#jackanape

Fantastic Four #87, June 1969, Art by Jack Kirby and Joe Sinnott

jackanape (English) /ˈd͡ʒækəneɪps/ an impudent or mischievous person

Soon enough, the bard was ready to begin her work in earnest, and the crowd was more than willing to let her. Standing up with mandolin in hand, she began to pace the few steps which her stage afforded, plucking out a few notes in time with her footsteps. Her movements were a touch nervous, I noted, but I doubted many in the crowd would notice.

“A fine evening to you all!” she cried, and the…

           Once upon a time, a bunch of deluded assholes built a castle in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They made it their capital, and they often paraded around it with the kind of pomp and circumstance usually afforded to royalty, which these deluded assholes certainly thought they were. Edward I Longshanks would have laughed at such a ridiculous thing; for him, castles were built primarily to terrorize the local populace into paying their taxes. After all, any Welsh peasant stupid enough to complain about his taxes being too high in the Year of Our Lord 1290 was more than welcome to fuck off down to the castle walls and discuss it with a vat of boiling pitch. 19th century Louisiana had none of these things, and when the Yankees showed up to burn the place they had cannons with them, against which castles were like so much papier-maché.

So none of it made any damn sense, and when Mark Twain saw the castle he said it was the stupidest thing he had ever seen in his life, an utter waste of money, and most especially an outward sign of the most self-destructive fanboying his beloved country had yet seen.

Fanboys? Oh yes. Because, as Twain put it, every white household in the South had at least three books on their shelves: the Bible, The Pilgrim’s Progress, and something by Sir Walter Scott. Twain did not stop there; in fact, he blamed the entire Civil War on Sir Walter Scott and took to calling the former Confederacy Sir Walter Scott-land. Scott, Twain argued, had so brainwashed the aristocratic Southerners with his ridiculous historical fantasies that they began to believe that one heroic racist asshole with a horse could beat ten Yankees with their full bellies and modern weaponry. Didn’t work out too well for the boys in grey.

Sir Walter Scott wrote the kinds of books that gave his Southern American fans a serious case of the cain’t-help-its. And with these books came the Scottish stereotypes that we all know and love. All Scottish people wear kilts, play golf, carry huge swords and bagpipes around with them at all times, live in castles like the one in Baton Rouge, toss cabers, eat haggis, fuck time-traveling American housewives and, hell I dunno, murder English nobles or some shit because freedom. And in Scott’s novel Redgauntlet (1824), a storytelling rogue by the name of Wandering Willie goes a-storytelling in a brogue thick enough to utterly baffle the college seniors I often force to read it. His story, called “Wandering Willie’s Tale” just to be random, references each of the following:

1. Souls in Hell

2. A Castle

3. The Rent, and an Important Piece of Paper Referencing the Rent

4. Secret Passage to Hidden Cache

6. Evil Land Owner

7. A Mystery Mousketool that will Help Us Later

 Souls in Hell

Once upon a time, Curious George and Bill were doing what they do best, which is gleefully tormenting the local wildlife. Bill was whacking golf balls in the direction of Jumpy Squirrel, sending the poor animal into paroxysms of fear and no doubt shortening his life by a few months with every whack. George attempted to imitate Bill’s swing.

George’s ball torments not the squirrel, but instead travels straight up into the air for like a hundred yards, and then falls to the earth two inches from the tee.

