Comic strips

Younger Generation Stripped of Comic Awareness

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D. D. Degg Updated: April 3, 2020 at 1:37 pm EDT 1 minute 3 comments

Remember when Donald Trump compared Pete Buttigieg to Alfred E. Neuman?

Apparently a very small minority of people under 50 had a clue who Alfred was.
Though it hasn’t stopped editorial cartoonists from using the “What, Me Worry?” kid:

I was reminded of the earlier comparison when Seth Myers used a comic strip character in a recent “A Closer Look” segment. As The Hollywood Reporter notes in a story about the late night host now working without a studio audience:

At the top of Wednesday’s “Closer Look” segment, Late Night host Seth Meyers made a reference to comic-strip character Andy Capp.

“I never would have made an Andy Capp reference in front of a live audience because the silence would have been deafening,” Meyers noted. “But these days, that’s the reaction to everything.”

A Seth Myer producer adds:

“We were laughing that an audience would not know who that is,” Late Night executive producer Mike Shoemaker told The Hollywood Reporter. “But we don’t have a [studio] audience. So go ahead!”

The Andy Capp reference takes place during the first 35 seconds of the April 1st Late Night show.

I’m past the demographics that the show aims for; but as a comics fan it is upsetting that popular comic strips like Andy Capp are supposed to be virtually unknown among the majority of the younger people.