CSotD: Against the Grain
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Yesterday was about my desperate search for comics that were only funny and not thought-provoking.
Today, we'll spin that another direction, starting with the new Existential Comics in which Socrates is forced to undergo a Socratic examination, of which the above panel is an excerpt.
And Socrates is wrong: It's very funny, and I say that as someone who studied Socrates at some length in college but had no idea who David Lewis and Edmund Gettier were. And I still don't, because I didn't follow the explanatory links on the page and, yes, this is a cartoon that comes with footnotes.
Which sounds like a joke itself but isn't.
However, all you need to get a laff out of this one is a familiarity with the Apology, which every college freshman is exposed to, plus a sneaking suspicion that the dialogues featuring Socrates are a little too pat, which, if it didn't set in sometime after college, will certainly occur to you if you read this.
What I particularly like about it is that, while it's argumentative and ivory-towerish, the fact that it's in cartoon format makes it palatable.
The first article I had published beyond campus stuff was a faux-Socratic dialogue about contemporary issues which, as a newly minted bachelor of arts, I thought was insightful and clever. However, Straight Creek Journal, the underground paper that ran it, somehow lost the last two pages so that the article came to an abrupt halt without the clever conclusion that wrapped it all up.
I was furious, but I kept that issue of the paper and it wasn't many years after that I tried to read the article and couldn't even get through it myself. It would have been much better as a 17-panel cartoon.
Which isn't saying "good," just "much better."
I once earned a B for a paper on Aristotle's De Anima which, encapsulated in four words, boiled down to "Who gives a shit?" and, when I say that, I actually ended the paper with, in classical Athenian Greek supplied by an amused professor who happened to be rector in my hall, "Aristotle is full of bad waste."
Which you can get away with, at least to a B if not A level, if you back up your proposition.
And if your professor has a sense of humor.
I didn't fare so well with a paper in which I argued that, if "Ulysses" is a novel, then the Statue of Liberty is a building. The professor was too worshipfully blind a Joyce fan to allow for playfulness, no matter how well argued.
In any case, I still think "Who gives a shit?" is a good question to pose to metaphysicians, because the answer is "We do!" which, in turn, is the basis for much of the humor at Existential Comics.
Another place to pick up a dose of much-needed cynicism is xkcd, which currently takes on the growth of emojis from a simple way to signal intent in otherwise dry text to … whatever the hell they have become.
See my previous commentary on how computerization of Monopoly embedded the most annoying aspects of playing with obnoxious nitwits, but, basically, "clever emoji" is an oxymoron.
Period. End of sentence. No emoji required.
Almost as annoyingly vapid as emojis are political cartoons pairing Trump with the iconic bluebirds of Twitter, which, by the way, turns 11 today.
But, in the wake of yesterday's testimony by intelligence officials, Ann Telnaes repurposes and redraws the birds, showcasing their increasingly futile efforts to prop the man up, thus making an actual point beyond "Golly gee, that Trump feller sure likes to tweet, don't he?"
Making an actual point, lest we forget, being the original purpose of political cartooning.
Indeed, thank god the world is in such good shape at the moment that we can take time off to show Chuck Berry duck-walking through the Pearly Gates, the justification for such being that editors eagerly pick up obituary cartoons and that cartoonists have to make a living, after all.
Back in '02, Telnaes drew this cartoon that, obviously, clashed with the popular sentiment of the hour, and I asked her if any papers had picked it up.
She replied that she didn't think so, but that she felt strongly enough about it that she really didn't care.
Which is, BTW, the sort of attitude that allowed Chuck Berry to be Chuck Berry and not simply Johnny Rivers.
And which unrepentence reminds me of archy's Lesson of the Moth, in which the moth explains
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
to which archy's response is so wistful and pathetically true to life that you really need to go read it for yourself.
(And I'm sorry Chuck is gone, but we used to get obits at the paper that said, "So-and-so, 90, died unexpectedly …" which really made me question their expectations.)
Juxtaposition of the Movie Critics
At his blog, Michael Cavna praises "Beauty and the Beast," and notes Disney's plans to turn more animated classics into live-action films with enough enthusiasm that his article is headlined
After ‘Beauty and the Beast’s’ record-breaking debut, Disney can bank on more live-action adaptation success
Leaving aside the issue of whether re-purposed animations under Tim Burton's voluminous layers of CGI count as "live action," I was amused by Cavna's contrast with the 11-year-old who reviewed the film for us, and who strongly recommended it, but added, at the end,
By one report, this is one of 22 Disney classics remade or planned to be remade in live action. I sort of like that new approach, but this is a little annoying also. When will Disney make a new live action movie?
Don't look back, Michael, and that's a reference to Satchel Paige, not to Dylan.
Here's to boatrockers:
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