CSotD: Humor, Satire, Reality

There’s nothing all that new if you take Guto Dias’ cartoon in the broad, overall sense. Both graphic and literary artists have had to leave creativity aside when entering the commercial arena, and if some leaks in, it generally gets committeefied into pap before anybody in the public sees it.

But the advent of AI is making the issue more dire, as we see animators being replaced by computers. My immediate reaction to this was that most animation has turned into crap anyway, and not just in animated TV shows but in more serious stuff.

I remember, as a small lad, a segment of Disneyland in which Walt walked us through the process of capturing the falling of raindrops in Bambi, and it’s been a long time since anyone did work like that. I also remember everyone’s jaws dropping over the use of CGI in a stampede scene in the Lion King and maybe we should not have been so celebratory, but here we are anyway.

Tuesday, the Washington Post published a guest essay by Garry Trudeau, which was an extended bit of satire which, as someone who has written that stuff in the past, I didn’t think worked. It was like disinterring Art Buchwald, who was funny a generation or two ago but whose schtick doesn’t have much zing today.

The article (which didn’t include a “share” button) was topped with a picture of the fictional fellow Trudeau pretends to have interviewed, with the disclaimer “Note: Picture of ‘Rocket’ featured in this story, is AI generated to protect his identity.”

Tee-hee! The Post is pretending a fictional character is real! Tee-hee! The Post is saving money by not paying a real artist to whip up a picture of a pretend person!

I think we’re going to have to amend Sturgeon’s Law to state that 98% of everything is crap.

While I’m in grumpy old man mode, I’ll deal with today’s Lola (AMS) because I, too, am not only immensely over 30 but just got an upgrade on my phone and I hate it.

Of course, I recognize that there’s always a learning curve and that, while nothing much changed, I’m going to need to pick up on a few things here and there, but I think that I’m going to disable the assistant because it keeps asking me to do things.

The things I want to do are (A) make phone calls, (B) text a friend or (C) look up something on Google, but this new phone is like a reminder that, when you move into a new neighborhood, you should be wary of the first person you meet because he’s gonna turn out to be really hard to get rid of.

Every time I pick it up, it asks “Would you like to …?” and suggesting “Ask me ….”

All I want to ask it to do is bugger off and I hate to be rude.

I’ve also heard that Alexa is going to be enhanced with AI so that she can be a major PITA instead of a discreet helper. I intend to take very good care of my current model so we don’t have to have any enhancements around here.

Dagnabbit.

And another thing. I particularly like this Lynn Hsu cartoon because when I looked her up the other day to provide a link to her work, I realized she seems to be several decades younger than I am, so it’s not just my advanced years that make me hate movies that alternate between mumbling and explosions.

Speaking of movies, I watched Meet John Doe the other day, a classic Frank Capra movie from 1941 with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwick, and afterwards looked up A Face in the Crowd, a classic Elia Kazan movie from 1957 with Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal, and boy oh boy are they a progression of where we’ve gone as a society.

I recommend both, but watch them in the order they were made, because the first is heart-warming and the second is scary as hell. And way too relevant.

But nobody mumbles in either of them, because that’s not how acting was done back then.

Juxtaposition of the Day

The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee — KFS

Betty — AMS

You might think that I’m juxtaposing this pair because Orville is cooking and Betty and Bub are at a restaurant, but that’s not the connection.

Edison’s grandpa has had a cooking show this week, and it’s mostly a reminder that people don’t cook anymore, though you sure wouldn’t know it from social media, where you see amazing recipes for things that make everyone oooh and aaah but that they will never make themselves.

And Betty is about being out in public and Bub looking over his wife’s shoulder at a pretty girl at the next table.

I’m probably the only person to connect them this way, but they reminded me of an old thing about why National Geographic and Playboy are similar: They both feature fascinating, well-written articles and beautiful, breath-taking photos of things you will never actually experience in real life.

Which in turn made me think of this Mauldin cartoon for which I don’t have a date, except that Look Magazine went out of business in 1971. Life started going in and out of business about a year later, but still pops up with “special issues” now and again.

I looked up National Geographic and Playboy and they’re both still being published regularly, but I think Playboy is using a lot of CGI. At least somebody there is.

And speaking of dying print, Non Sequitur (AMS) notes the takeover of newspapers by vulture capitalists. When I was working in the trade, I considered myself lucky to be reaching retirement age before retirement reached out for me.

I fled from a paper that was having buyouts to one that was then sold to Lee Enterprises and escaped to edit one that got sold and escaped again to one that went out of business and finished my career working for an Alden paper.

All the bloodshed, betrayals and horrors of Candide, but without the laughter, which brings us back to satire, only Candide is a good one, illustrated here by Sheilah Beckett, a for-real artist.

I like the work of for-real artists.