CSotD: It’s Hard to be Hip over 30
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In today's "Sally Forth," Ces touches upon one of my favorite topics. No, not Christmas, or stockings, or lonely children in need of family structure and certainly not "Roseanne," but that of cultural references in cartoons.
Sally is quite right: A child who was eight years old the last year "Roseanne" was on the air would be 21 today, and probably a little warped from watching "Roseanne" at such a young age, and, although the show has been in syndication since, such a detailed reference is certainly lost on a tween. It's a good choice of references in this context, mind you, because while it is, as the gag demands, too old for Faye and Hilary's cohort to get, there is likely a large number of people in adult demographic for the strip who will remember the show but not in such detail.
Which adds, of course, to Ted Forth's mystique as an ever-flowing font of stuff nobody cares about. I love Ted.
Cultural references are a matter of knowing your readership, but there is also the element of "growing your readership," and a strip that consistently shuts out other audience segments had better make a strong connection with the niche it seeks. On the web, that's not impossible, as long as the niche you appeal to is a niche that seeks webcomics. In syndication, however, distribution is to a general audience, and cartoonists would be well-advised to pause and do the math before moving forward with something too specific.
It's a question of cultural literacy. You could, for instance, question whether you can make a reference to "Roseanne" in a strip one day and then reference "War and Peace" in the same strip the next, but you're probably alright as along as you aren't too detailed in either reference — as long as your "Roseanne" reference is to abrasive blue-collar comedy and your "War and Peace" reference is to massive books nobody could possibly read. But expecting a reader to be truly familiar with both is asking a bit too much.
In fact, it would be better to call it "pop-culture literacy." Detailed, specific references to "The Lone Ranger" or "Howdy Doody" would be lost on most people under 60, but you can refer to the cultural perceptions of those works, which remain alive and well in the general population.
"The Lone Ranger," for example, was a very basic show to begin with. If you know the William Tell Overture, "Hi-yo Silver!" and "kemosabe," you're not missing a lot of nuance anyway.
This is different than the cultural perceptions of "Leave It To Beaver," which is remembered as a bland show that wallowed in middleclass values, when it consistently challenged and criticized those values. Like the notion of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" being about a girl fleeing across an icy river, or "Don Quixote" being about a man who attacked a windmill, it's not so much that it's wrong as that it doesn't summon up the work itself but the perceptions of the work.
Frank Gorshin (there's a reference lost on half the room) used to complain that impressionists didn't imitate celebrities so much as they imitated the impressionists who imitated those celebrities. They didn't do imitations of Kirk Douglas, but, rather, they did imitations of Frank Gorshin's imitation of Kirk Douglas. They didn't imitate Nixon, but David Frye imitating Nixon. Quotes attributed to various actors — e.g., Cary Grant's "Judy, judy, judy" or Humphrey Bogart's "Play it again, Sam" — actually came from impressionists, not from the originals.
Some references simply fly over the heads of the young. Five years ago, I was producing a weekly feature for students on political cartoons, and I featured a panel by Tom Toles about preparation for the impending bird flu pandemic that featured George W. Bush passively sitting on a park bench while birds gathered on the playground equipment behind him. It was a great cultural reference, of course, to Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds," but, by 2005, that movie was over 40 years old, and I suggested that students do a show of hands to see if the reference spoke to their demographic. I suspect it did not, and, much as I love Toles' work, and much as the cartoon appealed to me personally, I think he was a bit too narrow in this one.
Oh, and if you got the reference in today's blog title, you're old. Very, very old.
Not like the winners on this classic game show:
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