Cartoon Essays

And that’s by design.

The special opens up with this quote from Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA”

Tell me somethin’ / You mothafuckas can’t tell me nothin’ / I’d rather die than to listen to you…

In Sticks & Stones, Dave Chappelle sets himself up as some kind of defiant martyr fighting the good fight against so-called “cancel culture” or any moral busybodies who get offended by any jokes he or any of his other comedian friends might have told at any point.  Many of those who express praise and enthusiasm towards Sticks & Stones defend it on similar grounds, writing off any criticism of it as people being “too sensitive”, “offended”, and “trying to cancel Dave Chappelle”.

Enough dancing around the subject.  I found the special really tired and juvenile.  What he’s doing here is thumbing his nose at any critic who had dared to take issue with anything he has said in his prior Netflix special in a way that eschews the thoughtfulness that Chappelle is capable of for petulance.  That might have been okay if it was funny regardless, but I didn’t think it was.  A better version of what Chappelle tried to do here was more than 30 years ago, in Eddie Murphy: Raw.  Eddie Murphy opened up this special complaining about criticism he got for his last special from Mr. T, Michael Jackson, and the gay community with much funnier jokes.  The crescendo of this bit was his brilliant story of Bill Cosby calling him on the phone to browbeat him about his foul language.

A bunch of the critics praising Sticks & Stones are calling it revelatory and a breath of fresh air in this moment of time.  Really?  All this is is Chappelle’s version of “PC gone mad” in response to criticism, which is not a novel concept.  Carlos Mencia’s whole shtick 15 years ago was to crack jokes using racial stereotypes and then spend the next ten minutes guilt tripping the audience into laughing by expressing faux-martyrdom aggrievement over “political correctness” or “sensitivity”.  This is as cliche a comedy staple as “take my wife, please”.  Other comedians who have gone this exact same angle include Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne Barr, Larry the Cable Guy, Ricky Gervais, Bill Maher, Chris Rock, Andrew Dice Clay, Lil Duval, Jim Norton, Patrice O’Neal, Nick DaPaolo, Joe Rogan, Doug Stanhope, Rob Schneider, Lisa Lampanelli, Eddie Griffin, John Cleese, George Carlin, Aziz Ansari, Sarah Silverman, DL Hughley, Tracy Morgan, Adam Carolla, Amy Schumer, Tim Allen, Aries Spears, Russell Peters, Redd Foxx, Dennis Miller, Mike Epps, Patton Oswalt, Jeff Dunham, Sam Kinison, and Louis CK just to name a few.

Despite this being a cliche, I think taking the angle Dave Chappelle took here is more expedient for himself than ever.  A part of the reason is because our society has become more politically polarizing than ever.  A lot of the discourse around Sticks & Stones falls along politically partisan lines (yes, I know that includes myself too).  Most of the people defending Dave Chappelle so ardently are right-wing pundits/publications like Breitbart, Dana Loesch, and Gavin McInnes and most of the people criticizing Chappelle are liberal/pro-LGBTQ+ publications.  Chappelle and his defenders are using this special as a denouncing of “cancel culture”.  I hate that term and I hate the framing around it even more because it’s so vaguely defined other than the fact that it’s nakedly partisan.  The screeds against “cancel culture” are not so subtle digs at the left and reinforce a narrative that the left wants to censor everything and that the right are the true defenders of free speech and free expression.  It’s weird that the “cancel culture” designation never applies when the right-wing gets upset about Nike, Gillette, or Keurig coffee makers.

I think a better name for all of this is “outrage culture” and it’s nonpartisan.  So much of our public discourse is handled on social media, particularly Twitter, that rewards shorter and more attention-grabbing hot takes over lengthy, nuanced analysis.  And one of the easiest ways to grab attention is by being outrageous or inflammatory.  In response, online publications of all political stripes write their headlines in inflammatory ways that grab attention in order to be shared on social media.  Even if the actual article has more nuance to it, most people don’t read past the splashy headline anyway.  In regards to politics, it has further defined people, whatever their personal views may be, in reaction to what they aren’t or what they disagree with.  It’s partially why so many people have blamed things like the 2016 Ghostbusters film or Star Wars: The Last Jedi as the reason they voted for Trump or why they’ll vote for Trump again.  It’s also why so many of the people praising Sticks & Stones so zealously have attempted to use it as a rallying cry for Trump and Trumpism.  This also goes for any liberals who expressed a desire to buy Nikes or Gillette razors after the right-wing meltdown over them.

Sticks & Stones was a rallying cry to anybody that has defined themselves or their politics to being anti-politically correct (which isn’t only right-wingers, but largely encompasses right-wingers) to look to Dave Chappelle as a hero to wrap themselves around.  I felt the same way about Louis CK’s stand-up “comeback” where he mocked school shooting survivors, millenials, and non-binary kids.  CK was hugely popular on college campuses and liberal crowds despite never being “politically correct”.  He was also often very thoughtful in the way he towed that fine line when tackling touchy subjects.  But in light of his sexual misconduct scandal, he must have figured that he permanently burned a bridge with that crowd so he pivoted to a crowd that doesn’t care that he sexually harassed multiple women.  This same crowd also tends not to think too highly of the Parkland shooting survivors for their gun control activism or trans and non-binary people.