This is one of the few times I have actually identified with George’s struggle. My father is an excellent golfer and has been since he was a teenager. He is good enough to be able to play with any golfer on Earth and not embarrass himself. I suck. I suck at golf worse than I suck at anything else, and Good Lord do I suck at a lot of things. I have a better chance of dunking on LeBron than I do of actually hitting two decent golf shots in a row. My father, bless his patient heart, tried for years to teach me his craft, but it was like teaching a frog to do ballet. I continue to suck, and though he would never admit it, I thoroughly embarrass him with my ridiculous attempts to golf. Golf is the most difficult game in the world, and I am not exaggerating. There are at least 1,567,800 different things that need to be done absolutely perfectly for the golf ball to travel as intended. The perfect golf swing is as elusive as the dodo; the adequate, not-sucking golf swing is as elusive as the ivory-billed woodpecker. So imagine my pure, white-hot, homicidal rage when Bill says “Don’t choke up on the club, George—the more club you got between you and the ball, the farther the ball goes when you hit it!” and George stops choking up and proceeds to nearly brain Jumpy Squirrel with a perfect shot.  Oh? Is that ALL Bill? Is that ALL we need to do to hit a golf shot? Just “don’t choke up”? Wish I knew that twenty years ago—I could be whipping Phil Mickleson’s ass RIGHT NOW. I could have spent the past TWO FUCKING DECADES actually being successful at something.

Fuckin Bill. As if I didn’t have reason enough to hate the guy, he goes and makes something that has plagued and frustrated me for my entire life look simple enough that a literal monkey could do it ON HIS SECOND TRY.

“I don’t know how it works,” says Bill, “But it’s something called leverage.”

Leverage…I guess George could have snapped Bill’s knees and elbows by utilizing leverage and left him flopping around on the ground like some sort of slobbering, wailing swastika, but I didn’t get to write this episode. George and the Man with the Yellow Hat (MYH) go to Scotland instead.

Now, ladies and gentleman, I’ve been to Scotland. I don’t care how rich MYH is; there is no way he got Curious George through customs in that amount of time. It used to be that British customs would keep dogs and cats in quarantine for six months or more—a nasty little monkey that is one missed meal away from becoming a feral, face-eating beast would surely have to endure more than that. But, a few hours later, George is running amok in the Highlands like it’s no big deal.

It is in Scotland that we meet Uncle Tam. Of course his name is Uncle Tam because “tam” means “weird hat that Scottish people and professors wear” and he is totally wearing one and he is MYH’s uncle so lol. Why do they go to Scotland? “To help Uncle Tam move,” says MYH, because apparently a guy that owns a castle and a golf course in Scotland cannot hire local movers, nor can he drum up any friends to help him box up four hundred years of accumulated golf memorabilia plus a couple of green kilts. Incidentally, MYH and Uncle Tam, resplendent in yellow and green versions of Scottish Fancy Dress, look like the two most obnoxious Green Bay Packers fans at a Bay City Rollers concert. Somehow, Uncle Tam’s culture actually IS a costume.

A Castle

Uncle Tam has known he has to move for long enough to request and receive help from America, but nothing is fucking packed. Not one single, solitary Scottish objet d’arte is in a box.

The inside of Uncle Tam’s castle looks like a pro shop, though the narrator says “golf store” because he is a damn Philistine. Literally hundreds of golf clubs on racks, gold trophies, just dozens of bowls full of golf balls all over the place. George is enraptured, and immediately goes outside with ball and club in the hopes that Jumpy Squirrel followed them on this transatlantic voyage in order to receive a hurtling golf ball right in his earhole.

But alas, there is no Jumpy Squirrel on the castle grounds; the squirrel George meets is Jumpy’s Scottish cousin. We’ll call him Jumpy McSquirrelFace because who gives a shit anymore. This squirrel is nobody’s bitch; his family has lived on a Scottish golf course for thousands of generations, and he knows full well what that monkey is planning. Before George can even stop choking up, McSquirrelFace steals his golf ball and flees into the castle. George follows, and together they tear around a library chasing each other and knocking over priceless shit.

Not sure why. There are hundreds of golf balls in bowls in the next room. Why doesn’t George go get a whole bowl of them and attack McSquirrelFace with the golf equivalent of a pirate broadside? McSquirrelFace could hardly be expected to steal or dodge them all, thinketh the guy who has sat through God knows how many Curious George episodes but still, somehow, has hope that reality will triumph.

