breaking formula, except that Knight does it with a level of authenticity that you don't often see on the funny pages.
By "authenticity," I mean, in part, that it's clear his strips — by which I mean the Knight Life, seen above, and the K-Chronicles, but not (Th)ink which is a political panel — are drawn from his own life, but I also mean "authentic" in that he doesn't just use a few facts from his own life and then spin them into some stereotypical comic setting.
That is, Danny Thomas really was an entertainer, but I doubt that "Danny Williams," the nightclub performer in "Make Room For Daddy" was acting out scenarios from his life. I hope not, anyway.
When it comes to autobiographical comedy, the choices seem to be either exaggeration and stereotype or material that isn't very funny, but Knight comes up with very funny material based on things you can't fake knowing — like changing diapers or, as in today's example, putting the kid to bed.
If Danny Williams put Rusty and what's-her-name — Angela Cartwright — to bed, it would end up with them crying and running around the apartment while he screamed threats at them, because the show's premise was based on a slapstick "dads don't do that" approach to family life.
The alternative to screaming incompetent Danny Williams was the sort of "Ben Kenobi" father, Steve Douglas from "My Three Sons" or Andy Taylor of "The Andy Griffith Show," who would sit the children down and bestow deep, caring wisdom upon their little heads.
While Aunt Bea or Uncle Charlie/Bub was actually doing the day-to-day child-raising.
It's better than threatening them with mayhem, but at best, it is an intermediate step. It could well be that, without Sheriff Taylor as a role model, we wouldn't have Keith Knight as the father in this cartoon.
(It also occurs to me that, given Knight's age, he probably encountered Bill Bixby's dad-character in "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," which is good, considering that Bixby also starred in "The Hulk," which was more reflective of Danny Williams's approach to parenting. But I really, really digress …)
Anyway, since almost everyone I know in three dimensions these days I meet at the dog park, I get in a lot of conversations about Cesar Millan, "The Dog Whisperer." People bring Cesar a really out of control dog and Cesar gets the dog in control, lectures the people on how to keep it in control and it's a happy ending.
I hate the show because I don't think his advice is replicable or sustainable. That is, he's trying to teach people how to be Cesar instead of finding ways that they can be successful with their dogs within the boundaries of their own lives and personalities. And my guess is that, six months post-Cesar, those dogs are back to biting people and tearing up the furniture.
Similarly, we all know the Danny Williams approach to parenting is ridiculous, dysfunctional and abusive, but the Ben Kenobi approach, like Cesar's, is hard to truly teach, because it's based too much on the wisdom of the teacher rather than the needs and tendencies of the student. It's an impressive model, but it's not replicable.
Here's what I see in Keith Knight's depiction of fatherhood: He's depicting a model of involvement that is very much of his generation, based on an evolution from the Danny Williams screamer through the Ben Kenobi counselor to the person who assumes that he is competent, who assumes he should be involved, who assumes that being a father means, for instance, using different voices and sound effects and not mailing it in.
About 15 years ago, I wrote a column about changes in fathers, and I wrote about an extraordinary player who said winning the Super Bowl was the best day of his life, next to the day his child was born.
I don't even remember who it was anymore, because that has become a commonplace, and not just to say it: Recently, the coverage before a game included talk about a starter who might not make the game because his wife was having a baby.
And all the big tough jocks previewing the game agreed with the priority, nor did his coach express a problem with it. It was assumed, just as, a half century earlier, it was assumed that Danny Williams couldn't put a pair of kids to bed without screams and threats.
You can't teach that. But you can model it. And that's happening.
Anyway, Keefe, here's some advice from Old Ben: Read him "Through the Looking Glass."
Every chapter, Alice comes upon new characters, so you don't have to remember the voices you invented the night before. Just hope that, by the time they all come back in the last chapter, the Incredible Cuteness of Being has forgotten how the Mock Turtle is supposed to sound.
Here's today's earworm:
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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