The thing is, Dave Chappelle and Louis CK don’t give a damn about any of these right-wingers or their pro-Trump causes.  They’re just looking out for number one.  Breitbart wouldn’t write fawning articles about Chappelle if the focus was on him expressing discomfort over a white person’s laughter over a blackface sketch he was doing on his show.  They wouldn’t rally around Louis CK either if he was still telling jokes expressing confusion as to why women would want to date men based off violence against women statistics.  Conversely, Nike and Gillette don’t actually give a damn about putting an end to police brutality or toxic masculinity.  If they were to discover that they could make more money off of using “Blue Lives Matter” sentiment or objectifying women, they would do it in a heartbeat.  This is all this whole shit is.

The Lifetime channel has just released a six-part docu-series called Surviving R. Kelly, which interviews the R&B icon’s ex-wife and several of his alleged victims of abuse over the years.  Accusations of statutory rape and sexual misconduct have followed closely behind R. Kelly throughout his 25+ year career, including but not limited to his 1994 marriage to his at-the-time 15-year-old R&B protege Aaliyah, his mid ’00s trial over a sex tape which allegedly shows him having sex with a 14-year-old girl, and more recently, accusations that he runs a sex cult that isolates his teenage and young adult victims from their families.

When it comes to beloved artists that have done or have been accused of doing horrific things, there has always been this mantra of “separating the art from the artist”.  R. Kelly is far from the first well-known artist who has been tied to despicable acts within the realm of sexual abuse or pedophilia.

I can see why people take on this mantra.  I take on this mantra too, because unfortunately for hundreds of years various artists within the different creative fields have been discovered to have been depraved in their personal lives.  This doesn’t seem to be a trend that’s slowing down either.  Just within the music world alone, among the most commercially successful artists last year were Tekashi 6ix9ine and the late XXXTentacion amidst accusations of statutory rape and domestic abuse, respectively.  And the discovery one makes when they learn that the person who has created a piece of art that has moved them to their emotional core has done something deplorable can stir up many complicated feelings which may or may not include disappointment, disgust, or despair.  But most of the time, it doesn’t automatically change the impact that person’s art had.

I’m not much of a fan of R. Kelly’s music.  However, I admit I am a fan of Aaliyah’s first album Age Ain’t Nuthin’ But a Number, which was produced and written by R. Kelly (who was 27 when he married a 15-year-old Aaliyah).  And…*slowly ducks head*…I particularly like the title track, in which a 14-year-old Aaliyah assured the older man she’s singing to that she is ready and willing to have sex with him.

I’m an even bigger fan of this.

Toy Story 2 is not only my favorite film from an animation studio I already hold in high regard, it is one of my favorite movies of all time.  It makes me laugh, it makes me cry, it invests me in its characters, and it stirs my imagination intellectually and emotionally.  I think Toy Story 2 is such a beautiful piece of art.

I still feel that way about it despite the revelations about its director, John Lasseter, who apparently had a long history of sexual harassment in the workplace before he was fired from Disney.

In the midst of these numerous allegations against R. Kelly, many of his fans have attempted to deal with the news by “separating the art from the artist”.  However, I have began noticing a trend that a lot of R. Kelly fans have started taking this philosophy.

Whether or not one chooses to “separate the art from the artist” on any given artist is up to the individual person.  It’s up to R. Kelly’s fans whether or not they still want to listen to his music after all of these revelations about him.  However, the art of a depraved artist is not more important than the safety and justice of that artist’s victims.  And I have been seeing a lot of R. Kelly fans use this philosophy to bury their heads in the sand about who their beloved R&B icon is or to attack and blame his victims for their abuse.  Is a stupid ass song where R. Kelly compares his penis to car keys really that much more important than the welfare of the girls less than half his age that he has isolated from their families?

To quote some prescient lines from Talib Kweli, “the question was rhetorical, the answer is horrible, our morals are out of place and got our lives full of sorrow”.  R. Kelly’s long history of sexual abuse doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  Behavior like R. Kelly happens again and again over the course of decades because the structures around him enable his behavior.  All of the powerful people within the music industry that knew about R. Kelly’s pedophilic indiscretions chose not to intervene, because either R. Kelly was too much of a cash cow to sacrifice or they did not want to sabotage a potentially lucrative collaboration by calling him on his shit.  And as a result, they have enabled his behavior for decades.  And all of the fans who attack his victims by accusing them of lying for fame and money, playing the “well, why did she do this?! why didn’t she do this?!” game, or doing whataboutisms enable his behavior too.  John Lasseter’s predatory behavior in the workplace was also enabled by the structures around him that facilitated a casually sexist environment within Pixar and chose to cover up Lasseter’s misconduct instead of taking steps to make sure stuff like that never happens again.  Former Pixar artist Cassandra Smolcic wrote a long, comprehensive essay about Pixar’s toxic work environment.

If R. Kelly’s fans are truly willing to “separate the art from the artist”, why do they invest themselves so much in the idea that their beloved artist has a sterling personal life?  Would his music and his albums not live on, regardless of whatever happens to the person?  I suppose the worst thing that could happen to R. Kelly is that society treats him the same way we collectively treated Al Capp.  Once upon a time, Al Capp was the most popular comic strip creator in the United States.  His comic Li’l Abner was highly influential and was printed in millions of newspapers across the country.  Al Capp amassed such power and influence in his career that he rubbed elbows with the president.  But accusations of rape and sexual assault by several women got Li’l Abner removed from newspapers across the country and made Al Capp persona non grata, his life ending as a public disgrace.  His reputation has not recovered in the decades since his death.  Li’l Abner nowadays is not widely known outside of comic strip historian circles and the legacy of Al Capp is now little more than a footnote in history.

