CSotD: Sunday Short Takes
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Our theme today, to the extent that we have one, will be about people whose company you didn't want anyway, and what better lead off than dear little Agnes trying to be a social success?
And dear little Trout, ever the Greek chorus of uncomfortable truth.
Agnes and Trout are part of a tradition of madcap girls, along with Lucy and Ethel and Laverne and Shirley, constantly plotting to arise beyond their station, with one the ambitious partner and the other the willing if skeptical assistant.
With a substantial advantage going to the cartoonist.
That is, a comic strip is fairly limited — and thus blessed — in how much it depicts versus how much the reader has to supply.
As Bunny Hoest of the Lockhorns said when I interviewed her a decade-and-a-half ago,
"People read themselves into the situations," she reports. "Someone will say, 'I liked that cartoon where Loretta is walking along and Leroy comes out of the shop and says … ' and they've created a whole vignette in their heads. I did one panel, and they got it."
Number One advantage is that anything you can draw can happen.
When Lucy made bread and it rose in the oven to the point where it kept coming and coming out in one ridiculously long loaf, it required cutting the back out of a stove and then extending the back side of the set to make extra room off stage.
A cartoonist doesn't have to worry about such things; his long loaf of bread isn't going to intrude into the next panel unless he wants it to.
And there is also the matter of continuing action: Lucille Ball spent time tossing pizzas in a Rodeo Drive pizzeria so that Lucy Ricardo could foul up the job credibly on the show. A cartoonist can, in one frame, suggest the entire sequence that Ball had to deliver for real.
Which also translates to dialogue: TV writers have to create a three or four minute conversation simply to fill the scene. It can't be filler, but overexplaining will kill the gag, so it has to be tight and relevant and yet long.
A couple of word balloons and the cartoonist is off the hook: As Bunny said, the readers will supply the rest of the conversation.
Even in a comic book format, Little Lulu and Dot and Iodine could skip the filler and depict only the nuggets of dialogue and action.
But, then, a Little Lulu comic book might have three stories in it. Once you decide that one story should fill an entire issue, you must add detail.
That works for action comics: If it's Spiderman or Sgt Fury, it can be WHAM and BLAMMO and extended fight scenes.
But in screwball comedy, detail becomes the enemy.
Go back and read your Sunday comics again: There are a handful of strips — Sally Forth and Arlo and Janis come to mind — where a long set up can work. But for most comedy strips, less is more, and the greater proportion of the gag which happens in the mind of the reader, the better the payoff.
And then I immediately turn around and provide for praise today's Tank McNamara, a strip with extended dialogue and detail.
But Tank has always been a crossover between gag and political cartooning, providing humorous commentary on the world of sport, so it's not in the category of madcap comedy and aligns more with social commentary strips like Frazz or Pogo.
And, specific to today's strip, the detail is needed, so that the theme of unity falls apart by beginning with Tank's heartfelt, extended speech in the first panel, encapsulating the ideal, contrasted with the reality of the individualized refusal of that ideal in the second.
I got a laugh out of Agnes, though the reality of her social failure is really kind of depressing.
But Tank is depressing because it's not a gag but a fact.
And, speaking of depressing facts and dark humor, David Rowe brings his sardonic vision to a situation that is not simply depressing but deeply disturbing.
In the past week, there have been a number of cartoons contrasting Trump's obsession with the Take A Knee protests and his ignoring of the crisis in Puerto Rico. They've each shown Puerto Ricans kneeling or Trump kneeling or someone kneeling about the hurricane, putting forth the idea that he cares more about the NFL situation than dying people.
None has struck a nerve with me.
I think the problem with those cartoons is that both crises — the murder of young black men and the refusal to deal with Puerto Rico — are too serious to address through mockery. The ridicule seems inappropriately frivolous.
I once saw Steve Martin banter back and forth with a heckler at Red Rocks in Denver, using reason, using sarcasm, using every witty tool he had, and not getting through.
Finally, he just said, "Hey, fuck you, man. Shut up!' and the entire amphitheatre burst into applause and cheers.
I don't know if it finally worked on the fool, or if the ushers finally removed him, but the show went on without further interruptions.
When millions are dying and some asshole is heckling them from the comfort of a golf course, wit and reason and sarcasm are not the right weapons.
Rowe skips right past ridicule and gives us horror, extending Trump's utterly appalling, indefensible refusal to address the crisis and, more than that, his egocentric response.
For Trump, every crisis is about him.
Read his tweets: The problem is not that millions may die but that someone criticized Donald Trump.
The most horrifying aspect of this is how little Rowe needed to exaggerate to make that point.
Yesterday, I compared careless statements that cratered political careers in other times, and suggested that the only truth Trump might ever tell was about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and suffering no consequences.
If he walks away from yesterday's golf game with his popularity intact, we'll know.
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