Although I generally agree with you – Johnny Hart is a repugnant bigot, from all signs, and is deceitful about his bigotry as well – you’ve got a novel use of “unanimously” above, considering that you excluded from the sample of opinions the sixth cartoonist who didn’t agree that this was bigotry.
I mean, it looks to me like there’s unanimous agreement about this cartoon in this thread, too, as long as you only count your opinion and mine.
Daniel
Actually I was simply pointing out that I thought Family Circus and Zippy were the most unfunny comic strips.
Your interpretation of my motives is interesting considering the subject matter.
Slacker
They’ve found it suspect for good reason. And one of them is a professional semiologist who’s made a damn living out of conducting far more indepth symbolic analyses than this. Care to refute that reason or will you just stick to making snide comments. I mean, God knows the world needs more of those.
I firmly await your in depth refutation and justification for the fatuous “argument” that this is all just some big potty gag gone wrong. In the meantime I’m gonna side with the PhD holding expert. I hope you don’t mind :rolleyes:
Oh, sorry - so you were just sort of posting a complete non-sequitur regarding which comics are the least funny? I guess I read too much into it.
Hmmm…I don’t think it’s all that “interesting” that I might expect your comment to actually have something to do with the discussion at hand.:rolleyes:
I’ll say that I’ve been following this story basically from the beginning. I was reading Gene Weingarten’s original chat in which a poster suggested that the cartoon might have been a thinly veiled slur against Islam. (The article Ben Hicks links to references this chat.) I’ve been a long-time follower of Weingarten’s writings and have read the other article Ben mentioned in which Gene interviewed Johnny Hart, and the latter described his fundamentalist Christian ways. Does this give me some sort of special insight into either Hart’s or Weingarten’s thought processes? No. Nor am I related to or friends of either.
I think that Gene tends to cast a more critical eye on Hart’s work than on anyone else’s, simply because he knows the man and what he really believes. CAIR, as Airman Doors points out, only really appears when they’ve got a bug up their butt about something. Truthfully, no one will know except Hart what he was thinking when he drew that, but I’m willing to cut him a tiny bit of slack, because of the mental excercises one has to go through to interpret this cartoon either way.
However, I refer you to a different chat from Sept, '02:
The guy who comes up with a cartoon this bizarre probably hasn’t fired on all cylinders in a while. I don’t think he should be barred from the comics pages or anything, because I doubt there is anyone, no matter how fundie Christian, actually taking him seriously anymore.
I’m glad you believe everything you’re told, Ben. Did you know that there were WMDs ready to fire at a moment’s notice in Iraq, too? :rolleyes:
Think for yourself, dude.
lol… easy there buddy, I’d hate for you to choke on the “Trident” gum you’re chewing (almost half a dozen dentists recommend it).
I’m a person who is interested in statistics. You’re using them to make an argument, stating that 5 cartoonists at least tenatively agree that this cartoon is intended as a religious commentary. This, to you, is a “unanimous” opinion. I call this a “bullshit” opinion. Five people, no matter who they are, or what the context, are not statistically significant in my eyes. It’s just five opinions.
And your PHd sounds like he graduated at the top of the class:
“Marshall Blonsky, professor of semiotics at the New School in New York, said for one thing, people don’t slam outhouse doors.”
I picture a bunch of professors sitting around discussing the finer points of this poopy joke.
“Well, maybe it is just an outhouse.”
“Please, Milton! People don’t slam outhouse doors! They close them quietly.”
“Has anyone here ever used an outhouse?”
“No, I tried to once, but someone knocked on the door and I couldn’t go.”
I’ve been a fan of Jonny Hart’s “B.C.” since it debuted. They guy is capable of astonishing feats of cleverness, word-play, subtlety, etc.
Example: a guy is building a monument out of stones, each labelled with a virtue: “Intelligence,” “Courage,” “Honesty,” etc. The monument crumbles, and the fragments of the words, as they lie on the ground, now spell out “Destruction.” Another character chastizes the sculptor. “You made ‘Intelligence’ out of sandstone?”
Another example: about five years ago, the character Peter got on a raft and had a lengthy adventure. He was accompanied by a pelican and a hermit crab, and made several other animal friends on the way. He must have passed through a time warp, because he encountered such things as steel pipes and blocks of styrofoam. It was one of the few “novels” that have been written in the daily-comic-strip format.
(Walt Kelly did something equally clever with the daily strips that were collected as “Pogo, Prisoner of Love.”)
The problem is that Jonny Hart goes through mood swings that make Dr. Laura Schlessinger look like a stable personality. He exhibits gigantic mirths…and gigantic rages. He’ll happily go for six months on puns and dinosaur gags…and then burst into a furious Jeremiad against gay marriages.
By the way, if you want something offensive against Islam, how about the pagan idol “Neebookanezzer” in “Crock?” Howzat? Northern African Arabs in the 19th century…kneeling in front of a carven stone oracle? Now that’s blasphemy!
For my part, I cast my vote for “I don’t know.” I can’t tell exactly what Hart had in mind in the outhouse strip. He’s fully capable of using sound effects to indicate ideas; I just can’t tell for sure if that’s what he meant this time.
(By the way, the best use of sound effects EVER was in a Tumbleweeds strip where a horse went by,with the sfx “Clip Clip Clip” – and the little words fell to the ground behind it to form tracks in the sand. Now that’s SURREAL!)
Trinopus
Galloop galloop galloop…
The original article was God, That’s Funny…until he Started Drawing Cartoons About Jesus by Gene Weingarten, April 4, 1999.
Oh please. Academics * live * for this kind of stuff – finding cryptic, controversial meanings in even the most innocuous content. Back in school, I had to wade through pages of literary criticism where some moderately famous academician would hold forth on the homosexual subtext in Huckleberry Finn, or some other such drivel. (Take a look at the “Pooh Perplex” to get an idea of what I mean.)