I like Li’l Abner a lot, but if this thorough desecration of Al Capp’s reputation and legacy meant that any more potential victims were spared of his sexually predatory behavior, so be it.  If R. Kelly finally being brought to justice means he doesn’t get to release his next album (which would just be some auto-tune sing-rapping self parody anyway, like “My Story” or “I Admit”), so be it.  Even if that means nobody can stream or purchase 12 Play or Chocolate Factory anymore, so be it.  If Disney/Pixar has to let John Lasseter go in order to make their workplace safe for women, so be it.  If that means I never get another Toy Story 2 ever again from the studio, so be it.  Separating art from the artist should never be an excuse for complicity in the abuse of women or underage girls.

P.S. For anybody that thinks the backlash against R. Kelly is part of the conspiracy to take the black man down, I’ll let Huey address you dummies.

(unfortunately, their cynical outlook regarding R. Kelly’s controversies from 2005 can still be applied today)

So imagine my delight when I first saw this!

Fast forward another 10+ years with The Boondocks having been over for years.  As much as I loved the TV series, I never thought it lived up to the comic strip.  The biggest reason I feel this way is because of how the show handled Huey.  I didn’t like how the show removed Huey as the main focus after the first season and how he had gotten reduced to mostly a peripheral role by the third and fourth seasons.  I suppose it fits the cynical outlook of the show to push their voice of reason into the background of a whole lot of nonsense.  But I still think that’s a lazy direction to go in if that really was the intent.

I understand that Huey’s primary role in the comic strip was to riff on current events and how that’s not a role he can serve in an animated series (especially with how many years it took to produce one season of the show).  I’ve wondered myself over and over on how the show could have fit Huey in.  But I’ve finally come up with an idea of where the show could have gone with him.

I suppose one reason why Huey’s role in the show was reduced is that he had no other character he can intellectually bounce off of.  He had Michael Caesar in the comic strip but he was never introduced to the TV series.  But I think Jazmine DuBois could have served as a great substitute for Caesar.

Jazmine may not have been as knowledgeable as Huey or Caesar about socio-politics, but she is a temperamentally passive enough character to just sit around and listen to all of Huey’s socio-political outrage (whereas other characters like Riley or Granddad would immediately balk at him).  I also imagine that Huey wouldn’t mind having Jazmine around to intellectually brow-beat since nobody else in his life is even willing to give him the time of day.

The relationship between Huey and Jazmine could have been used to explore opposing philosophical views.  To make a reference to The Matrix, Huey and Jazmine have a “red pill vs. blue pill” dynamic between the two of them.  Jazmine’s the blue pill: she blissfully lives her life uncritical of how the world is shaped around her.  Huey’s the red pill: he’s all too aware of the all the systemic injustice in the world and has dedicated his life to fighting against it.  The two of them constantly paired together could have produced a hilarious and insightful dynamic.

On one end, Huey could have been that one character in Jazmine’s life more than willing to pop that bubble she interacts with the world in.  The comic strip above and several others show Huey challenging Jazmine on her ambivalent view towards her blackness and her Euro-centric standards of beauty.  Huey also could have served as a dissident alternative to the more dominant views about politics and society she uncritically accepts from her parents, teachers, or whatever distinguished figure she catches on TV.  On the other end, Jazmine could have also challenged Huey’s view of the world too.  Although Huey is extremely knowledgeable and dedicated to activism, he lets it consume his life to a degree that is unhealthy.  Several years ago I read a profile done of the late Gil Scott-Heron where at some point he sat down in his living room and put on a tape of Rocky & Bullwinkle.  He explained that since he dedicated his music and his life to activism and political consciousness, that a little decompression from all of that once in a while is healthy for his psyche.  What does Huey do for fun?  Does he meditate?  Relax and listen to Public Enemy or Elton John or something?  Does he read any escapist comics or literature?  As a matter of fact, the only time I can recollect Huey ever smiling is one small scene where he was happy to see Riley killing it at his basketball game (pretty surprising considering how emotionally detached the two brothers are to each other).  On top of that, Huey’s perpetual mean mug does not endear him to others.  Without Caesar around, the only friend Huey had on the show was Cairo back in Chicago, and even that ended with the both of them falling out.  These are all things that Jazmine could have challenged Huey on.  Why would anybody want to live their life angry and miserable about the world all the time, especially at such a young age?  Does Huey think anything less than his 24/7 curmudgeonly attitude is complicity towards the structures of oppression he rails against?  Does Huey even have a realistic grasp of what he has the capability of accomplishing in this regard as a 10 year-old kid who can’t drive or even be left home alone without falling apart?  Something like this had unlimited potential to mine great jokes, provide insightful commentary, and beautiful character development.

The most frustrating thing about this is that the first season seemed to be going in this direction already.  They bounced off of each other well in episodes like “A Huey Freeman Christmas”, “The Real”, “Wingmen”, “The Block Was Hot”, and “The Passion of the Ruckus”.  But unfortunately, Huey’s role in the show got reduced after that first season and Jazmine’s role was severely reduced in the show after the first season and the comic strip after the ’90s (series creator Aaron McGruder later said that Jazmine was so shaken up by 9/11 that she spent all those years afterward hiding under her bed).  Building on this would have been a better focus in those later seasons instead of wasting it on pointless episodes like “Smoking With Cigarettes”, “The Fried Chicken Flu”, or “The New Black”.

Oh well.  It’s fun to dream.