The Rent, and an Important Piece of Paper Referencing the Rent

Meanwhile, MYH and Uncle Tam are talking instead of moving, and poor Uncle Tam is despondent. He has to move out of the castle BY THREE O’CLOCK because he owes rent for the four hundred years his family has lived in the castle.

“I’ll help you pay the rent,” says MYH, and I have no doubt he could do it too. MYH is, as numerous episodes have established, a multi-millionaire that has never had to worry about the cost of anything except elephant mittens.

Uncle Tam refuses the help. If only he could find the deed, he says; all he has to do is show the deed and he doesn’t have to pay the rent.

Now, I’m no Scottish solicitor, but I ain’t sure rent works like that. This all sounds contrived, a convenient literary device we’ll call Bullshitty McMacGuffinFace because who gives a shit anymore. McMacGuffinFace is a piece of parchment—four centuries old, mind you—on which is a cartoon drawing of a dragon wearing a yellow tam. MYH and Uncle Tam then start to break their backs looking for it. I think the stress of not being able to buy himself out of the situation makes MYH mentally challenged, or maybe it is the thin Highland air. Either way, later in the episode MYH finds two of the world’s cruelest pranks: two separate pieces of four-hundred-year-old parchment, each with dragons wearing red and blue tams respectively. Both times he believes he has saved the day. Uncle Tam savages him for this idiocy:

“No blue! Yellow! YELLOW! Have ya looked in a mirror today, laddie?”

Secret Passage to Hidden Cache

George is still chasing the damn squirrel through the castle. After knocking over a specific book, McSquirrelFace opens a secret passage and scurries inside. George has to pry it open to follow him, so he uses…wait for it…LEVERAGE. George finds an eight-foot halberd and prises open the secret door, leading the narrator to say, and I quote:

“There is nothing like a big stick to get you out of a tight place. Or into one.”

wat

Without the liberal use of Quaaludes, there is no way in hell the producers got William H. Macy to deliver that line with a straight face.

Anyway, off George goes after the squirrel, and he ends up in a sort of catacomb that is filled with golf balls. Thousands of them, piled everywhere, as if the hoarding instincts of every squirrel since Robert the Bruce had been honed to desire golf balls, and golf balls only. In fact, the only thing in the catacomb that isn’t a squirrel, monkey or golf ball is Bullshitty McMacGuffinFace, which is squirreled away in one of the ball-piles.

Squirreled away

Lol

I guess we are supposed to believe that the squirrel stole it; honestly I don’t even know anymore. Maybe the little dragon with the yellow tam crawled down there his damn self.

Evil Land Owner

Outside, MYH and Uncle Tam watch a big fancy car pull up, and Evil Land Owner steps out with a smirk on his face. Poor Uncle Tam didn’t find the deed, and the castle now belongs to Evil Land Owner. A few yards away, peeking through a barred window, is George. He has the deed, but no way to get it to them. Except what? Go ahead and guess.

A Mystery Mousketool that will Help Us Later

If you said “He wads up the deed around a golf ball—uses LEVERAGE—and hits it perfectly through the window bars and into Evil Land Owner’s hat,” then congratulations! YOUR a genius.

Epilogue

Once upon a time, Wandering Willie told a tale about his gudsire Steenie. Steenie owed rent to the local Laird, and he paid it in silver, but before he could get a receipt for it, the old codger died. Later, the new Laird demanded that Steenie pay his rent, and Steenie did not have a receipt to prove that he had already paid it, the old Laird was dead, and nobody could find the silver. Steenie was very much in danger of losing his home, but that night he met a stranger in the woods who led him down to Hell. The old Laird was in Hell with all his buddies, and he wrote a receipt for Steenie’s silver. Steenie escapes Hell and heads back to produce the receipt. The new Laird is understandably freaked out because the receipt has a current date on it, and his father had been dead for weeks.

And the silver? Turns out the Laird’s jackanape had stolen it and hidden it in a secret room.