I'll be the first to admit that I love dumb jokes. And, when it comes to dumb jokes, Joe Martin is the champ, with a lineup of strips in which stupid reigns supreme and Willy reigns above all. Willy & Ethel make the misadventures of the Kramdens look like "Dynasty," and have been doing so since Dynasty was on the air, as these scans from the 1985 collection attest:
There is an art to stupid humor. We're not talking here about sitcom jokes, which are insultingly lazy and stupid and geared to the lowest possible denominator and wherein the setups are so strained that you can shout out the obvious punchline before it's delivered, as if you were watching "Jeopardy."
We're talking about imaginative, delightfully stupid humor that revels in the cleverness of its bathos.
The Gong Show used to occasionally feature college guys who thought "funny" meant putting on a wig and jumping around. They were just there to be gonged, and Chuck Barris -- who knows a few things about entertaining people with stupid humor -- remarked in an interview that he didn't get a lot of young guys on the show because, in contrast to women in that 18-28 age range, they weren't yet centered enough to be able to come up with interesting acts. True stupidity is not interesting and it's certainly not funny.
(Tip: If you want to see something wonderfully and stupidly entertaining, stream this, bearing in mind that Barris claims it's true. The level of smart stardom in the cast suggests that everybody involved was on board with how very, very stupid this movie was going to be. I promise that it will not in any way change your life.)
Appreciating stupid humor requires that you have the self-confidence to allow yourself to be fooled.
In the old days when mountain men sat around telling shaggy dog tales, there was a willing suspension of disbelief that helped set up the droll humor, and Jim Beckwourth was a welcome addition to these expeditions not just for his prodigious wilderness skills but as "The Gaudy Liar" who could turn a simple campfire into an entertainment center.
Various historians have stumbled over Beckwourth's nickname, assuming it to be an insult and therefore attributing it to racism, and, by the same token, there are people who don't like stupid humor, which I attribute to their self-image being challenged by it.
Sometimes, they're simply overthinking it. They feel there must be some level of meaning they're not getting, and it's not that. It may be that they just can't understand why a beggar slipping on a patch of ice is not funny, but a rich man slipping on the same patch of ice is.
In fact, there's a sort of Kevin Bacon thing going on here, because George Clooney directed and appeared in the Chuck Barris movie, and he was also in "O Brother, Where Art Thou," which gets its title in a nod to the Preston Sturgis classic, "Sullivan's Travels," in which Joel McCrea plays a pretentious movie director, intent on producing a socially conscious film of that title, who finally discovers his sense of humor and perspective after he has lost everything, including his inflated opinion of himself.
And, if the rich guy falling on the ice is funny, it's in part because, just as leftwing and rightwing extremist political views meet in the Mystical Land of Batshit, so, too, smart and stupid, carried to their respective extremes, become virtually indistinguishable from one another.
A daily diet that includes both Willy & Ethel and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal can give you a bit of whiplash, as it did today:
Then again, sometimes stupid just happens, and, when it pops up in a strip that doesn't particularly specialize in it, it's a delightful surprise and should not be over-analyzed. Just relax and dig the dumb:
That Willy & Ethel collection is one of my favorites. For years I had a copy of the cover on the wall of my office.
Posted by: Mark Jackson | 05/29/2013 at 09:23 PM