CSotD: Nize Agnes
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Tony Cochran's Agnes dwells in an odd niche somewhere between the sweet daydreams of "Heart of the City" and the surreal fantasies of "Calvin," perhaps with a little of the loveable-loser element of "Big Nate." But while all those characters make us laugh with their striving, we know that they're just kids and that, with time, they'll grow up and settle into good, happy, solidly middleclass lives.
Agnes is different. Though she's also a kid, she has a lot more of Ralph Kramden in her than those other cartoon tykes. What made "the Honeymooners" different from all its imitators — from "the Flintstones" down to "King of Queens" and all that raft of sitcoms about schlubby guys with hot wives — was that Ralph and Alice dwelt in a ratty apartment one step up — or maybe not –from a tenement, and were perpetually on the brink of genuine ruin.
Gleason often went for bathos in all his characters, trying for that tug at the heartstrings, the smile with a tear, through Joe the Bartender and the Poor Soul, but, while those two clips I've linked are actually pretty good, Gleason, outside his Ralph Kramden character, had a tendency to be more cloying than touching. I always suspected the character he played who was most like himself was Minnesota Fats in the Hustler — tough, street-smart and with a good sense of where he came from and a devil's determination to never go back there again, whatever it took.
Agnes seems blissfully unaware of her station in life. She lives in a tiny travel trailer with her grandmother, and hangs around with her buddy, Trout, who is clearly of no higher socio-economic status but seems a little more level-headed about it, not a loyal, scatter-brained Norton but a solid, skeptical Alice to her Ralph. Trout does know where the pair of them live, though she apparently feels no need to do more than provide a bit of droll orientation for her reality-challenged pal.
In short, there is a contextual bite to Agnes that is not often seen on the comics page, and that adds greatly to the humor and appeal of the strip. We love her,we laugh at her, we worry about her a little. We laugh some more.
What brought me to feature this particular strip today is the combination of utter delusion and fabulously appropriate imagery.
Cartoonists often make cultural references that won't play because they're too remote for a general audience. A cartoonist past the mid-century mark has to bear in mind that some of his readers are only a quarter of a century old and don't share the same pop culture experience. Now, certain things are so iconic that they are fair game: Howdy Doody, Citizen Kane and, yes, the Honeymooners. But beyond that, you have to double-check your dates and ask yourself if anyone under 50 is going to get it.
However, the reference here to the Smothers Brothers is perfect. It doesn't require that the reader be familiar with the act (though it's a lot funnier if you are). It isn't even totally necessary for the reader to be familiar with the name (though a lot of people would be, even if they haven't heard them). All that is necessary is to conjure up an old woman spinning old records on an old record player in the other part of an old trailer, preferably with a title that suggests more than one voice.
And then Trout casually tosses in the concept of "Yiddish thunder," which, as far as I can tell, is utterly and completely without meaning, yet sounds so portentious that she glibly repeats what she has been told despite having no idea what it means either.
What little meaning the phrase might possibly possess suggests that God speaks Yiddish instead of Hebrew, which would sweep us back past Jackie Gleason, to Molly Goldberg, Sholem Aleichem and Milt Gross's Nize Baby, which — speaking of ancient and obscure cultural references — was both a series of stories like this and a cartoon strip, an example of which I stole from this wonderful site.
Eggniss, dollink, you could do woise.
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