Further viewing:

I liked this one very much.  I absolutely loved the cartoony way the human characters were designed and the cartoony way they were animated.  And while the story of the growing rift between the doting mother and the dumpling child wanting to go his own way in life as he grew up didn’t move me to tears, it was nonetheless very touching.

The short was directed by Domee Shi, a Chinese-Canadian woman and just like with Sanjay’s Super Team and its director Sanjay Patel, Bao draws on Shi’s Chinese background.  There seems to be a weirdly polarizing reception to Bao, attracting a lot of praise (particularly from other Asians) and confusion (particularly from white people).

Bao’s story is particularly resonant to Asians raised by immigrants in a Western country.  I’m not Asian, but I didn’t think the story was so uniquely Asian or Chinese that it’s completely unrelatable to anyone outside of that culture.  Bao is basically a condensed version of A Goofy Movie.  It shares parallels with Brave and the aforementioned Sanjay’s Super Team too.  So I’m completely mystified that there has been such a big chunk of people so detached to this that they can only come away from it baffled.

I’m also the child of immigrant parents who’s culture has not been represented in any of the cartoons I grew up watching or have watched since growing up.  Relating to all the white, Japanese, and anthropomorphic characters that inhabit all my favorite animated shows and films was never a problem for me.  As a matter of fact, I always found it even cooler when those shows introduced me to parts of their culture I wasn’t familiar with.  I’m not Jewish, so I was introduced to Passover and Hanukkah through episodes of Rugrats.  I learned what a bar mitzvah was through Hey Arnold!.  I’m not Persian, and one of my all-time favorite films is Persepolis.  The concept of Bao and the emotional gut-punch scene where the mother, fed up with her dumpling child’s defiance, devours him is no less confusing than CatDog’s mom and dad being a big blue Sasquatch thing and a big nosed frog.  They’re all metaphors for the points they’re getting at.

Asian fans of Bao were also mystified by some of the glib and dismissive responses the short has gotten from some white audience members.  Some of these fans argue and defend its cultural specificity to Asian immigrant culture by suggesting they should suck it up because this isn’t for them and there’s a billion other media that centers their experiences anyway.

(I don’t know how to embed tweets on Tumblr posts....)

I don’t agree with this take either.  Like I mentioned before, I don’t think Bao is so specific to Chinese culture that it can’t be relatable to anyone outside of it.  Domee Shi’s perspective is still one that comes from growing up in the West and she directed this film for a Western studio that primarily targets Western audiences i.e. audiences that aren’t Asian.  A studio like Pixar would never release a film that would only be relatable to a small cultural niche.  When Disney or Pixar portrays any cultures outside the dominant, they always package it in a way that allows for those outside of it to engage, for better or for worse.

However…

In This Corner of the World is a movie adaptation of a manga about a young artist who lived in Hiroshima during World War II.  I watched this movie last fall and I didn’t like it.  I found it too mundane and it was a struggle to keep from dozing off or to keep my attention on it.  This is a film that has garnered critical acclaim so I was confused by what I was missing, especially because I really liked other films/manga like Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen.  But then I realized something.

Most of In This Corner of the World takes place before Hiroshima is bombed by the United States.  The story mostly revolves around the young artist named Suzu getting married, moving in with her new husband’s family, and adjusting to her new duties as a wife.  These aren’t things that readily come to my mind when I think of Hiroshima.  When I think of Hiroshima, I think of the ravages and the immediate drama portrayed in Barefoot Gen or Grave of the Fireflies (although that didn’t take place in Hiroshima).  I don’t think of marriage or domestic home life when I think of Hiroshima.

And this is what is so pivotal about In This Corner of the World.  It portrayed Hiroshima and its residents before the bombing, laying them bare as no different than any other town in Japan (or anywhere, really).  The people there get up in the morning, go to work, get married, raise children, play, laugh, and cry just like anyone else.  Even as the war rages on in the background, the people of Hiroshima do their best go on with their lives.  The tragedy of the film is that the reality of living in a war-torn country steadily disrupts their lives more and more until it is unavoidable.  It started with taking shelter during the occasional air raid.  Then it continues with Suzu occasionally seeing bombs exploding in the sky.  Then it continues with food and water rations.  It continues further when the air raids increase in frequency and devastation.  And then it hits close to home when Suzu’s older brother is killed in action.  It hits even closer to home when Suzu’s sweet little niece is blown up by a time-delayed bomb.  This all culminates at the end of the film when the nuclear bomb is dropped on Hiroshima.

Hiroshima will forever be haunted by the specter of the nuclear bomb, even as the surviving residents continued to live on as best as they can for the next 70+ years.  There are several generations of Japanese people who only know a Hiroshima after the bombing.  So it is a big deal that In This Corner of the World provides their audience with a vision of what Hiroshima was before the bomb and what it could have been if not for the bomb.  I can only imagine how powerful this is for Japanese audiences, especially those from Hiroshima, those who have relatives from Hiroshima, or those who have loved ones who died in Hiroshima.  I specifically say “I can only imagine” because this was not my response to the film.  I have no cultural or personal connection to Hiroshima at all, and I think this why my response to this film was so lukewarm.

In other words, In This Corner of the World wasn’t made for me.

This isn’t to say it could only resonate with Japanese people or people from Hiroshima.  Based off of its critical acclaim, it clearly has wider appeal.  I’m just acknowledging this as the likely reason it didn’t personally resonate with me.

So for those that didn’t like Bao, they don’t have to like it.  I just think it would do them some good to think about why it might resonate more with others and to demonstrate more thoughtfulness in their discourse.

