CSotD: Dreolín Humor on Boxing Day
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Today is Boxing Day or St. Stephen’s Day or Wren Day (Lá an Dreoilín) or, as I call it, the point when if I haven’t used a cartoon yet it’s probably become irrelevant because they’ve all been about Christmas for the past three weeks.
Fiona Katauskas takes an appropriately irreverent and silly look at Boxing Day. It is named for the tipping of servants that day, but the custom of handing out charity from the manor house seems to bring up the ghosts of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party which is absolutely brilliant but should make your skin crawl as Laura goes between her upscale family’s aloof social planning and the harsh realities of the working-class people in the town below.
It should at least summon the ghost of Lonnie Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman:
Some folks give tips at Christmas
And some of them forget
So when he picks their bins up
He spills some on the step
Now, one old man got nasty
And to the Council wrote.
Next time my old man went ’round there
‘E punched ‘im up the froat
Whichever you prefer, I like her final suggestion. We’ll shelter in the box for now and deal with all that another day.
And we can count on Frazz (AMS) to offer something appropriate and silly and appropriately silly. There are people who say puns are the lowest form of humor but those are people who can’t think up any and generally don’t get them when others do.
He who laughs last resents feeling like an idiot. But when it’s a good pun, an intelligent victim enjoys the craftsmanship and admires having been played.
There’s also value in bad jokes, as seen in today’s Rabbits Against Magic, because it takes colossal nerve to unleash a really dumb gag, which is what brings the laughter.
Steven Wright makes his mark with clever twists on common expressions, but Steve Martin — who is also a brilliant man — began his career making incredibly stupid jokes and daring his audiences not to laugh.
Neither approach works with humorless people, but, then again, what does?
Carpe Diem (KFS) makes a dumb joke here, but it’s clever, because it’s a joke about dumb people who use obvious passwords. And if dumb people think PASSWORD1234 is going to fool anyone, it would be just as dumb for someone working in submarines to think they’re clever by using PING.
It’s such a dumb joke that I felt guilty for laughing at it, which in my book is a measure of success.
Bizarro (KFS) takes more of a Steven Wright approach, though Wright works with one-liners while Piraro and Wayno plant seeds. Having been raised on the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia and non-fiction books about dinosaurs as we knew them 75 years ago, recent discoveries have rocked my world.
What has been most surprising, though, is how much sense it makes to step outside those hidebound visions of giant gray thunder-lizards and ponder colorful animals who may have sported feathers. And since we already knew that alligators and crocodiles care for their young, why should it surprise us to find that dinos may have as well?
Or maybe, as Bizarro suggests, they were just pranking us. It’s both silly and thought-provoking.
Will McPhail’s work frequently appears in the New Yorker, which specializes in gags about contemporary society, in this case, the writers who camp out in coffeeshops and well overstay the time normally spent having a cup of coffee.
It’s something I genuinely don’t understand, because I’m so distractable that, whether or not I felt it was fair to tie up a table with a $4 cuppa fancy joe, I wouldn’t be able to get anything done. When I went from freelancing to working at a paper, my biggest adjustment was learning to work in the newsroom, so I can’t identify with anyone who would voluntarily try to work amid hustle and bustle.
Though I realize that coffeeshops have to accept what makes them popular, and be prepared to stay in business, starting with their furnishings, which seem chosen specifically for people who show up alone, with homework.
Jesus and his disciples probably had to push together a bunch of those little tables.
Speaking of the generation gap, which is still a thing, as it has always been, Pearls Before Swine (AMS) addresses the demise of the prank call.
Also speaking of writers, since there have been many thoughtful pieces (known in the biz as “thumbsuckers”) about how cell phones have disrupted crime and mystery stories. You can no longer have the hero heading for danger if it could be averted by somebody calling him with a warning, and getting lost is largely your own fault unless you are truly in the backcountry.
Meanwhile, songs like “Memphis” and “Sylvia’s Mother” make no sense to anyone under 50, while Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven barely made sense to those under 75.
And on the topic of modern inconveniences, The Other Coast (Creators) raises some questions. I won’t argue about how much a few feet of snow deadens sound or question the difference between the roar of a leaf blower and the putt-putt of a snowblower.
It’s less an issue of volume than of persistence. The operator of a snowblower just wants to clear the driveway and get back inside where it’s warm, while operators of leaf blowers become obsessed with blowing that last single leaf into the pile and clearing out the cracks in the sidewalk, and will stick with it for three times as long as it would have taken to get it all up with a rake.
And while I feel for that poor bird, I’ve already got my doors and windows shut tight when the snowblowers come out, but I’m about 50 yards from a parking lot where Leaf Blower Guy practices for autumn by being Grass Clippings Blower Guy all spring and summer.
Okay, one last Christmas cartoon, this from Liza Donnelly, because, while I have little patience with greedy kids, I had a 16-month-old who enjoyed Christmas morning but was deeply disappointed when it didn’t happen again the next day. We had to console him without laughing.
Anyway, it’s Wren Day in Ireland, so here’s a song to cheer yez up:
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