3:22 a.m. - 2024-04-29
fish head/funny pages
There was a series of television ads back in the day--for disinfectant or air freshener or something, where household odors were personified with photo-animated depictions. A giant fish-head would rise up from the trash can for example, with wavy “smell lines” to imply its rank impact on some spotless suburban kitchen...on the kind of scene where, our housefrau hostess's repulsed expression made clear, its sort just wasn't welcome.
The fish head had a supporting cast: A smelly old pair of sneakers would pop out from the shoe rack, or a chagrined-looking puppy face would hover over the rug...its expression implying unwelcome gas or piss stench or god-forbid worse. An olfactory army of darkness was besieging our kingdom of linen-scented light, it seemed, and only this magic mist could repel it...
I can't speak to the campaign's success w/consumers, but it definitely made an impression on me. I know this because yesterday, while wrasslin' with a ripe bag of garbage on a warm, close afternoon, I was visited by the ghost of last week's fish dinner. The wrapper from the market I presume, buried now under coffee grounds and soup cans and a typical first-world avalanche of packaging, was making its presence known...and I couldn't help but remember that old TV ad. Couldn't help but imagine a disembodied fish head flying up out of the trash; mouth open, google-eyes agog, kinda rockin' back and forth w/the crazy smell-lines and everything and I just started laughing aloud. Laughing and laughing. I'm laughing again, even as I type this.
Because I'm what you'd call a comedy simpleton.
~ ~ ~
I laugh at puppet shows and children's jokes; at Jerry Lewis pratfalls and poorly translated Japanese-to-English phrases. I laugh at low-budget monster movies, jobsite pranks and lav-wall limericks. Months ago, somebody on the internet set a tiny turtle on an even-tinier skateboard and hit “record” as it chased a visibly annoyed housecat 'round the kitchen...I've watched this again and again, cracking-up every time.Viewed through a lens of world-weary detachment, from the lonesome perspective of my rural hermitage, much about “humanity” and its/our priorities seems absurd. Only...it's the wrong kind of absurd. It's the violent absurdity of angry apes, teeth bared and daggers wet w/the blood of our own fresh-cut noses, committing atrocities in the name of some obtuse fairy-tale codex as the women cheer-lead in apocalyptic ecstasy. It's the absurdity of a downtrodden population-at-large placing self-image above self interest and turning on each other...of tribes within tribes defined by some frivolous hate du-jour, force-fed by the incessant rhetoric of flatulent figureheads, by demagogues unable to see the breadth and beauty of humanity beyond the razor-wired pale of their own sorry lifetimes.
It's enough to make you shudder...to don reading gloves so as not to stain one's fingers w/the noxious ink of the headlines and turn abruptly to the funny pages. To turn away from the horror and towards a kinder sort of absurdity. One that-too defines us, I'd like to think.
~ ~ ~
What year is it, Beetle Bailey? Ageless in your Army uniform--are you a peacetime soldier, or training for imminent deployment? To Korea maybe? To Vietnam? Within the neatly inked lines of Camp Swampy, the violent details of American military adventurism matter not; what matters is that Sarge has yet-again assigned our lazy-but-loveable hero to potato-peeling detail, and that work-shirkin' hijinx are sure to follow. Further down the page we find the feckless (and for some of us, painfully relatable) Andy Capp. He's skint again, walking home from the pub w/a thought-bubble over his head. A set-up for the inevitable punchline wherein, three panels later, “the missus” bonks him with a rolling pin. Everyone sees it coming, but if you're a comedy simpleton like myself you chuckle anyway.“But wait a minute Ernst, haven't you (in this very diary) sung the praises of arch and cerebral literary humorists? Of Borges and Nabakov...of Terry Southern and J.P. Donleavy and George Saunders? How is it you're laughing now at Hagar The Horrible? Aren't the funny pages like, populist pap? Aren't they...lowbrow?”
You think so?
Marcel Duchamp was an intellectual, so he (and other erudite Frenchmen) wrote at length to justify/explain his clever-at-the-time assemblage sculptures, which they dubbed “Readymades”. Pablo Picasso was a genius, and didn't need to explain shit. He regarded his own brilliant assemblages as but another afternoon's work--the dude wrapped one up and was on to the next. I'd place Ernie Bushmiller in the latter camp. For 44 years Bushmiller sat at his drawing table, sketchin' gags for Nancy; his surreal, minimalist, fever dream of a comic. These gags could be incomprehensibly esoteric at times; subtle to the point that weeks would pass w/out a traditional “punch-line”. And then, out of nowhere, he'd drop a strip so original that you'd give pause to marvel: this bit of absurdist post-modern pop-art is running hot off of small-town presses? Comedy at its best is deceptively subversive...
“Good grief!” exclaims Charlie Brown as the kite-eating tree claims another victim. That Schultz’s protagonist was a clinically-depressed child speaks volumes to his worldview; and I can relate. “Good grief!” is as apt a summation of the human condition as I've heard...the eternal disappointment of the headlines echoing, pages later, in abstract. But every grimace, every frustrated shrug and eye-roll were offset by the manic exuberance of Chuck's id; a puppy-farm beagle who, when he wasn't staring expectantly down at his food bowl, would don goggles, helmet, and scarf, climb into the cockpit of his Sopwith Camel and take-off to battle the Luftstreitkräfte...to confront his nemesis, the Red Baron.
Set aside for a moment the implausible wonder of a dog piloting an aeroplane--the idea of a beagle wearing a scarf and goggles alone is wild and terrific.
Our better angels, I suspect, have a sense of humor...let's heed them.
