CSotD: This time it’s personal
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People love cartoons that strike a personal chord — those are the ones that end up on the fridge — but that usually really means a universal chord, something we can all relate to, or, as people say to cartoonists, "It's like you're looking through my window."
A cartoon that actually does strike a personal chord might not be funny to anyone else, or at least, nearly as funny. Case in point, today's Rhymes with Orange:
Trendy food jokes — in fact, jokes about any societal trend — are a staple at RWO and this strip stands alone just fine. But any gag involving mixed drinks and blenders is even funnier for the folks who gathered at the Blue Bird Inn back when I was a little too young to be gathering at the Blue Bird Inn.
Like any good "local," the place was known by the owner's name, "Chappelle's" rather than by whatever was on the sign over the door. Gert Chappelle was a kindly but irascible woman of, um, I dunno, 73? 90? 130?
However old she was, she came across sometimes as grumpy but then she'd stay open on Christmas Eve, not to make a lot of money but because she knew those of us who had gone off to college or the military might well be back in town and would want a place to meet up with friends.
Gert's son Donny was probably in his 50s, but the story is he'd taken an accidental bat to the head as a kid, and he seemed to be about three years old, albeit a three-year-old in a body that was six feet tall and heavy set.
Donny did a lot of the heavy lifting around the place and I suppose qualified as the "village idiot" in that (in contrast to people whose families kept them hidden away) we all knew him and watched out for him and, while we might tease him a little or make a joke or two, we were protective of him and any stranger who took notice of him would have been well advised to do so in a kindly way.
Every couple of days, you'd see Donny shambling down the road to Bob's Barber Shop for a shave. He couldn't have done anything that required that level of fine motor skills and, besides, Bob was happy to do it for him. We took care of our own.
Anyway, getting back to RWO, towards the end there as Gert was starting to show her age, whatever it was, somebody gave her a blender for Christmas, and it transformed her bartending.
It wasn't that she would have put a martini in it — with or without a quantum of olives — but she might well have, if anyone had ever ordered one there, given that, to start with, whatever mixed drink you ordered had been coming back a whiskey sour for a year or two.
Well, let me correct that: You could order a Seven-and-Seven and get that, and you could count on getting a Bell's-and-ginger if you asked for one.
But everything else was a whiskey sour and that was okay because we all knew it. If you wanted to order a white Russian or a stinger, you were free to do so, as long as you were okay with a whiskey sour. And Gert made a pretty good whiskey sour.
Until someone gave her the blender, after which, if you ordered a mixed drink, you got a glass of whipped foam with a cherry and a plastic sword or sometimes a mermaid.
And we all learned to order beer and be grateful she didn't run that through the damn blender.
Today's Curtis is a little more universal, but the advent of unreality reality TV is something I find particularly distressing and it doesn't take much to set me off on the topic.
A large part of it is the shows that purport to be spontaneous but that, while not quite scripted, are directed, with retakes for real life scenes that didn't come off the way the director wanted.
It has been an evolutionary process but, boiled-frog-factor notwithstanding, there's a difference between editing "Survivor" footage to create heroes and villains, and having a director hiding under the counter telling the "Pawn Stars" cast how to deliver their lines, and there is certainly something more than slightly wrong about buying and planting valuable items in the storage lockers for high bidders to "discover" in "Storage Wars."
And then we have the supposed "documentaries" on paranormal activities, unlikely creatures, aliens and new interpretations of history based on apocryphal bullshit. The previous king of all this was the "alien autopsy," but the Discovery Channel's recent mermaid special has supplanted it at the top of the manure pile.
Nor have the critics had nearly the impact as the ratings, that WashPost article reports:
“It has us thinking about what we do next,” Animal Planet GM Marjorie
Kaplan acknowledged to The TV Column — after Nielsen noted that “The
New Evidence” attracted an average of 3.6 million viewers.
“We’re thinking big,” said Kaplan, about internal talks to keep this ratings gravy-train going.
Even if he decides "Birdcage Makeovers" is too stupid to watch, I don't know where Curtis is going to find something "educational" that won't make him more ill-informed than he already is.
And I wish it were only little kids who fell for the lies being shown on TV.
Yes, because "then they voted."
This Cul de Sac is funny enough on its own merits, but it cracks me up personally because, when I was Alice's age, my pal Quinny, who lived two doors down, bet me he could pick up a bee with his bare hands.
Granted, the strip is a "classic" or, as the peasantry would term it, a "rerun," but so is the story about me and Quinny and the bee, so that, if you go here, you will not only get all the thrilling details, but a whole other Cul de Sac, and, best of all, Buckethead Kevin is in that one, too!
Such a deal!
Finally, today's Doonesbury would have been a wonderful thing to clip and send to my favorite curmudgeonly professor who, like any good Professor Kingsfield, had a personalized set of beloved rants that he would regularly roll out to buttress his identity.
One of the most-cited was an insistence on referring to MD's as "physicians" to distinguish them from Phd's, who had earned and deserved the title "Doctor" or "dottore" based on their wisdom and scholarship.
He's gone now, with of course an annual academic merit award named in his honor, but, if he were still alive, that last panel would have done the job, which I guess means it wouldn't have been such a wonderful thing to clip and send to him after all.
But I'm sure somebody would have. Mr. Hart, possibly.
And, for anyone who would like to see some cartoons that are particularly special even if you didn't go to preschool, the bar or college with me, here's a collection of Pat Oliphant panels that has been linked tp in a couple of places and now one more.
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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