....I'm going to take things back, with a couple classic strips from the 60s.
It's been said that politicians are unable to be genuinely funny, lest irreverent jokes or sarcasm be misunderstood as sincere belief or insensitivity.
That first cartoon is about as funny as a politician is allowed to be.
The second cartoon is like a badass guy/gal who would make an awesome political leader, but keeps it too real to ever be elected.
I love that second strip. It's over the top in a very uncharacteristic way, and I'm not sure I completely get it. What is it that sends this traveling sales man over the edge? Was the scene of disarray with which he was met the final proof of life's meaninglessness? Of course, the point is that it is obviously NOT the best time for Mommy, and she really can't be bothered with dude's midlife crisis. If that's the point, though, it could have been expressed without bringing suicide into the mix. I'm pretty certain that if this strip was written today, the salesman would have finished his sentence with "day," for Mommy, that would have been interruption enough, and the whole thing would be clipped out by grandmothers with terrible senses of humor and taped to refrigerators all over the country.
Just in case you're curious, the highest suicide rates by profession are apparently food "batchmakers," doctors, and lathe and turning machine operators.
Though the onion-tear gag has been done many times, many ways, i think this rendition is just downright sweet. Compared to more recent strips, in which everything the kids say seems so self-consciously adorable, Billy, Dolly and Jeffy seem completely lost in the fear that they've done something terrible. Some childhood's scariest moments come when we don't understand what our parents are doing, and i think this captures that feeling well.
No comments:
Post a Comment