CSotD: Dark Humor for Dark Times
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We’ve seen a plethora of Timmy-in-the-Well cartoons, despite the fact that, while Timmy had a whole lot of scrapes, that wasn’t one of them. However, the jokes have replaced the reality to the point where Jon Provost’s biography is titled Timmy’s in the Well.
It’s like that old saying, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so,” and, appropriately, people think they know who said it, but they’re usually wrong.
However, we’ve come to a point where, as Wiley notes, “facts” and “truth” are determined mostly by popular acclaim, not through research and logic. George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, Timmy fell in a well and Al Gore said he invented the Internet.
Lassie is telling the truth this time, but she’s a little late. Jon Provost is two months younger than I am, and we are of an age where we’re responsible for the dystopian nightmare into which our grandchildren have fallen, which makes this cartoon prompt more guilt than levity.
But I laughed anyway.
It’s not as if we’re doing anything to pull our kids out of the Slough of Despond. Australia and Indonesia have put bans on social media for kids, but are finding that Google and Meta aren’t doing much to comply with their laws.
Blower’s cartoon is commenting on the negative effects social media has on children, and Britain is considering not a total ban for children but a ban on sites deemed harmful, which includes many of the major platforms.
However, the White House has told the British government that the Trump administration opposes such a move because it would “impose disproportionate compliance burdens on American companies.”
The US solution is for parents to be responsible for their children’s social media use, in much the same way that we expect parents to be responsible for keeping their children from accessing firearms.
I’m never sure whether Banx’s works fall under politics or humor, but here he’s straddling the same things Leighton, Miller and Blower are, and his cartoon fits in with our discussion of priorities.
Abbie Hoffman joked that Neil Armstrong would have been set for life if, when he’d stepped out of the lunar module, he’d said “Drink Coca-Cola!”
Well, yesterday’s jokes become today’s headlines, and if you give the First Lady $28 million and make a movie about her, your rocket company might coincidentally get $230.4 million in government contracts. And if you don’t like making movies, try donating to the ballroom project.
As Solly told Tom Hagen, it was only business.
Juxtaposition of the Day
It’s “only business” to make necessary cuts and layoffs, because while a business might be profitable itself, there’s a lot of debt involved in leveraged buyouts and that has to be paid off, too.
My dad explained “leveraged buyouts” to me back in 1970 when he was telling me how Ling-Temco-Vought had bought the iron mine in our town and was stripping it down and maximizing the profits to pay for the money Jimmy Ling had borrowed for the purchase.
This caused the mine to shut down a generation sooner than necessary and threw my friends and their parents out of work, but what was shocking 60 years ago is Standard Operating Procedure today.
Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Not sure the Chicago Bears’ pending move to Indiana is more pleasant, but it’s only political in the sense of business triumphing over emotions. Again.
Leaving Soldiers Field seems a betrayal, but Hammond is only 25 miles from the Loop. When the Dodgers deserted Ebbets Field, they went 2,700 miles, so that Jethro Bodine could shout the immortal golfing cry, “Whomp it, Mr. Durocher!”
The NY Giants also moved to sunny California, but the NY Giants Football Team still calls itself that to avoid confusion, although the real confusion is that both they and the NY Jets play their home games in New Jersey, at Met Life Stadium.
If that’s not confusing enough, the World Cup games scheduled for East Rutherford, New Jersey, will be played not in “Met Life Stadium” but in “New York New Jersey Stadium” because FIFA is against commercialization. Which is another case of dark, unintentional humor.
Alas, Thandi: FIFA has banned vuvuzelas from the games, along with whistles, air horns and other annoying noisemakers.
I think it’s still legal to do the wave, though if I paid that much for a seat, I wouldn’t be sitting down anyway.
And Now For Something Completely Intellectual
First Dog got plenty of reader feedback about the Guardian’s list of the 100 Best Novels Ever, and they were pretty much as impressed as I was.
And then the Atlantic re-published a similar list they’d come up with two years ago, and I was even less impressed but realized I haven’t read very much fiction from the past 100 years, more by happenstance than intention.
Howsoever, a couple of comic strips have pinged novels that I have read and can recommend, particularly if you like fat books you can sink into:
If you’ve gotten through all the existential despair of today’s offerings, you are ready to try an extremely grim, extremely funny novel set in the era of railroad tycoons, Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now.
It’s about an upper middleclass Gilded Age clique who are persuaded to invest in a railroad by a fabulously wealthy developer whose past seems a bit indistinct but who has wonderful promises of the riches they will all gain by trusting him.
And while Augustus Melmotte doesn’t erect a golden statue of himself, you won’t have trouble thinking of a real-life equivalent. It would have been hilarious anyway, but the parallels make it even moreso.
There actually were four musketeers by the end of the first in Alexandre Dumas’ three-novel D’Artagnan Romances. The first is the familiar book, the second continues their adventures and the third is a more complex tale of courtly intrigue.
None of the movies could capture the complexity of the written plot, but here’s a sample of wit and action from the 1935 attempt:
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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