CSotD: Losing focus
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Mr. Boffo stopped me in my tracks this morning.
At first, I thought it meant his parents had somehow switched him to something G-rated, but then it hit me and knocked me over.
Joe Martin is not often this heavy, but he sure kicked out the jams today.
I'm not sure when the Andy Griffith Show lost focus, but I'll accept the kid's analysis: After Season Four.
I'm also not sure where the show fit in the overall trend of "single dad raising a kid" shows, but it debuted in 1960, the same year as "My Three Sons."
That was nine years before "The Courtship of Eddie's Father," which launched three years after the movie that inspired it, and in which Eddie was played by Ron Howard. Busy kid.
There were other attempts — "Bachelor Father" (1957) comes to mind — but that and "My Three Sons" were less about empathy than about hijinks, and ditto with "Family Affair," which (1966) was more contemporaneous to Eddie's Father.
In most of those shows, however, the fathers, or father-substitutes, exuded more adult wisdom than emotional connection.
Bixby got the tone right and Brian Keith didn't do badly, but that was after the start of men being allowed to project more vulnerability.
Griffith's aw-shucks delivery allowed him to be more sympathetic, avoiding that "Father Knows Best" (1954, but the radio show was 1949) feel of someone who had been at the office all day and was being a parent in his spare time.
The show's iconic opening established Sheriff Taylor's priorities, and may have inspired the similar, Nilsson-toned opening of "Courtship."
Two points of criticism:
One is that the kid is right and the show lost focus once it strayed from the dad/kid relationship and became more of a rural comedy. Then again, I don't know how long it could have sustained the original premise.
If they had done those four seasons and then shut it down, it would be remembered far differently.
The British seem to do better at putting on sitcoms for a limited time and then stopping before they drift into mediocrity: Not just "Fawlty Towers" but "Good Neighbors" and "No, Honestly" went on the air, pleased the audience and left before they got stale, while Rowan Atkinson rolled up his sleeves and reinvented "Blackadder" repeatedly to keep it fresh.
By contrast, American TV will keep a comedy on life support long after it has anything but audience habit to sustain it, and "Mayberry RFD" is a pretty good, sad example of that.
The other point, regarding criticism, is that it's always much easier to explain a piece of art than to produce it from scratch.
Joe Martin must have danced around the room when this one hit him, though, given his prodigious output, it had to necessarily be a short dance: One verse, one chorus, in a business where "back to the old drawing board" applies whether you have succeeded or failed.
Honorable mention
Not on that level of flash-bang insight, but Rick Stromoski still scores with today's Soup to Nutz for being pretty damn twisted and funny.
Stephen King in four panels. If little Opie reads this one, Sheriff Taylor's gonna be up changing sheets in the middle of the night.
Plus Stromoski gets extra credit for getting such good facial reactions given his minimalist artistic style.
And speaking of artistic style
You may want to start keeping an eye on Arlo & Janis, where Jimmy Johnson is apparently updating Arlo's look. Here are yesterday and today's strips and I have no idea where he's headed, except that they've been talking about retirement and just ended an arc that involved a dream of a country home near Gene and his family, and this may be related to that sort of "now what?" moment.
Janis got a new hairstyle about a dozen years ago, but, while Arlo isn't letting his go as shaggy as it once was, he isn't nearly as much changed.
This may seem like trivia, but there's a difference between being in a groove and being in a rut, and cartoonists need to keep things fresh.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Two cartoons that, in quite different ways, make the same point about a president whose level of self-involvement is so complete as to be pathological.
Exhibit A, or, by now, probably Exhibit R or W or something, is this montage that's been going around.
Trump fans have defended the paper towel throwing by saying he was just having fun with the crowd, but if the crowd was in a mood to have fun, it was the wrong crowd.
And it's more than a matter of how badly this or that community was hit or how much each has or hasn't recovered. It's a matter of simple good manners, of knowing how to behave.
It's fair to note that Trump was not talking to a particular person when the shot of him was taken, but other presidents have had the breeding and good manners to understand proper decorum.
We could go back and see what they said in those gatherings and I'm betting they weren't making wisecracks. One regrettable "Heckuva job, Brownie," and even that was not part of a litany of egocentric self-praise.
Previously, there was discussion here about not depicting Trump as an infant, but, rather, as an ill-mannered toddler, and this astonishing display of self-centered insensitivity was, indeed, the sort of behavior you might expect of a five-year-old.
But one who would be strongly, immediately reprimanded.
I'm sorry his parents washed their hands of him and shipped him off to military school, but now he's our problem and I'm even sorrier for that.
Which brings us to Tom Toles, who cuts through all the wisecracks over Tillerson's overheard remark and gets down to why it matters.
Making silly jokes about a "fucking moron" with the power to launch nuclear missiles is no more appropriate than tossing paper towels at hurricane survivors.
Toles gets the balance right.
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