After reading a few on-line articles by Marshall Blonsky just now, I trust his interpretation even less. He seems to make a point of adopting a supercilious, cleverer-than-thou persona that rubs me the wrong way.
Anyway, if someone has a bunch of B.C. paperbacks, I wonder if they could do the following research. I seem to recall that the outhouse “jokes” are a recurrent theme in B.C. comics. That is, he uses pretty much the same scene fairly often. If someone could review his opus (preferably pre-2001) and see if there are outhouse strips with the crescent moon, then we could maybe make a fairly strong argument that it’s a lame joke rather than a nasty hidden commentary on current events?
Okay, Slacker, that was pretty funny :D. Nevertheless, it IS interesting that of the six cartoonists the reporter talked with (I’ll assume for the moment the reporter is being honest), five agreed that it was an anti-Islam cartoon.
This isn’t statistically significant, perhaps, but it IS a view of what some experts in the field think.
If I asked six Shakespearean actors whether Hamlet was crazy, and five of them told me that he wasn’t, then I’d give some serious weight to the interpretation that he wasn’t. If I asked six rock musicians for their opinions of Phil Collins’s bass player, and five of them told me the bass player stole all his riffs from old ABBA albums, why, I’d suspect that bassist of plagiarism.
People familiar with a medium are going to give informed opinions on works in that medium. Even if their opinions aren’t statistically significant (and there’s no real evidence that a statistically significant poll would be valid, anyway), their informed opinions ARE significant.
Furthermore, the points they raise are good:
-Why does the comic happen at night? As someone else pointed out, most of BC’s comics occur during the day, and there must be some reason for this one not occurring during the day.
-Why the huge slam? It doesn’t have any relevance to the “punchline”, and isn’t how folks use outhouses. Usually the word “slam” indicates anger or excitement in a comic strip; if the character had been running to the outhouse, it would’ve made some sense at least.
-What the hell does the punchline indicate?
Johnny Hart has before come up with bizarrely convoluted explanations for his comics (are you seriously telling me his menorah-into-crucifix, “it is finished” comic wasn’t intended to imply that Jesus transformed Judaism into Christianity? Pshaw!). He’s not got a record of honesty on such matters. I see no reason to believe his explanation, given his previous dishonesty and his explanation’s inadequacy in actually, well, explaining the comic.
It’s possible something else is going on besides a slam on Islam, and I’m open to other theories. But unless they account for the night sky and the major slam and the punchline, such theories are inferior to the theory that this is an anti-Islam comic.
Daniel
I was wondering when this would make the Pit. It’s been up at this site for a couple weeks, including a poll:
>(Take a look at the “Pooh Perplex” to get an idea of what I mean.)
I hope you know that The Pooh Perplex was written as satire of critical commentary. There is also a sequel, “Postmodern Pooh.” They are brilliant and right on the money.
While I do agree that the attack on Islam is the most reasonable explanation for his comic, I think we’re forgetting that not only is BC never funny at all, I’d say about one strip a week makes no sense to me whatsoever. Either he’s sneaking in a LOT of barbs at various religions and proselytizing in completely incomprehensible ways, or his strips just don’t contain anything resembling jokes much of the time.
Face it. The guy’s senile. He’s old, his comic was never exactly brilliant and time has worn away what’s there. It’s reasonable to think that most of his strips are basically just the ramblings of a guy who’s old enough and well-enough respected that no one really wants to say anything, assuming he’s not long with the world.
Yeah, the symbolism was heavy enough in this comic that I lean strongly towards the anti-Islamic interpretation, especially given the offensive and also semi-comprehensible attack on Judaism linked above. (Which, by the way, depicts a menorah with only seven candles, and uses the seven motif throughout the strip. Anyone else appalled at this kind of ignorance?)
Whether or not it was an attack on Islam, though, it’s not worth a fuss. Like I said, the guy’s mind is fading. He’s a befuddled old man who doesn’t really have much sense of what’s appropriate and what’s not anymore, and while I think papers should probably stop carrying the comic, it’s not worth getting our collective undies in a bunch over it.
The argument that the joke isn’t funny just doesn’t wash. That means nothing. The funny pages are chock full of pathetic non-jokes, and the “is it just me, or does it stink in here?” bit is exactly on par.
I swear to god, someday there’s going to be a Ziggy strip which consists of a single frame of Ziggy looking at the reader and saying simply, “I stubbed my toe.”
Of course. The idea being that much of critical commentary is so risible that there’s plenty of material for some tongue-in-cheek satire. However Ben Hicks was citing the opinion of this semiologist as if his academic credentials actually gave him additional insight into the hidden meanings of the comic strip. I’m arguing that his academic credentials may actually just give him additional experience in BS’ing spurious interpretations where none exist.
With all due respect, Garry Trudeau wholeheartedly disagreed with them. He certainly can’t be called a Christian apologist or right wing proselytizer, can he?
To the person that mentioned the menorah cartoon by Hart, he made no bones about what that meant. Why would he suddenly start denying what he really intended with a cartoon? Not very likely. As to the other statements, from a Christian standpoint (i.e. his standpoint) those are factual statements. He has no right to say them?
Marshall Blonsky is a pretty well respected semiotician. What you perceive as “blowing smoke” may be a fine tuning of the senses to semiotic subtleties. On the other hand, it might be blowing smoke. Probably it’s a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
CAIR and B.C. deserve each other. Like Johnny Hart, the leaders of CAIR are also boring, whinny religious fanatics.
Semiotics is about as scientific as phrenology. One may as well praise someone for their ability to pick out great mood crystals or some other such crap.