If it’s not meant to be a dig at Islam, what’s the joke? Outhouses stink, a fact that BC (the character) is apparently ignorant of? Yeah, right. I agree Hart wasn’t very funny post-1975 or so, but the “jokes” were bad, not non-existant. Here there’s no joke whatsoever, just a guy going into an outhouse and complaining that it’s stinky. There’s a message here, folks, and it ain’t that BC has never been in an outhouse before.
The outhouse one is pretty clearly just your standard juvenile potty humor. The crescent moon is the symbol for an outhouse, and the “slam” is necessary to indicate that he’s gone into the outhouse. It’s vertical (in the shape of an “I”, if you insist) because that’s the way to fit it in between panels.
You’re a very smart guy… but come on. The panel makes no sense without the Islam context. Simply walking into a bathroom and proclaiming it stinks isn’t a joke or a punchline, even for someone as lazy as Hart.
I tend to agree that this strip may have been intended as a dig against Islam - largely because of how unnecessary (and awkward) the SLAM is. The strip would have flowed much better if buddy was shown closing the door.
I do recall that Hart sometimes used giant “sound words” in the interstitial spaces of his strips, but this doesn’t really do a very good job of saying “Buddy has reached the top of the hill, entered, and closed the door.” Why is it necessary for him to have SLAMMED the door with all of the emphasis of Fat Broad WHAMMING a snake?
True - if this was a Jim Davis strip, I doubt I would give this interpretation much weight. However, it’s Johnny Hart. I think he was deliberately (if ineptly) propagandizing.
As a Christian I find the menorah-cross strip to be offensive just because it’s using religious symbols (both Christian and Jewish) in unflattering ways.
My impression about the outhouse strip is it’s a joke about how stinky one’s own shit is. He doesn’t notice the smell until he’s been in there a while. That is, after his business had progressed. Self-deprecation is a common form of humor.
Trying to get analytic about it, there’s an obvious parallel between the moon on the outhouse and the moon in world. I think that’s saying it’s not just the outhouse that’s stinky but the world as a whole. The strip is saying our shit is stinking up the whole world. More a political statement than humor.
I guess I don’t associate the moon with Islam, so that didn’t even occur to me. Trying to find an “I” around “SLAM” is like trying to find “SEX” in the background of a Disney cartoon. Simply silly.
I don’t understand how people are saying they are not seeing the humor in the strip, and that the only way the punchline works is with the Islam context. Fred Basset got by on much worse punchlines. I mean, seriously, people. It’s just a bad nyuk-nyuk kind of joke that I could imagine my wacky uncle saying. It’s mildly amusing as is. With the Islam interpretation, it’s just weird.
Okay, have you any *other *evidence of Hart’s anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic stance? Anything besides dubious interpretations of just two cartoons? And just being pro-Christian doesn’t count. It’s *possible *to be a fundie without hating other religions.
Well, I can see people saying that it’s not funny, or that the punchline doesn’t work, but I’d expect that they should at least see how it’s supposed to be funny.
The real test, I think: If nobody told you that “SLAM” written vertically was supposed to mean “Islam”, or presented the strip as something potentially offensive, and you just saw it in the course of reading the comics page in the newspaper, would the Islam connection have ever occurred to you? Myself, I would have just thought, “Hm, that wasn’t very funny today”, and moved on to Wizard of Id.
I was just going to say, when I first looked at the second strip I didn’t register the SLAM part and I still thought it was an anti-Islamic statement. Adding the SLAM to the equation just really slams the point home. Also, why the second crescent moon in the sky? Coincidence? No way. And no, I don’t see any joke in there otherwise… but then I don’t have any wacky uncles.
Agree. The SLAM is awkward, and if it were just a potty joke it would work better without it. The first panel is the setup, the second is the “wait for it,” and the third is the, er, punchline. Interjecting the SLAM messes the timing up for no advantage in the, er, storytelling.
Somewhere along the line I got the idea that Hart acknowledged the outhouse strip was a poke at Islam. Wikipedia actually says he denied it - which doesn’t prove anything but does make me a lot less certain that’s what he was going for. So I’m going to back off of my assumption that he was proselytizing with that one.
The SLAM is there to indicate that he has gone into the outhouse and shut the door. Without it, the sequence would have been more confusing. It’s hard to indicate an action like shutting a door in a comic, and Hart frequently used sound effects instead of drawing the action.
Here’s an example of him using sound effects as a substitute for drawing action panels in other strips. Note the layout of the effect word is exactly the same as in the outhouse comic, with the word “WUMP” instead of “SLAM”.
edit: Darn, that’s actually a post-Hart strip, with Mason Mastoianni.
It still constitutes a dastardly slur against Iwump.
Those who insist that the outhouse strip must be a commentary on Islam because otherwise the strip is unfunny and incoherent are forgetting that Hart’s strips were frequently unfunny and incoherent. B.C. was always a regular subject of “please explain this strip to me” threads. I do wonder a bit why the strip takes place at night, but I also think that if Hart had intended the crescent moon to be a symbol of Islam he would (should) have added a star. And reading significance into the vertical “SLAM” just smacks too much of finding Paul-is-dead clues on Beatles albums for my comfort.
Well, the walrus was Paul–but Jesus was the carpenter . . .
shrug
To me it’s the same type of joke as walking into an actual sauna and saying, “hey, it’s like a sauna in here!” (from Seinfeld.) Walking into an outhouse, dropping a deuce, and then saying “Is it just me, or does something stink?” is the same type of humor, although not quite as funny as the sauna line. I could see my uncle (or even me, really) going for that exact type of joke, walking into some place with an obviously overwhelming odoriferous environment and pulling out that punchline. Or any other situation that is very obviously X, and saying “Is it just me, or is it X”? (Like being down 12-0 at a Cubs game and turning to your pal, saying, “Is it just me, or are we getting our asses kicked?”) I really don’t understand why it’s so hard to see the joke here. You don’t have to find it funny, but the humor is basically in the stating of the obvious. The Seinfeld example has the added humor of playing with a cliche, but the BC joke also has the weaker cliche of “Is it just me, or …”
Here’s another hilarious Johnny Hart strip from July 3, 2006. The guy really had a thing for crescent moons.
But it doesn’t really seem like a joke that way. I guess if you have a really weak sense of humor, something like, “Boy it’s hot” or “Wow, you’re tall” is funny. The Seinfeld thing is at least sort of meta. Stating the obvious is just…well, making a statement. By that rationale, anything is funny.
That’s not a straightforward pun on “lunatic”? That’s how I read it.
Well, it is funny to me. I know I’ve made or heard jokes with that structure before. Then again, I do tend to laugh at almost anything.