CSotD: Noncritical Errors, or Fun with Fiction
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Having railed against inaccurate history the other day, let’s relax a bit and note humor that relies on either not knowing much about the topic or not caring about it.
If you’re going to read comics at all, you have to have a well-developed willingness to suspend disbelief, not only to accept talking animals but to accept the idea that dogs not only sleep on their backs but could do so perched on the sharp peak of a doghouse roof.
There are certain strips — Frazz being chief among them — that regularly send me clicking off to Google and Wikipedia to fact-check odd premises, only to find, for instance, that, yes, there is indeed such a word as “callipygian.”
In the spirit of the strip, I shouldn’t have provided that link, but here’s another that I loved so much that the original hangs over my desk:
The point being that Jef Mallett believes in making people think and in rewarding those who do, this one requiring you to know three different things in three different disciplines.
Bizarro, by contrast, floats back and forth between True Facts and Popular Notions, not simply dependent on whether it’s one of Wayno’s dailies or Piraro’s Sundays, and today’s panel is so defiantly inaccurate as to dare you to give a damn.
Pterodactyls died out about 136 million years ago, while the first cavepersons appeared about 300,000 years ago, so it isn’t even close.
The point being that, if you’re going to get hung up on that, you probably won’t enjoy the comics page anyway.
And the joke is that being lifted up by the hair makes wrinkles disappear, the pterodactyl being a comparatively safe way to get a laugh, since the old standard of cavemen dragging cavewomen around by the hair is not simply inaccurate — women rule the roost in most hunter/gatherer societies — but offensive anyway.
Though there’s also an anthropological element in the other woman saying “You look awesome!” that ties into Jeff Foxworthy’s classic “Do these pants make my butt look fat?” routine.
Men have trouble learning that there are times to be supportive and times to be frank, and that the time to be frank is “never.”
Which brings to mind those pictures on Facebook which invariably get replies of “How beautiful!” from women friends while men are quiet, perhaps thinking about how their children, raised on electronic timekeepers, would not understand the old expression “could stop a clock.”
And some men foolishly continue to write a paragraph or two after they should have gone on to the next cartoon.
Today’s Pardon My Planet sent me to the Internets to confirm what I was pretty sure of.
I knew Sir Isaac hadn’t actually written any laws of matrimony. That was the joke.
But it occurred to me that he avoided the topic not simply in his writing but in his personal life, and, from what we know of his personal life, that was a very good thing for the women of England, one of whom would otherwise have had her hands very full indeed.
Fortunately for whatever statues of him may exist, he was too firmly focused on chemistry, physics, optics and alchemy to make any rude, iconoclasm-inducing statements about women and minorities.
Not an incel so much as an ohthankgodcel.
And today’s Brewster Rockit is a headscratcher in that, first of all, there are way too many (meaning, more than five) people who really do believe things like Stonehenge and the pyramids were left behind by aliens.
Which, by the way, is a sort of racism that assumes pre-industrial people were also stupid.
While the fact is that we’ve figured out that Stonehenge and a whole lot of other megalithic structures will accurately predict the winter solstice but we haven’t got a clue as to what else they were for, and it seems unlikely that they were simply there as a one-day-a-year calendar.
So who’s stupid now?
(Brewster Rockit being another of those strips that will occasionally send you to the Googles to confirm that he’s smarter than you. Which is probably why Blondie and Beetle Bailey do better in those phony comics polls papers love to run.)
Juxtaposition of the Day
First, thanks to John Deering for the megalithic segue. I’ll even forgive him my suspicion that the ancient Egyptians didn’t use a whole lot of mortar.
I like the dubious connection between Deering’s joke about a cynical prediction taking 4,000 years to come true and Stahler’s observation of the losses we’re about to realize.
I don’t plan to be one of the 200,000 dead, though I’m not foolish enough to lay down a bet on it, but I am being impacted by store closings.
I was an Amazon customer back when Jeff was sending out mousepads and insulated cups to thank his customers, the reason being that the closest bricks-and-mortar bookstore was a $12 ferry ride and 40 miles away in Burlington.
It was great if you were already there, but not worth the trip when you just needed a copy of “The Sun Also Rises.”
Now, as we prepare for the recovery, we’ve got a lot of small businesses announcing that they won’t be able to reopen, but we’re also losing both our K-Mart and our JCPenney.
Proving that it raineth alike upon the just and the unjust.
And sending us either to Wal-Mart or on-line and ‘scuse me if I don’t see much moral difference.
And, finally
I like Jimmy Margulies’ commentary on BunkerBoy’s need to fence himself off from his adoring public, but Frost didn’t say that. His grumpy neighbor did.
What Frost said was
That wants it down.
Which does not diminish Margulies’s thesis, but, in the poem, Frost was a great deal more diplomatic than Mayor Bowser, in the reality.
Though he only had to deal with the antisocial SOB once a year, which likely helped.
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