And for good fucking reason too.

This response to The Problem With Apu is bullshit; I’m not gonna mince words.  These writers are better than this and these writers know they’re better than this.  Pulling out the banal “PC gone mad” canard is the refuge of a comedic hack.

First of all, The Problem With Apu highlights how Apu Nahasapeemapetilon’s conception as a character is based off of various South Asian stereotypes that include but aren’t limited to his voice being performed by a white man (Hank Azaria) doing an impression of another white man (Peter Sellers) doing an Indian accent, his job being at a 7-Eleven type of convenience store, and the fact that his name “Nahasapeemapetilon” is just foreign sounding gibberish and not actually a name.  Kondabolu and various other South Asian actors and comedians discuss how growing up they were bullied and picked on by being called “Apu” and his catchphrase “thank you, come again” was used against them as a slur.  They also talked about how the roles they get offered for shows and movies hardly go beyond stereotypes and cliches that draw a lot of parallels to Apu.  And the Simpsons writers responded to all of this with a dismissive and tired ass whine about political correctness.

It’s particularly disingenuous of them to use Lisa as their mouthpiece to voice this response, considering her statement is a dismissive retort of her whole existence as a character.

The season 5 episode “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy” is all about Lisa taking the makers of Malibu Stacy dolls to task over its reinforcement of sexist stereotypes, noting how popular and influential the dolls are to girls around the world.  A lot of striking parallels to Kondabolu’s documentary about Apu, aren’t there?  The show didn’t treat Lisa’s concerns about Malibu Stacy’s sexism as trivial or a non-issue; she was framed as the hero in this episode.  Lisa’s statement in “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” is a complete 180-turn from “Lisa vs. Malibu Stacy”.

Most of the negative critiques that have been written about “No Good Read Goes Unpunished” have focused specifically on moments where Lisa and Marge break the fourth wall.  But I want to discuss the framing around that moment in the episode more because it is also terrible and makes that particular moment even worse in context.  In Marge’s changes to the book she grew up with, she changed the protagonist from a little girl who happily revels in Britain’s colonization of South America to a “cisgender girl who fights for wild horse rescue and net neutrality”.  Let’s see how many liberal strawmen are in this sentence.  There’s a strawman related to the language used by transgender rights activists and allies, another strawman related to animal rights, and are they seriously framing net neutrality as something you can write off as some shallow identifier of politically correct liberals?  Are there a lot of people who brush off the net neutrality issue as political correctness?

And once Marge began telling her re-edited story, Lisa was quick to point out that all the re-edits stripped the story of the emotional journey the protagonist goes through.  First of all, how the hell would Lisa know about the protagonist’s emotional journey or how the racial stereotypes play into it?  She hasn’t read the damn book!  Second of all, this is a false dichotomy the episode sets up to give weight to its dismissal of The Problem With Apu.  Indulgence in racist stereotypes aren’t an inherent function of character arcs in stories.  Why does Marge specifically say “It takes a lot of work to take the spirit and character out of a book, but now it’s as inoffensive as a Sunday in Cincinnati”?  Her objection in the first place was the book’s racism, not that it had spirit and character.  Why are they now framing racism and pro-colonialism as “spirit and character”?  Perhaps The Princess in the Garden is some kind of allusion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and controversy surrounding its banning/censoring in various schools and libraries?  If that is the case, the rest of the episode does not make that clear.

In fact, when I watched the full episode, I was surprised to see the rest of B-plot actually admonished the book’s racist stereotyping.  The first part of this plot sets up its racial and ethnic stereotyping as really over-the-top and mean-spirited (and giving no allusions of how it related to an emotional arc later in the story).  The last part of this plot mocks historians of The Princess in the Garden’s author who act as apologists for her racism through ridiculous reasoning that they don’t even really believe (they call her racism “self-consciously ironic protest against [the author’s] own oppression” due to her being a lesbian).  So on top of this episode’s response to The Problem With Apu being built from various strawmen, dishonestly framing a dichotomy between creating a character with an emotional arc and not promoting racial stereotypes, and just being really heavy-handed (they both stare directly at the viewers for crying out loud), it was completely in contrast with the rest of the plot.

I can’t read this as anything else but a petty “fuck you” to Hari Kondabolu.  And that is really sad.  These writers are better than this.

Or maybe they’re not better than this.

The Simpsons has always been an overwhelmingly white show with very little representation of people of color.  In fact, the only characters of color I can think of that has been explored beyond their on-the-surface personality quirks in the show’s almost thirty year tenure are Apu and Carl in only one episode.  This show hasn’t really grappled with racism in any of their episodes outside a character making a small quip about it once in a blue moon or “Much Apu About Nothing” (although that was more about xenophobia than racism).  It seems to be an issue the writers of the show have never been comfortable in tackling.  They nonetheless open themselves up to scrutiny by ignoring it, especially when they conceive a foreign character based on stereotypes they find funny (Simpsons writer Dana Gould admitted to that in Kondabolu’s documentary).

I’m not even necessarily saying that they should kill off Apu or something like that.  I like Apu and I personally wouldn’t want to see him go (but hey, I’m not Indian).  But I would have liked to see the writers honestly reckon with the stereotypical character they created and how the decades-long ubiquity of the show has helped shape the broader collective view of South Asians in media.

Instead they chose to respond like this:

And it’s not only beneath them, it’s pathetic.

