"Garfield" Is Not Funny

And now for the lighter side of things . . .

Like any ailurophile, I started out liking Jim Davis' strip "Garfield."  After "Peanuts" had popularized dogs with Snoopy, it was refreshing to see a cat in the funnies, especially a cat as the title character in a strip.  But, after reading "Garfield" for so long, I realized something - the strip isn't very funny.  In fact, once you've read it long enough, you realize it's not really funny at all.

The humor of "Garfield" - if it can be called that - centers on not-so-humorous character traits, depicting Garfield as a cynical, gluttonous, oversized and somewhat nasty cat.  This is in stark contrast to Charles Schulz's "Peanuts,"  which used gentle humor and light philosophical musings to make us laugh or smile. "Garfield" barely elicits a humor-based reaction at all, because there's nothing funny as a pet you'd never want to own.  A lot of people would love to have a dog like Snoopy; who would want to have a cat like Garfield?    

"Garfield"'s "humor" is more mean-spirited than anything else, as evidenced by the strip below.

It's also inane . . .

 . . . and flat-out dumb.

Jim Davis didn't really start his strip to entertain comic-strip readers.  He wanted to create a cartoon character that could make him lots of money through merchandising, in the form of Garfield plush toys, Garfield radios, Garfield calendars, Garfield pencils, and so on and so on and so on.  Davis doesn't even draw the strip anymore; he farms it out to hired artists, which is why Garfield's appearance has changed over the years.  When Davis started the strip in 1978, this is what Garfield looked like.  

Not exactly an adorable kitty.

Charles Schulz gave Davis pointers on how to draw better when Davis first started, but Davis paid little attention to Schulz's advice. Schulz grew to resent "Garfield"'s success, as he saw the strip as inferior and was annoyed by all of the merchandising.  "Peanuts" was (and still is) merchandised too, of course, but for Schulz, merchandising came second behind the quality of the strip, his top concern. 

Meanwhile, Patrick McDonnell, who created the pet-centered comic strip "Mutts," took an approach more similar to Schulz's than Davis'.  He uses the same simple, gentle humor that "Peanuts" is known for, and while his drawing is much less sophisticated than Schulz's was, his two main characters - an adopted dog named Earl and an adopted cat named Mooch - are quite cute.  McDonnell's art work is not unlike the drawings in classic early-twentieth-century strips like George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," a strip Schulz idolized. ("I always thought if I could do something as good as 'Krazy Kat,' I would be happy," Schulz said in 1967. "'Krazy Kat' was always my goal.")  Schulz would call "Mutts" one of the best strips ever, saying that it was "exactly what a comic strip should be."

Also, McDonnell uses his strip to promote animal welfare and pet adoptions from animal shelters, believing there are few greater loves one can give than to a domestic animal who needs a home. "Garfield," by contrast, stands as an argument against pet adoption.

"Garfield" will likely continue for the next few years, but I don't think it will be remembered so well once the strip is retired.  And it will not likely be rerun like "Peanuts" has been since Schulz died in 2000.  But it serves as a reminder of the biggest thing wrong with the American dream - some people just fake it 'til they make it.

It makes sense that "Garfield" thus took off in the 1980s, the decade that gave us Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, two of America's biggest fakers.

*

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was a kid.  I drew a comic strip - mainly for my own amusement - patterned after "Peanuts."  It was lousy. The jokes were stupid, the characters were one-dimensional, and the drawings were little more than sophisticated stick figures.  One lesson I learned from drawing my own cartoon is that just because you love doing something doesn't mean you're good at it.  A friend of mine, incidentally, draws a serial superhero cartoon for a local paper.  And it's gosh darn awful.  I don't have the heart to tell her that, as a cartoonist, she's even worse than Jim Davis.    

Lee Mendelson: 1933-2019

Lee Mendelson, a San Francisco-based TV producer, was a friend of "Peanuts" creator and Bay Area resident Charles Schulz in the mid-1960s, working with Schulz to sell a "Peanuts" television show and getting nowhere despite Mendelson's success with a special on San Francisco Giants baseball player Willie Mays that had aired on NBC.  Then, on a Friday afternoon in 1965, Coca-Cola's advertising agency, McCann-Erickson, contacted Mendelson's office to ask if he and Schulz had a format for a "Peanuts" Christmas special to air on TV for the soft-drink company to sponsor.  Mendelson said yes, and he was told to send the format to New York by Monday - special delivery.

