Cartoon Culture
EVEN as a small child, I instinctively sensed that American cartoons seek to furnish a deeply unpleasant caricature of human nature and, moreover, impose this exaggerated condition on the animal kingdom. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, I was inevitably exposed to the staple celluloid diet of Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Tweety Pie, Daffy Duck, Roadrunner and various other five-minute monstrosities. Whilst each imbecilic episode seemed to be centred on the endlessly repetitive themes of violence-begets-violence, dishonesty-also-begets-violence and stupidity-begets-even-more-violence, I always found these cartoons to be incredibly loud and abrasive. What I assumed to be the typical American style of entertainment seemed brash and irritating, cheap and nasty, shallow and unintelligent.
Apart from the fact that many of the writers, creators and voice-overs on these productions were Jewish, thereby representing a mere segment of what ordinarily passes for 'American' culture, I have since come to question what on earth was behind it all. There is the profit motive, of course, and the likes of Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera made untold millions back in the day, but in a more pathological regard one has to ask why violence was always the solution? Tom treats Jerry badly and gets battered by the black maid or savaged by the ferocious bulldog; Wile E. Coyote chases the beeping bird and continually ends up at the bottom of a canyon; and Elmer J. Fudd stalks his furry prey over and over again and ends up having his shotgun broken over his ridiculously ovular head. And so it goes on.
The main topics under consideration, at least for those who even bother to think beyond the surface banality of this formulaic trash, also have a distinctly Jewish flavour. No disrespect to ordinary Jews, of course, but among the animated tropes on display one clearly finds the eternal maxim 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'. Scooby-Doo is perhaps the exception, in that a group of hippy students has its own non-violent way of dealing with criminals. Nonetheless, we can only speculate as to the precise impact these cartoons had on my generation and those prior, but a cursory glance at United States foreign policy over the last century might tell you everything you need to know. Put it this way: the Tweety Pies of this world are not quite as innocent as they seem and there is always a serious need to tear the mask from the face of the proverbial janitor.
Have to beg to differ on this somewjat, though you have a point about some aspects of the violence. What I got from cartoons was very different from jewish humour. One of the most valuable things I got from cartoons was a sense of the trickster, whom SK Langer calls the jack in the box, always popping back to life irrepressibly. Though there is violence, anyone who lives with animals and plants sees violence every day, and of course our teeth that are symbols of laughter, love and fun are also used to rend beautiful animals and plants aoart, after, or even before we have killed them. The lesson for me is not adequate, because we have to deal with the guilt and tragedy of inevitable violence we all engage in to survive, but one of those ways is the trickster. I want to think that our soiuls have a lot of trickster in them - no matter how much we suffer, we will pop back up again, and say to our tyrants, What's up Doc?, munhing on a carrot. (Bodhidarma dolls?) A lot of people including Jewish humourists seem to think that Jewish humour has a monopoly on self-deprecating humour, but my WASP /Redneck family did that stuff all the time. One of my favourite lines is Daffy's " Goodbye cruel world!" as he pretends to die. And the slapstick practical jokes in cartoons seems to me pure Redneck - my Dad and Mom's relatives were always doing that kind of idiocy - if you know the tv series Jack-Ass, that was my Dad' and Mom's family exaggerated. True, I did not always like those jokes when plaYed on me, and I feel guilty when others suffered, but some of it was pure joy.
When Mad Magazine adopted the "What, me worry?" image our Dad recognised it immediately from his youth - pure Redneck shit, making fun of a kid who is foolishly optimistic, while also recognsing that is what we all do at times. You could say that kid is a meshugannah, but he is also the universal idiot in all of ofus, in many ways that stupid side of the trickster. Still, the contradicitons of animal cartoons are extreme - some speak, and others do not and are eaten, etc. And Walt Disney's hypocritical sentimentality is unacceptable. But even Diusney is capable of intelligent humour that I still find valuable: the crows in Dumbo and the monkeys in The Jungle book - though overtly racist representations of American black culture, they are actually celebrations of the deep intelligence, and life-affirming humpur of this culture that does not necessarily contradict a sense of tragedy as well (as Frederic Douglas says, in the most cheerful slave songs you can hear the tragic, and in the saddest you can hear joy - still relevant to the best of blues and jazz).