Al Capp was a 20th Century newspaper cartoonist and creator of the comic strip Lil’ Abner.  In his heyday, particularly during the immediate post-WWII years, Al Capp was the most famous cartoonist in the world.  And back in these days, having a popular comic strip got a person more than a Mashable or Bored Panda article.  The popularity of Lil’ Abner made Al Capp a multimillionaire and a fixture on radio, television, and print publications.

The popularity of Lil’ Abner was owed in big part of its sharp satirical edge and the politically outspoken nature of it and by extension its very gregarious creator.  The protagonists of the comic strip, Lil’ Abner Yokum, his family, Daisy Mae, and all the colorful denizens of Dogpatch, are a precursor to The Beverly Hillbillies, but with the New Deal-style politics of Roseanne.  Just as the Conners were used as stand-ins for the average working-class family in Roseanne, the folks of Dogpatch were often used as stand-ins for the American public.  Capp is decidedly less sympathetic in his portrayal the average joe than Roseanne since his stand-ins are ignorant and gullible slack-jawed yokels, but he always sided with them over the greedy businessmen and shysters that exploit and manipulate them in order to make a buck.  Al Capp was a New Deal Democrat all throughout the Roosevelt and Truman years and remained a steadfast Democrat as the American landscape shifted more conservative in the ’50s.

But in the 1960s, as a reinvigorated left-wing activist base emerged and became influential, Al Capp’s politics started shifting to the right.  Instead of going after greedy businessmen, the targets of Lil’ Abner’s ire were student protesters (which he called “Students Wildly Indignant about Nearly Everything”, or “SWINE”) and counterculture celebrities like Joan Baez.  The cartoonist who once took the piss out of powerful corporate CEOs by showing them leap out of windows to their deaths after their profits declined was now rubbing elbows with the likes of William F. Buckley, Richard Nixon, and Spiro Agnew.

I really hope the only parallels between Roseanne Barr and Al Capp are their major shifts in politics over a period in time.  The other thing Al Capp is best known for is likely the biggest reason he’s nary known or acknowledged since his time.  As a conservative pundit, Capp used to tour college campuses across the country in response to the rising liberal activism across colleges.  While touring these colleges, Capp’s reputation took a major hit when it was discovered that he had sexually harassed numerous coeds (not to mention that he once exposed himself to Goldie Hawn and attempted to rape Grace Kelly).  As stories of Capp’s sexual misconduct became widely known, newspapers across the country dropped Lil’ Abner and Al Capp became a pariah to the public for the rest of his life.  Even nowadays, the legacy of Lil’ Abner are rarely acknowledged outside of comic historian circles despite its massive popularity in the ’40s and ’50s and Al Capp has been a relegated as little more than a footnote in history.

Could the same happen to this guy too?  Perhaps.

It has recently been reported that John Kricfalusi, most famous for being the creator of Ren & Stimpy, has been accused by two women, Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice, of sexual harassment and statutory rape when they were teenagers.  Up until now, Kricfalusi has enjoyed the reputation of being a controversial, but brilliant and revolutionary cartoonist who was pivotal in changing the landscape of TV animation in the early ’90s.  Ren & Stimpy, along with Doug and Rugrats, established the Nicktoons, which would turn the fledgling network Nickelodeon into a powerhouse and help elevate the standards of quality of children’s cartoons beyond the rote half-hour commercials they had been reduced to in the ’80s.  In addition, Ren & Stimpy’s popularity with adults also helped establish the viability of animation aimed at adults, especially as studio politics were putting the nails in the coffin of Ralph Bakshi’s career making theatrical features.  Kricfalusi’s legacy as an influential creator positioned him as a precious, heavily guarded asset within the animation industry despite his long history of burning one professional bridge after another and his predilection for preying on teenage girls having apparently been an open secret in the animation world for years.

Before these accusations came to light, John Kricfalusi was infamous for voicing his…very strong opinions about other cartoons that came out around the same time as his own and after.  To be more direct, his absolute veneration for Golden Age Warner Bros. animation and the Hanna-Barbera TV shows of the ’50s and ’60s made him a curmudgeon regarding other types of cartoons.  He has disparaged The Simpsons, Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, The Critic, Family Guy, and many other cartoons.

It probably comes as no surprise that Al Capp was a major snob when it came to his artistic tastes as well.  His art style was based on a thorough foundation of life drawing, perspective, and the other principles of art established by the Renaissance artists.  He let it be known how little regard he had for the modern art movement emerging at the time.  He never looked past the surface of abstract expressionist, minimalist, or pop art paintings, so he dismissed the artists as charlatans making a racket out of artwork his kid could do (I’d love to see him and Clement Greenberg locked in a room together…).

He was particularly mystified by the growing popularity of a little comic strip that could called Peanuts.  This comic about neurotic little kids talking like a bunch of grown up psychiatrists and a dog that acts like a weird human made no sense to him.  Schulz’ “simple” drawing style that only grew more flat as it continued was a bizarre contrast to the lush artwork of his own comic, or the work of his buddies Walt Kelly and Milton Caniff.  And no doubt it was a blow to Capp’s ego that Peanuts’ growing popularity started to overshadow Lil’ Abner in the ’60s.  Capp’s response was to make a fairly mean-spirited parody of Peanuts in 1968.

