CSotD: It wasn’t even close to a tie
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Rhymes With Orange is in contention for CSOTD so often that I'm kind of disappointed today was such a landslide.
This is a funny, insightful and affectionate little salute to fathers and I wish it had been a tougher choice, because it wouldn't have changed the outcome.
Father's Day cartoons, by and large, are treated like an obligation, or maybe a bit of a day off, in which you can do a gag about neckties and consider the job done.
I've been a father for about 40 years, and I don't think I ever got a tie for Father's Day, nor do I remember ever giving one. This puts about 60 percent of Father's Day cartoons into the "Yeah, what else you got?" category for me.
I saw a political cartoon this morning that used the occasion to hammer fathers who don't make their support payments, and another that blamed child sexual abuse on fathers who desert their families. Yeah, that's right in the spirit of the day. Thanks.
A couple of cartoons did make me smile, but this one made me laugh, and I like to laugh.
And if there is a serious parenting issue attached, it's that the rougher, more challenging play of fathers is believed to be an important part of how kids learn about the world.
Not that mothers can't play "I've got your nose!"
But it is traditionally a father's game, as are a dozen variations in which the humor and fun are in issuing a challenge to a small child's tenuous grip on reality.
This can be explained in terms of Lithwick's Unified Theory of Muppets: Men are from Ernie, Women are from Bert.
And little kids need a healthy dose of Ernie to balance the calming, reassuring Bertness of their lives.
"I've got your nose" can be pretty distressing to someone who isn't sure that noses are not detachable, and even more so to one who is pretty sure they aren't but is just learning that sometimes he's wrong.
Ditto with the above-referenced puns. A pun challenges your grasp of language as well as your ability to make a quick mental shift and is, in many ways, a more abstract version of "I've got your nose."
That is, I know that's not my nose, but what is it? And I know that word you used doesn't mean what it's supposed to mean, but what does it mean?
The key to punning is waiting until your children begin to think abstractly. There is such a thing as unleashing the pun too soon.
My eldest and I still laugh and cringe over a drive we took from Colorado Springs to Buffalo when he was five years old. We were at about North Platte, Nebraska, when I asked him why carpenters don't believe in stones.
I spent the next 1200 miles trying to get him to stop saying that of course carpenters can see stones daddy because they're not blind and the stones are right there and daddy why did you say they never saw them?
The payoff didn't come for 30-some years. Then he got his own five-year-old and I got sweet revenge.
There's probably a doctoral dissertation in why some people welcome puns and others are so hostile to them, especially if you could tie in the factor of how often they had their grasp of concrete reality affectionately challenged when they were little.
Fathers also tickle, and they push you way high on the swing, and they pretend to be bears and roar at you and sometimes you're not sure they aren't bears and you're a little bit scared and they have to hug you and laugh while they apologize and remind you that it's okay.
And then they take your nose.
The bottom line is that Hilary Price speaks more truth in jest than just about anybody out there, and, yes, fathers do drive you from your home, because their verbal and physical horseplay teaches you not only that you can survive outside your comfort zone but that it's kind of fun out there on the edge, where people who are supposed to be grownup and dignified and mature and serious ask you to pull their fingers or make up silly, outlandish stories that they don't expect you to believe but that you kinda sorta do
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