[QUOTE=mr. jp]
But that jews are not connected to real life, I haven’t heard about this stereotype. Can you explain the comment for me Gordon?
[/QUOTE]
The strip doesn’t say that at all. The line of dialogue reads: “[Almost every single Christmas movie makes] not even the slightest attempt to say something substantial about… real life.”
The line is about Christmas movies, not Jews.
[QUOTE=lissener]
That’s not “reading too much into it,” which implies the fault is entirely on the reader’s part. Unless you are the greatest cartoonist ever, with an absolute alignement between the art you have in your head and the art that ends up “on paper”–the Mozart of cartooning–then you must acknowledge the possibility that your intent, noble as it may or may not be, has not been perfectly realized.
Is that possible?
[/QUOTE]
It’s not just possible – it’s intended that readers make some connections between the two ideas (shitty Christmas movies and Jews) that aren’t in the strip. They have to in order to make sense of it. I’ve already acknowledged that the strip can be interpreted any number of ways, some of which are pretty ugly (anti-semitic, if you must). That was the idea.
But the strip itself raises none of the anti-semitic “messages” that anybody here has raised – not explicitly, anyway. There is no “explicit” anti-semitic message, as you said before. Look up the word “explicit,” lissener, because you used it incorrectly.
The strip inarguably implies that the Jews in Hollywood make shitty Christmas movies. But it says nothing of why.
There are NO words in this comic strip commenting about Christmas or Jews of any kind, however, and nothing is stated about those two things. There are absolutely no words establishing any relationship between Jews and the secularization of Christmas. The characters do not even acknowledge any connection between the host of Jewish names in the credits and their musing about the sad state of Christmas movies. They don’t see it: “I wonder why that is?” is not a statement; it’s a prompt for the reader to start wondering that themselves, and to see the answer that eludes the characters right in front of their eyes. But any connection that the reader establishes between the names and the shitty Christmas movies (based on their juxtaposition) is entirely imagined by the reader.
In making any connections, or in expanding the scope of the strip beyond the subject of Christmas movies (which is kind of retarded, since it’s a movie-themed comic strip), readers have to realize that all the contextual stuff they’re bringing to the table is just that: the reader bringing it to the table, and not something that was already on the table to begin with.
Anyway, this is pointless. I don’t want to debate basic literary theory here. It’s a humor comic strip, not Shakespeare.
