Disney: ‘If You Can’t Make Fun of It, It Ain’t Worth Thinkin’ About’

WHO WE ARE-Cartoon [kahr-toon] Noun: 1. a sketch or drawing, usually humorous, as in a newspaper or periodical, symbolizing, satirizing, or caricaturing some action, subject, or person of popular interest. 

My grandfather was a cartoonist; an artist-illustrator hired by Walt Disney to do design work on Fantasia, Snow White and Pinocchio. He designed “Dance of the Hours” and was paid handsomely – but always figured that the day he took a couple of minutes during the depression to draw a blue “76” in an orange circle for the Union Oil Co – and then audaciously charged them $25! – this was his greatest commercial artistic triumph!

My stepfather was a cartoonist – a Disney animator on Peter Pan and Cinderella who went on to work for Hanna Barbera and every other shop in town. He directed the Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Gay Puree …a movie about straight cats.

My mentor in the film biz was a cartoonist – from Disney – a genius at combining animation and live action and doing special effects in the camera. Through all those contacts I knew many other cartoonists – guys+ gals who drew Mickey Mice and princesses and Yogi Bear and Fritz the Cat and Playboy cartoons. Funny, bright, hard drinking, “Show Biz is the hardest-way-to-make-an easy buck“ folk to whom nothing was sacred. Especially Walt. And everything subject to humor, satire, caricature and ridicule. Especially Walt. “If you can’t make fun of it, it ain’t worth thinkin’ about”.

Who knew it was a dangerous calling?

"Dictators of the right and the left fear the political cartoonist more than they do the atomic bomb." – Art Buchwald

We love our freedom of speech in this country – political+editorial cartooning was once of staple of provocative American journalism. Think Thomas Nast and Mauldin and Herblock and Paul Conrad – who illustrated Nixon’s downfall from his drawing board on the enemies list. Sensationalist “Yellow Journalism” is named for a comic character: ‘The Yellow Kid’. 50’s funny page’s Pogo Possum philosophized about the McCarthy Era: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” – a portmanteau philosophy cartoonist Walt Kelly carried over to tree-hugging environmentalism in the ‘60’s+70’s. 

Pogo was regularly censored by newspapers (Kelly often created alternate “bunny strips” with bowdlerized content: cute rabbits telling safe, insipid jokes. Kelly told fans that if all they saw in Pogo were fluffy little bunnies, then their newspaper didn't believe they were capable of thinking for themselves … or didn't want them to.) These were not the bad old days, the press still regularly censors ‘Doonesbury’. Publishers and advertisers and readers don’t like feeling uncomfortable. And editorial cartoonists are an endangered species.

FRANCE IS A WHOLE OTHER PLACE: They don’t poison the garden pests, they cultivate+ eat them!

President de Gaulle complained: "Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?" ("How can you govern a country which has two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?")

The magazine Charlie Hebdo – (named after Charlie Brown – hapless alter ego of the most gently provocative+subversive cartoonist) subtitles itself as 'le journal irresponsable'.The magazine and its cartoons are intentionally provocative and often offensive–and provocativity provokes. Subversion subverts. Offensiveness offends. Truth spoken to power through humor isn’t always supposed to make you laugh. It’s OK to be nervious+uncomfortable; it’s OK to share+spread the discomfort. Comfort is highly overrated. The man-or-woman in the arena/the small dedicated few who change the world - do not live in the comfort zone.

We are proud of our American separation of church+state. The French revolution enforced the separation of the secular from the sacred with the blade of the guillotine - because the church and the aristocrats were two faces of the same problem. In America a church wedding is the ‘real ‘wedding; in France the city hall visit is the real ceremony – the rest is quaint superstitious nonsense. When you have no religion sacrilege comes easy. Charlie Hebdo is an equal opportunity offender …regularly offending Christians, Muslims and Jews. The Right and the Left. And the comfortable Center.

It was Voltaire who said “I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.” This philosophy comes close to being a French national attitude about free speech. And Voltaire, lest we forget, was a satirist.

Satire is a powerful thing; it’s a lens through which 4LAKids views LAUSD. Luckily for me LAUSD isn’t organized religion, so when I mock it True Believers don’t feel more than a passing urge to rub me out.

Unluckily for the kids LAUSD isn’t organized anything! …though the FBI is working on the ‘(dis)organized crime’ storyline.

If you look at anything too closely it isn’t funny at all. If you are the coyote vanishing into a dot to the accompaniment of a slide whistle – and become a puff of desert dust at the bottom of the cliff – that isn’t funny either.

(Parenthetically wandering off-topic: I suspect that “Pearson” is the “Acme” of this cartoon.)

Humor isn’t funny. It is, like Art-Not-Being-Pretty: Truth.

Truth with a clown nose. And, as the Firesign Theater said: “I think we’re all Bozos on this bus.”

And speaking of the bus:
Ray Cortines is back!
And Caprice Young is back!
Wait! …isn’t this where I got on?

We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again,
And by that destiny to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come
In yours and my discharge.

We are all Charlie Hebdo on this bus.

●●●

In other news – (there WAS other news):

• Governor Brown gave his state-of-the-state-address on Monday and pitched his new budget on Friday. In both he promised more money for education and touted local control of education funding.

• The LA Times business section had an article about how there shouldn’t be many layoffs upcoming – employment +job security is looking good.

• Superintendent Cortines sent a memo to the board saying just the opposite. LAUSD has a $321 million (and growing) deficit, he expects challenges to the District’s local control plan and layoffs are inevitable: “At the same time the District is investing in the new programs, there will be cuts. Because there has not been “rightsizing” or necessary action taken in the past, there will be hundreds of notices anticipated coming to the Board in February. “ LAUSD, like the State of California in the LA Times editorial, needs to move beyond Running on Half-Empty.

• A Labor Board judge tossed out former Supt. Deasy’s woebegone teacher evaluation plan. (Actually the judge ruled that back on Dec 24th – we got to wait until the fifteenth day of Christmas to find it out.)

• President Obama is proposing tuition-free Community College (Save your bellbottoms: Back in the olden days day when I went to community college and the first Governor Brown was governor it was tuition-free!)

• Education Secretary Arne Duncan is beginning to advocate for repeal of No Child Left Behind. Not reauthorization. Not tweaks+waivers. Repeal …as in Prohibition. (Of course he wants to keep the testing and the teacher evaluation!)

School starts back on Monday, a new year and a new semester. It's a reset. Let’s be safe+successful out there.

¡Onward/Adelante!

 

(Scott Folsom is a parent and parent leader in LAUSD. He is the former President of Los Angeles 10th District PTSA and represents PTA as Vice-chair the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee. Scott is a member of the California State PTA Board on Managers. He blogs at the excellent 4 LA Kids  … where this perspective was originally posted.)

-cw

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 4

Pub: Jan 13, 2015