I don’t really have a bigger point to make about any of these figures or any insight as to why they are the way they are.  I suspect that with Roseanne and Al Capp, a negative response to a shifting social landscape sent them down the rabbit hole on the other side of the spectrum (I don’t know John K’s politics, although he had a fixation with ’50s era masculinity).  In Kricfalusi’s case, he may not have ever changed.  His ascent up the hierarchy within animation production may have further exacerbated bad habits (work habits and sexual habits) he always had.  And maybe Capp and Roseanne never changed either.  I’ve heard Adam Carolla complain in response to critics calling him right-wing, that his support for legalizing marijuana and prostitution was not at all considered right-wing in the ’90s.  And perhaps Al Capp’s and Roseanne’s views of the world stayed stagnant as it continued to pass them by, so going from liberal to conservative made perfect sense to them.  Or not.  I don’t know.

The world of The Jetsons is a world filled with gadgets and appliances to handle any menial tasks.  Housework, meal preparation, and personal hygiene can be done at the push of a button and are fast and efficient.  And any other tasks around the house are taken care of by a robot maid like Rosie.

Such is the life in the world of The Jetsons.  So technologically advanced and convenient that the arduous task of walking is a thing of the past.

Most of the time, the biggest source of tension in The Jetsons comes from family patriarch George’s job.  He works as a sprocket manufacturer at Spacely Space Sprockets, Inc.  His boss, Cosmo Spacely, is domineering, short-tempered, and extremely demanding of George.  A running gag in the series is how often Mr. Spacely fires George.

Approximately 35 years after The Jetsons, another Hanna-Barbera series The Powerpuff Girls introduced us all to Harold Smith in the episode “Supper Villain”.

Harold Smith lived a quiet life in the suburbs next door to Professor Utonium and the Powerpuff Girls with his wife and two kids.  There was a consistent routine to his life; wake up, get ready for work, eat pancakes for breakfast, go off to work screwing lids on to jars of mustard, go back home in the evening, rinse, repeat.  Harold felt miserable in the bland routine of his life.  The only source of excitement he found was in paying close attention to the news reports about the Powerpuff Girls and the Mayor of Townsville being held hostage by Mojo Jojo, morbidly rooting for Mojo Jojo.  When the Powerpuff Girls and the Mayor finally broke free and placed Mojo in custody, Harold became so incensed at the outcome that he decided to take villainy into his own hands.

So what does all of this have to do with The Jetsons?

To further explain something I mentioned earlier, The Jetsons took a dig at how much consumerism has reduced suburban life into a rote routine day to day.  Not to mention George’s job is to literally create cogs for the machine, all while the threat of termination constantly looms over him.  However, these jabs the show takes are relatively mild.  Overall, the show’s tone aligns with that same sense of optimism and wonder towards the technological advances of the future that President John F. Kennedy sparked across the country at that time.

By the time we get to Harold Smith in the late ’90s, a new generation had gone on to live their adult lives through the typical work/nuclear family routine and they voiced their dissatisfaction with it more than before.

I think it’s interesting to note that “Supper Villain” and Fight Club came out the same year; 1999.  This is the year that also saw the release of films like The Matrix, American Beauty, and Office Space.  All of these films have working-stiff male protagonists with a desire to escape from the rote, unfulfilling suburbia hell life has become.  A desire to escape that feeling that all your role is in life is just to be another drop of water in a big bucket or just another cog in the machine.  From there, these films all go in different directions, like how The Matrix becomes a power fantasy for the viewer (with Neo as the audience surrogate) or how Fight Club becomes a critique of how masculinity is constructed in our society.  I don’t think “Supper Villain” goes as deep as any of these films, but I think its interesting that it touches on similar themes.  I also think it’s interesting how the overall view of this type of adult life was viewed in 1962 versus in 1999.

To be clear, this negative critique of the conformist “get married, move to the suburbs, have kids, and work for the rest of your life” lifestyle didn’t begin in the late 1990s.  The sitcom Married With Children was all about how miserable and demeaning life as a working stiff family patriarch is.  National Lampoon’s Vacation also takes to task all the false promises boys of John Hughes’ generation were told would come true as soon as they grew up.  Robert Crumb drew comics all about the misery of toiling life away working a menial manufacturing job in the Midwest less than ten years after The Jetsons aired (actually, he literally fled from his wife, kid, and 9-to-5 job in Cleveland to go live a much more exciting life in San Francisco!).

It’s a little strange thinking about how miserable all these men felt in their workaday lives.  These are all stories told by Baby Boomers and Gen Xers.  I’m a Millenial who by a stroke of luck, happened to finish high school around the same time the world economy tanked in the late ’00s.  The type of jobs that characters like Harold Smith, Neo, or the Fight Club narrator felt that they were wasting their lives in have either been outsourced or automated.  Considering that these were jobs with benefits and paid enough to raise a family on and save up for retirement, someone from my vantage point is inclined to say “what the hell are you all complaining about?!”

I imagine the Millenial version of this theme would be as the lost children crushed under the boot of late stage capitalism.  The promises of finding lifelong and stable employment after graduating from college were not kept.  Economic inequality this day and age is comparable to the Gilded Age, perpetual war and military occupation rages on in a steadily increasing number of countries, and catastrophic weather patterns brought about through climate change grow more frequent.  And unlike the narratives of George Jetson or Harold Smith, these stories can’t only focus on white men.  As generations before us have picked apart all the holes in what “the American Dream” is supposed to have been, this generation has questioned who is socially and economically served the expectation to achieve it in the first place, and who isn’t.

Dang, this is a pretty depressing note to end on, isn’t it?

Here’s a cheerier note to end on!