Mendelson thanked the agency representative, hung up the phone, and quickly dialed Schulz - not to tell him he'd sold their Christmas format, but to tell him that they needed to come up with one by late Saturday morning to send to New York.  Usually, a format for an animated TV special took a month to develop.

Schulz was not angry at Mendelson at all. In fact, Christmas had always been a favorite topic of his in his strip, and he had several ideas of how a format could be executed.  They managed to work out a rough outline and get it sent to New York in time for the deadline.  In spite of the downbeat plot of Charlie Brown being depressed about Christmas, the absence of Santa Claus, and the religious overtones of the storyline, Coca-Cola sponsored it on CBS - reluctantly.  It was so low-keyed and serious, no one thought it would be a hit.  The animators used real children's voices for the characters.  Snoopy didn't talk like other cartoon animals.  The colors were all muted. There was even same political paranoia involved ("We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket," Lucy says. "It's run by a big Eastern syndicate, you know.").  And what was up with that piano jazz from Vince Guaraldi? Yet "A Charlie Brown Christmas," a simple little animated-cartoon story about trying to find the true meaning of Christmas through a Nativity play and showing love to a scraggly little Christmas tree - a real tree - caught the imagination of Americans and defined Christmas like no other Christmas special had done before - not even "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" of the year before, 1964 - and no other has done since.

Lee Mendelson died at 86 on Christmas Day this past week - sort of like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson dying on July 4, 1826 - and "A Charlie Brown Christmas" - now airing on ABC every December - is greatest legacy.  It revolutionized animated holiday storytelling, and he, Schulz, and their partner Bill Melendez would produce many more "Peanuts" holiday specials with the same light touches and subtle messaging about the holidays - Thanksgiving, Easter, Valentine's Day - that the Christmas special had.  Mendelson had helped set the template with his choice of Guaraldi's music and his interest in Hans Christian Andersen's' "The Fir Tree," the latter prompting Schulz to come up with the story of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree; those elements of simplicity would reverberate in the simple storytelling of future "Peanuts" specials.

Mendelson would take that same approach to animated features.  It was in 1969 - December 1969, fifty years ago this month - that the first "Peanuts" movie, A Boy Named Charlie Brown, premiered.  It gave humility and pathos to Charlie Brown's plight as a loser in a delightful story in which he discovers his talent for competing in spelling bees and makes his way to the national spelling contest.  It brought the same uncluttered plot development and melancholy touches to the big screen that had worked on television, and it, along with the 1968 Beatles animated movie Yellow Submarine, set a new standard for cartoon movies.  The late sixties were a fruitful period for movies for adults and more mature adolescents seeking deep, honest movies that did away with Old Hollywood proprieties,  and there were many movies of that sort released in 1969, such as Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider.  Mendelson and Schulz, however, saw an unintended consequence in the trend toward mature films in that movies were becoming much less family-oriented and that there were no movies to take children to.  In 1969 the only other major movie for kids was the Disney studio's The Love Bug, the movie that made a Volkswagen named Herbie a movie star.  A Boy Named Charlie Brown, in the more grown-up milieu of the New Hollywood that was emerging in the wake of Walt Disney's death, shone like the evening star.  It also had a perfect message for kids.  Like Herbie, Charlie Brown was a plucky underdog, and like the animated Beatles of Yellow Submarine, he was daring and adventurous, but the movie also reminded us that not everything works out the way we want it to.

Another producer like Mendelson (below) couldn't compete in today's tech-happy, computer-animation-driven, blockbuster entertainment world.  We should be happy that he came along at the right time and played a bigger role in bringing Charles Schulz characters to life than anyone except Schulz himself.  RIP. 

The White Album 50 Project: "Happiness Is a Warm Gun"

John Lennon had begun writing two separate songs about odd sexual turn-ons in 1968 but couldn't finish either one. Then, while the Beatles were recording what became the White Album, producer George Martin showed Lennon an essay from an American magazine. The provocative title prompted Lennon to start writing a third song about sex; when strung together with the first two, the result was one of the most astonishing - and definitely one of the most subversive - Beatles songs of all time. 

The essay, written by a fellow named Warren W. Herlihy, was not about sex but about firearms, and the magazine was the May 1968 edition of American Rifleman, the official magazine of the National Rifle Association.  Herlihy's essay was about how he bonded with his son John through the sport of shooting when, one day in 1957, he was going out on a shooting excursion with friends and John, then a boy of seven, asked to tag along.  Soon John had his first rifle - a small Remington Model 514.  He later moved up to a Winchester Model 37.  Herlihy lovingly wrote about how he bonded with his son by teaching him marksmanship through shooting clay targets and discs until John was ready to hunt, his proud pop describing their hunting trips in great detail:

"The years went by.  Happy years. Hunting ducks and geese in mud up to the arm pits, rain streaming down our necks.  Through those years that kid of mine made kills that would turn a veteran shotgunner blue - not with cold but with envy."

Waxing rhapsodic in 1968 about the happiness and the joy he derived from going out shooting with John, Herlihy pondered the beauty of his son's first rifles, which had been kept as mementos of the warm memories of their adventures.  "The bores are clean and the barrels have a good bit of their original bluing," Herlihy wrote.  "Sometimes I open the cabinet to admire their polished stocks and well-oiled metal."  Herlihy took pride in the young man John had become at the age of eighteen - old enough to be drafted into the service but in 1968 still too young to vote.

Those guns, Herlihy concluded, stand for "the comradeship and the good times a father and son can have when they share a love of guns and shooting." 

The essay's title?  "Happiness Is a Warm Gun."

This essay has to be read to be disbelieved. I urge you to click on the above image twice to enlarge it so you can read it for yourself.  A textbook example of a celebration of conservative American values - family, fatherhood and firearms -  it is at once elegantly written and superlatively sick, equating a father-son relationship forged over a love of guns and a desire to shoot animals with taking your kid to his first Yankees game. Violence may not be as American as cherry pie, as H. Rap Brown once opined, but it is certainly as American as baseball.

And while there's no evidence that either George Martin or John Lennon read the essay, they were understandably appalled by the tone-deafness of its title.  "I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say," Lennon later remarked.  "A warm gun means you just shot something."

The title of Herlihy's essay was a play on "Happiness Is a Warm Puppy," "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles Schulz's 1962 book, in which Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy and the rest of the "Peanuts" gang offer numerous definitions of what happiness is.  (The book also inspired the song "Happiness," which was a tune from the 1967 stage musical You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown.)  By perverting something as fine and wholesome as "Peanuts" for a title for an essay celebrating firearms, Herlihy was practically begging for a crazed genius like John Lennon to turn his gun romanticism on its ear and bring out the underlying phallic implications of gun worship  - by turning the fetish for rifles and shotguns into sexual images of smoldering barrels and smooth triggers.

Oh, this was gonna be good. 

The song begins with Lennon musing about a woman who's "not a girl who misses much," and the gritty guitar line accompanying him already makes it clear what he's talking about.  Then Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's drums bubble up and explode as Lennon explores the dirty, ugly, grotesque side of sex, set to guitars that bite and scratch like alley cats.  Lennon seethes with morbid fascination about this woman getting a thrill from a velvet-gloved hand up against her side, then he focuses on a man's unsavory hobby of using mirrors on his boots to get excitement from looking up girls' skirts; as the guitars spit, the nauseating pervert relieves himself of what nauseates him by eating a carved soap likeness of his wife and crapping it out on public property - "donated to the National Trust."  Imagine being so disgusting yet so disgusted yourself by your wife that you symbolically turn her into two in the loo.  These images, inspired by LSD visions Lennon had while tripping with Beatles publicist Derek Taylor, then devolve into a demented waltz articulated by the nastiest guitar solo ever committed to a Beatles recording.

The brooding, mean register Lennon's voice assumes as the music gets raunchier conveys his own seething desire for sex, speaking of it in terms of getting high - "I need a fix 'cause I'm going down."  (Lennon always insisted that he was speaking of a sexual and not a narcotic high, but the dirty, sordid nature of both is still powerful  - and powerfully pungent - in his stoned delivery.)  Yoko Ono, his teacher and his elder, is his dealer: "Mother Superior jump the gun."  He wants to jump her bones, and she's going to jump his pistol.  "Sex is inextricably bound up with the violent phallus of the gun," Tim Riley wrote in his Beatles song-analysis book "Tell Me Why," "which plays off the junkie's 'shooting up' and the dirty flasher 'shooting his wad' before it lurches into the final episode."    

And that's when things really get interesting.    

The song goes into its third section - it reaches its climax, in fact - in an unlikely depiction of ecstasy as Lennon exuberantly espouses the happiness he feels from his warm gun in a send-up of silly R&B tunes like Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl" as Paul McCartney and George Harrison back him up with choruses of "bang-bang, shoot-shoot."  At once, Lennon is satirizing sexually repressed Americans by, as Bob Duggan of BigThink.com wrote, commenting on the American firearms fetish "that commingles sex and gun violence into one dangerous, creepy brew" while laughing at that other American cultural embarrassment - doo-wop.  The insane and the inane.

But, just as importantly, Lennon is inverting kinky sex and gun violence into a celebration of the feeling he gets from sexual activity.  In "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," he turned ugliness into beauty, frustration into gratification, perversion into liberation, and, as Newsweek once opined, death into love.

And he did it by making a complete mockery of Warren Herlihy's idea of happiness.

Paul McCartney and George Harrison both considered "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" to be their favorite song on the White Album, no doubt in part because it took down the "guts and guns" mentality of American conservatism.  The song goes through many intricate time signatures and complex meter changes that would test the abilities of any musician; it's one of only two Beatles songs that lack anything resembling a definable verse/chorus structure ("You Never Give Me Your Money," from Abbey Road, is the other song).  It became a challenging song to record, and all four Beatles were closely involved in working out the arrangement; indeed, it's one of the very few times the Beatles worked together as a group on  the White Album, which is the most likely reason why Paul and George loved it so much.  "A dogged band effort spread over fifteen hours and nearly one hundred takes," Beatles author Chris Ingham wrote, "the resulting two minutes 40 seconds of acid-folk, progressive rock and doo-wop was described by Lennon as 'a history of rock and roll.'  It's not quite that, but certainly one of Lennon's final masterpieces for the Beatles."

For his part, Warren Herlihy wrote that he was never sorry he gave in to his son John's pleas to take him shooting, but I have no doubt that he regretted the choice of the title for his essay after what the Beatles did to it.  Who knows what John Herlihy - who would be 68 today - thought of the whole thing.

The song collapses to an end with a final tap of Ringo's drums.

Afterglow. :-)     

Comic Relief

I haven't read a comic strip in ages.

"60 Minutes" re-aired an Andy Rooney essay last night in which Rooney lamented that what used to be called the "funny papers" aren't so funny anymore. I agree to a considerable extent, since I had found myself reading the comic strips in the newspapers and finding myself chuckling mildly rather than laughing out loud. Old favorites have outstayed their welcome in my local paper (some of which have been continued by hired artists after the deaths of their creators), while some strips I like - Jim Toomey's "Sherman's Lagoon," for example - don't appear there. The only strip that still guarantees a real laugh, in fact, would have to be Stefan Pastis's "Pearls Before Swine." But I don't even read that anymore.

One big reason I don't read the comics these days is this: More and more strips - not just the serious ones of the "Mary Worth" variety, but funny ones as well - have ongoing stories. Though my mother and I subscribe to a local paper, we only get it Thursdays through Sundays to save money. If I don't read comic strips like "Funky Winkerbean" or "Louann," which increasingly use ongoing storylines, on Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, how I can figure out what's going on? (Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean," incidentally, is a strip that used to be hilarious but now has grown more serious and brooding, with only flashes of its original brilliance.)

Other strips have disappeared, either dropped by my paper (I miss "Marvin") or discontinued by their creators. Canadian cartoonist Lynn Johnston retired her strip "For Better of For Worse" in 2008, and even though it could be annoying - I sometimes suspected a bit of hostility toward the male sex in this strip about a family of five - it was interesting in that the characters grew and aged in real time. Those readers of the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger who want to know what Johnston's strip was like can read reprints of the color strips in the Sunday comic pages. The state of comic strips in general is probably best demonstrated not by the reprints of current strips from creators on sabbatical but reprints of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts," as Schulz died in 2000. The fact that "Peanuts" is still more popular than current strips is roughly the equivalent of people still buying Beatles records because they're just not into the Hold Steady.

Comic strips are clearly going the way of rock and roll these days.

Stefan Pastis himself once dismissed most comic strips as banal and irrelevant, and he's been proven right so much that I don't miss the comic pages on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Or any other day, for that matter.