Just Say Know

"Rewards and punishments are the lowest form of education." —Zhuangzi, c. 286 BC

There’s a story about Oscar Wilde walking through a birthing ward in a London hospital in the late 1800s and saying to an inconsolable mother who had just given birth to a pair of stillborn twins, “Buck up and be jolly, my dear lady! Stillbirth is a sign that God has a sense of humor!” It is a quote that can simultaneously give one hope for the future of humankind while also demonstrating why we are almost certainly doomed as a species. On the one hand, as a sheer spectacle it is an inspiring demonstration of one man’s ability to use humor in a real-life situation that the average onlooker would deem inhospitable to joke making—the conceptual equivalent of striking a match underwater—and then, more important, it is somehow proof that reality itself, as it is defined by cold, hard fact, is never the sole determinant of truth in any given situation. That is to say that nothing, by mere virtue of its literal physicality, is wholly self-defining and nothing can happen in the world that cannot be skewed by interpretation and made into something else. The obliteration of Hiroshima by an American B-29 on the morning of August 6, 1945, for example, was a glorious day for those just sitting down to dinner in Washington, D.C., and praying for the safety of their sons, brothers, uncles, and fathers serving in the Pacific and something considerably less glorious for the 80,000 plus Japanese living in the Pacific who would never see lunchtime.

Jokes, particularly in cartoon form, can take a truth, even a horrible one, and convert it into a satirical concept that, because it is an opinion and no longer tethered to fact, is malleable and therefore capable of either rising above or nestling beneath, like a whoopee cushion, those truisms that the cartoonist hopes to subvert. Humor, then, like any other form of mollification, can often dislodge the disease of hopelessness from any situation that appears hopeless and invigorate the joker’s chosen audience with something that feels funny and therefore more hopeful. However, because the diagnosis of a disease is never what cures the patient, it is important to never allow a joke to become a distraction that diverts attention away from a situation that may in fact be truly hopeless and really dangerous. Those who found the blacklisting and red-baiting of the McCarthy era reprehensible knew that mining Herblock cartoons for confirmation of their feelings was neither the solution to the problem nor the only action required to comprehend all that was wrong with clannish senatorial subcommittees, any more than readying a slide whistle and a pair of cymbals for protection from a safe that is being pushed out a 10-story window above a crowded sidewalk will alter the physics of gravity sufficiently to temper the tragic consequences. No—as a rule the best cartoons are the ones that simply tell a reader to look up in the direction of the open window where there is the unmistakable sound of a heavy metal safe being pushed along a gravely floor toward the blinding sunlight, figuring that the rest is up to the bystander.

On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club variety show premiered on ABC at 5 p.m. with the Mattel toy company as one of its sponsors and something called the Burp Gun as its main product. In the 60-second commercial that aired that Monday afternoon, a young boy with a crew cut and eyes like an assassin creeps through his living room hunting imaginary elephants with a machine gun, eventually turning to blast away at the camera and to surround himself with more smoke than was likely released at the Boston Massacre, his bloodlust for defenseless elephants apparently satisfied with the slaughter of everybody out there in TV land. It marked the first time in U.S. history that a national advertising campaign was targeted at children, which, as proven by its rapid and enormous success, revealed just how much money could be made by selling directly to a demographic renowned for savage impatience, having no significant income beyond pocket change, and answering every attempt made by grown-ups to curtail its spontaneous and impulsive behavior with audible sighing, puking noises, and full-on rage. All of a sudden the message coming from those in power—that is, from those who sanctioned corporate-friendly mores and subsidized their broadcast—was that it was okay to relentlessly hound your parents for toys and recreational items that you felt you deserved simply because you thought it would be really neato to have them.

In many ways, it was the Burp Gun and the similar ad campaigns that immediately followed that inspired the radicalism of the 1960s by encouraging those who had no significant income beyond pocket change to exercise their savage impatience and anti-authoritarianism when hounding their government for a stronger, more equitable democracy that they felt they deserved simply because they thought it would be really neato to have one. Thus was demonstrated a terrifically delicious irony so rare to real life but so frequently played out in superhero comic books, ancient mythologies, and resurrection stories the world over: namely the triumphant emergence of good from evil, of truth from bullshit, of victory from defeat.

It was an opportunity for all the bootlicking, straitlaced squares to buck up and be jolly at the encouraging sign that God has a sense of humor.

Another unintentionally radicalizing element established in the early 1950s as a safeguard specifically designed to prevent radical free expression from flourishing was the adoption of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) in 1954 by the Comic Magazine Association of America. The group was initially created as a way to avoid government regulation following the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings, which had been convened earlier that year to determine the harmful effect that comic books were having on young readers The newly formed association announced that by acting as a self-regulatory body tasked with the job of issuing the CCA seal of approval only to those magazines that complied with a long list of decency guidelines, the comics industry would be able to clean itself up without enduring a nightmare of bureaucratic legislation requiring expensive legal enforcement and never-ending political stewardship.

Chief among the code criteria were:

· Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals.

· Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority.

· Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols that have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden.

· No comic magazine shall use the words “horror” or “terror” in its title.

· In every instance, good shall triumph over evil and the criminal will be punished for his misdeeds.

Reading less like a well-intentioned child protection order and more like a totalitarian decree devised to muzzle any artist or writer not in complete agreement with the absolutism of a paranoid and tyrannical state, the CCA might rightly be credited with single-handedly launching, if not directly then certainly by proxy, the Underground Comix movement of the 1960s and 1970s, as evidenced by the parody seals that occasionally appeared on the covers of magazines such as Zap Comix and Mom’s Homemade Comics.

Most remarkable about the Comics Code Authority and the support offered by both the Comic Magazine Association of America and the 1954 senatorial subcommittee of the United States government is not that it was allowed to function for nearly 60 years, but that it was ever established in the first place. Similar to the House Un-American Activities Committee created years earlier for the purpose of harassing anybody who knew all the words to This Land Is Your Land or had ever congregated outside of church with more than 10 nonrelatives at a time, the mere existence and largely uncontroversial tenure of the CCA and similar contrivances of censorship beg the question: What is it, precisely, about the assemblage of a vast number of learned human heads that more often than not encourages a uniform stupidity rather than an accrued intelligence? How is it possible for people to so easily ignore, en masse, all the warning signs that typically come before debilitating public policy and crippling protocols of social behavior that are so contrary to common sense and basic decency? In 1936, the Nazis organized a massive get-together in Nuremberg for malleable nincompoops woozy from countrywide economic hardship and called the gathering Reichsparteitag der Ehre, or “Rally of Honor,” which made sense given the desperate circumstances of a hopeless citizenry seeking to bolster its flagging national identity with jingoism.

For 1950s America, however, with the fiscal seas being so calm, the threat of foreign invasion being so unlikely, and the opportunities to expand personal freedoms and cultural ingenuities being so viable, to introduce panic and fear of democracy-leeching boogeymen who were rumored to be forever poised to devour both our optimism and our intelligence was just as pernicious as an ad campaign marketed to children and devised for pure profit. To quote George Meyer, executive producer and lead writer for the longest running animated sitcom in U.S. history, The Simpsons: “I hate [advertising] because it irresponsibly induces discontent in people for one myopic goal, and then it leaves the debris of that process out there in the culture. An advertiser will happily make you feel bad about yourself if that will make you buy, say, a Bic pen.”

Luckily for all of us, there are cartoonists who know how to use Bic pens and all their multicolored cousins in a way that defy conventional expectations and contradict the bleak notion that it is the pen and not the person that knows what it is writing.