One thing that is important to point out is that Johnny Bravo was a show that was created by and mostly if not entirely written and directed by men.  From the top of my head, the biggest names I can think of that been attached to the show are Van Partible, Butch Hartman, Seth MacFarlane, John McIntyre, Gene Grillo, Jed Spingarn, Russell Calabrese, Kirk Tingblad, and Craig Bartlett.  I also feel I should be clear about this as well.  If I haven’t mentioned this already, I absolutely love Johnny Bravo.  As a kid, it was my favorite Cartoon Cartoon after Ed, Edd n Eddy and as an adult it still remains a favorite of mine.  In my own circles, the only other animation fans I have talked to who were also fans of Johnny Bravo were other men.  I have plenty of female friends who are animation fans and grew up watching Cartoon Network in the early-mid ’00s and none of them I talked about Johnny Bravo with cared for it very much.  I know this is purely anecdotal, but I suspect that this example speaks to my female friends’ experiences with the subject matter Johnny Bravo’s central focus is on vs. mine and my other male friends’ experiences with it.

One way that I think Johnny Bravo falls short in this regard is that it frames all of the women Johnny makes a move on as interchangeable, in their personalities and their designs.  Most of them aren’t even given names.  I understand that this is a show framed strictly from Johnny’s perspective and I don’t doubt for a second that he sees all the women as interchangeable.  However, the show never challenges that framing, and this is a show that has no problem putting Johnny back in his place in every other regard.  Since the show was so focused on Johnny, viewers never got a good perspective of what those women go through in their lives (because Johnny’s not the only man who treats any of them like a piece of meat) with the exception of the season four episode “Witch-Ay Woman”.  I understand that doing this would have made Johnny Bravo a very different show, but as it is a shortcoming is still a shortcoming nonetheless.

This brings me to the other shortcoming of the show.  Even though Johnny Bravo was constructed to be a satirical takedown of meat-headed male chauvinists like our titular character, audiences have long been trained to sympathize with the protagonist in a given piece of media.  As an example, a few years back CNN caught flak for their coverage of the Steubenville rape case because their coverage centered around how devastated the rapists must have felt hearing the guilty verdict and only mentioned the rape victim in passing.  Getting back to Johnny Bravo, the quandary the creators found themselves in is that although they want to use the character to denounce male chauvinism, they can’t make him so reprehensible that nobody would have a good reason to watch (a good example of utterly deplorable characters making a satire unwatchable is the short-lived Lil’ Bush).  So they responded by making Johnny really funny, charismatic, and endearing in his stupidity and failures.  Problems arise because oftentimes the endearing aspects of characters like Johnny obfuscate whatever satirical critique they were supposed to represent (see Homer Simpson, Archie Bunker, Eric Cartman, Glen Quagmire, Rick from Rick & Morty, Tony Montana, Jordan Belfort from The Wolf of Wall Street).  Since the audience is not granted as much exposure to all of the women Johnny makes moves on, it’s harder to empathize with them than with Johnny, even if it’s easy to understand why they all beat the crap out of him.

This brings me to a bigger quandary about satire that all satirists and aspiring satirists have to grapple with.  In short, doing effective satire is hard.  Really hard.  Effective satire has to carefully thread that fine line between authorial intent vs. death of the author with whatever statement the author intends to make intact and clear to the wider audience.  It is really easy for satire to fail somewhere and when satire fails, it inadvertently reinforces the idea it had attempted to take to task.

Speaking of a satirist often criticized for his portrayal of women, I think Robert Crumb is often a great case-study of satire that often fails.  There are definitely instances where his satire succeeds (this example is extremely graphic, so I’m only gonna share the first page of it, you can look up the rest yourself if you want to), but there are also many times where his satirical point is lost on me or on audiences in general.  The most infamous examples of this are his are “When the Niggers Take Over America” and “When the Goddamn Jews Take Over America”.  These examples are particularly infamous because white supremacist groups took these comics at face value and used them for recruitment.  I suspect that Crumb’s thought process behind these pieces are that the racism/antisemitism in them is so over-the-top that nobody could possibly believe this and that nobody could mistake him for being racist/antisemitic because his adoration for many African-American blues artists and marriage to a Jewish woman have long been public knowledge.

The problem is the first line of thinking is that Crumb naively underestimated how fanatically unhinged the beliefs of many racist/antisemitic people actually are.  The problem with the second line of thinking is that first of all, one can still perpetuate racism/antisemitism (intentionally or inadvertently) without explicitly holding those beliefs.  Second of all, the extent to which Crumb himself is not racist has never been clear to me.  I don’t think he necessarily believes all the stuff he portrayed in “When the Niggers Take Over America”, but I was never clear on what his point was with Angelfood McSpade and his constant portrayal of black people with sambo imagery in his older comix.  I’ve heard many times before that all that imagery was satirical but it never differentiated from intentionally racist imagery to me.  I suppose the sambo drawings are consistent with the 1920s aesthetic he drew his other characters with (Ku Klux Klan membership was at an all-time high in the 1920s), but that’s not a critique of racism.  I have always interpreted Crumb’s work as an expression of his id, unfiltered in its ugliness for all to see.  Just as Crumb has always been uncomfortably candid in sharing his sexual proclivities in his work (and in a way that is not at all flattering to himself), I always interpreted his sambo drawings as his own admission to his own latent racism (and his portrayals of women as his own latent misogyny).  It is what it is, but it ain’t a satire of racism.

To get back to Johnny Bravo, I stand by my assertion that its conception was an attempt of showing deference toward women and the advances they have made in society since the days of Pepe Le Pew.  But I’m more aware now of how it falls short than I was before and I thought it was important to be clear on that.

Further viewing: