CSotD: They’re nobody. Who are you?
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Flash from the Past: The Stripper's Guide has a discursion on "The Nebbishes," which I discovered via a tip from Mike Lynch and then expanded through some surfing around whereby I came up with the above example at a blog called "It's A Cat," though they aren't cats.
They're nebbishes, a Yiddish term for a person of no significance.
Think of every Woody Allen character, though somehow Herb Gardner's Nebbishes didn't have the self-loathing of a Woody Allen character and seemed, in fact, to be rather pleased with themselves despite their status as non-entities, dwelling somewhere between Woody Allen and Alfred E. Newman.
Where they really dwelt was in gift shops for quite awhile before they became cartoon characters. Nebbishes were all over the place, in the form of figurines and ashtrays and other ephemera, which popularity is probably what made them seem a natural for the comics page.
Which apparently they weren't, because the strip only lasted a couple of years, and, judging from that example and the others at those sites, I think I can see why.
It's not so much that the strips are too talky, though they are. But Jules Fieffer had marvelous multi-panel strips in the same period that were basically illustrated dialogue.
Fieffer was cartooning for the Village Voice, however, a very different venue than the Sunday funnies, and, on top of that, his characters may have gone on for several panels, but his writing is extraordinarily tight.
(Feiffer is still working these days, just not for the Voice anymore. In fact, I ran into him a couple of years ago.)
Gardner was a solid writer, his main claim to fame being the plays "A Thousand Clowns" and "I Am Not Rappaport," both of which were turned into movies after successful stage runs.
But success in one medium does not always translate into success in another, and this cartooning business is a trickier than it looks. Had he done a cartoon version of them as single-panel one-liners and on a less than daily schedule, the idea might have worked better.
Still, for someone who ran into rubber and ceramic Nebbishes on coffee tables and kitchen counters before he was old enough to start running into the flesh-and-blood kind in the workplace, this was quite a flash.
And anyway, I loved A Thousand Clowns and didn't like Carnal Knowledge at all.
Shoemakers, stick to your lasts.
And speaking of nebbishes:
Monty is one of my very favorite small-n nebbishes, mostly because Jim Meddick has absolutely no shame in trotting out the old "nebbish looks just like a notorious killer" wheeze and then adding the ridiculous flourish of deus ex washing machina in the final panel.
With this type of humor — as with that noted nebbish, Bob Hope, who used this same plot device at least once or twice — you don't look for breakthrough innovations but, rather, for basic stuff done masterfully.
Dumb jokes are only dumb when they are fumbled, while, when done right, half of your giggles come from embarrassment over laughing at something so incredibly dumb.
Not everybody finds nebbish humor funny, and my suspicion is that it takes a certain level of self-confidence to laugh at something stupid, or maybe it just takes the mental agility to realize that there is no deeper meaning hidden behind somebody getting a pie in the face.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Sally Forth's sister came over to her house because she was going into labor but not so much that her husband couldn't go to work. Then, when her water burst, the whole fam damily piled into the car and went off to the hospital, with the husband joining them later.
And now Mom and Dad have arrived.
I'm glad they're not all on bleachers in the delivery room with the video rolling, but, still, when did giving birth become a team event?
I was a father-in-the-delivery-room in 1972; certainly not the first, but it still required finding an OB and a hospital that would allow such a radical thing. By the time our second came along four years later, fathers needed a very good excuse to not be present.
But I was also there when the kids were started, so I think it was perfectly appropriate for me to be there when they hatched.
And I understand that a single woman would want a trusted friend or maybe her mother present. Makes perfect sense.
However, shortly thereafter, the floodgates opened.
To which I say "phooey." It is neither a medical emergency nor a public spectacle. Even in the bad old days when women (allegedly) simply squatted down and gave birth in the fields, they did it behind a bush.
You're not supposed to be there. You're supposed to sit by the phone and wait for news and no that doesn't mean bring your damn cell phone to the hospital.
Go away. The second part of the making-of-babies process is no more any of your business than was the first.
Though I suppose that will be the next to go. We've already got weddings where everyone piles onto a cruise ship and attends the first half of the honeymoon.
Why leave after the ceremony? Don't you want to see how the rest of it goes?
What, you don't love the happy couple?
So after I read Sally and had all that rattling around in my brain, I came to today's Bliss for the antidote:
Stick to your guns, pal. I'm on your side.
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