CSotD: Ignore-ance is bliss
Skip to comments
Nobody in the business does observational humor quite like Jimmy Johnson. The artwork in Arlo & Janis is perfectly – perfectly – wedded to the deadpan observations that are key to its conceptual tone.
Arlo's utter lack of expression in panel 4, particularly in contrast with Janis's expression of disgust in 3, is like George Burns starting to put the cigar in his mouth but pausing halfway there: You begin to laugh before he speaks.
And it's different than when Jack Benny would fold his arms and then put one hand to his cheek, because Benny almost always deflected the punchline, so that the laugh was in sharing his reaction to a joke that had already happened.
His predictable response heightened the gag, but you already knew what it was going to be and, with a few exceptions (the classic example being "I'm thinking it over!"), was never the actual joke — it was more a case of him sharing a laugh, the way Victor Borge would make a joke and then heighten the effect by simply looking at the audience with that infectious twinkle in his eye.
With Burns, you had a sense of what he was going to say, but you didn't know what it was going to be and you had to wait. He was the consummate vaudeville straight man and, in their set pieces, always did the slow burn and let Gracie get the laughs, but he would also come on stage separately and do observational humor bits alone, summing up the previous action and setting up the next scene.
Janis doesn't play the ditz. And that's good, because there was only one Gracie Allen, and so much of what she did involved her voice, her exquisite sense of timing and her physical reactions that you couldn't recreate it on the comics page anyway.
In the comics, innocently ditzy women are very hard to pull off sympathetically (Trudeau's Boopsie being a rarity). More often, they simply come across as stupid, which is not all that funny. The foolish wife is a comics stereotype, but, really, how many times can you dent a fender or overdraw a checking account and still get a genuine laugh?
In fact, Janis and Arlo take turns playing straight to each other. On some occasions, she seems to be the voice of common sense until Arlo adds a note of pragmatism that goes counter to the accepted reality. On other occasions, she really is the voice of common sense or the voice of the average responsible adult, in contrast to Arlo.
For instance, this isn't the first time Arlo has exhibited his theory of "If I don't notice it, I won't have to deal with it." Here's a classic from 2002:
Note, however, that his expression here is more of a person refusing to admit he's been found out. Janis is properly aggrieved this time around, while today's strip, well, hey, we all have things we pretend not to notice.
Oh, and I lied. There wasn't just one Gracie Allen. Here's the other one:
Comments 1
Comments are closed.