I"M GOING TO LEARN A FEW WORDS OF YIDDISH

This is what I'm reading now: "Born to Kvetch" by Michael Wex. It's a book about Yiddish which has the distinction along with Jive of being one of the world's only deliberately funny languages. I've only just started it so I apologize in advance if I make any factual errors.

Yiddish is a deliberate corruption of German with a lot of slavic words thrown in. It's a relatively new language, only a few hundred years old. It began when German Jews decided to come up with their own version of German so their kids wouldn't be assimilated into what Jews considered an alien culture and religion. Yiddish isn't only different than German, it's a parody of it. It's also a parody of Christianity.

The language can get pretty insulting but the insults are so funny sometimes that it's hard to get mad about it. In that sense it's like Jive, the language that some urban American blacks speak. Jive isn't supposed to be understood by the white man. It's deliberately full of funny sexual and racial references that would put off white people, if they only understood it. It's a funny language that's meant to use humor to seperate black people from the mainstream. Jive is fast disappearing as is Yiddish. Now that Jews have Israel and blacks have their freedom the need for seperation is slowly disappearing. Israel officially discourages Yiddish, except for scholars who study it as an academic subject in the university.

The title of the book mentions a Yiddish word, "kvetch." According to the writer all Yiddish speakers constantly complain (kvetch), whether there's anything to complain about or not. Yiddish-speaking Jews cultivated this to remind themselves that nothing will be right for them till they have a homeland of their own in Israel. The complaints are made tolerable by humor and it's no accident that Yiddish speakers helped to make America one of the funniest countries in the world. In Japan students of English sometimes study American jokes because it's believed that humorous speech is so widely used here that they'll be earmarked as foreigners if they don't make frequent jokes in the middle of a converstion.

I wish I had the energy to look up a few common Yiddish words to include here but I'm so sleepy that that I can barely finish typing this sentense. When I do learn some Yiddish words and phrases I want to move on to select Italian words and gestures. I also want to pick up some Jive. With all these funny linguistic treasures around us it seems foolish not to dabble.

DARE TO BE TWO-DIMENSIONAL!

It seems to me that too many dramatic animated features labor under the assumption that audiences want to see three-dimensional (ie., psychologically three-dimensional) characters in the lead roles. That can't be true! true.

Would the Lone Ranger show (above) really have been improved if the ranger had taken off his mask and said to Tonto: "Tonto, it's not easy helping other people day in and day out. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'd like some help too? I'm a man and a man has needs!" No, it wouldn't have been improved! The third dimension is not for the Lone Ranger or any other mythic character.


Aren't you glad that James Bond (above) is two-dimensional? What about Snow White in the film by that name? There's not a three-dimensional character in the film. "Pinnochio" contains only one 3-D (actually 2 1/2 D) character, Jiminy Crickett, and he's not even the character the film is named for. "Alice in Wonderland" and "Fantasia" contain no 3-D characters. The early, vintage Disney didn't believe in three-dimensions and he was right. Maybe he took his cue from the best children's writers of them all, the Brothers Grimm (below), who avoided 3-D like the plague.

An added benefit of committing to 2 or 2 1/2 dimensional characters is that it solves a lot of story and directorial problems. 2-D characters are naturally extroverted. They want to do things. They want to talk and act in a stylized way. It's easier to fit music to them. Stories with these type of characters exert pressure on writers to come up with momentum, thrills and suspense. Dare to be two-dimensional!

BOOTY FROM A TRIP TO THE LIBRARY KIDS DEPARTMENT

Depressing, horrific, post-modern kids books have been in fashion for years. Here's one (above) called "Spooky ABC" by Eve Merriam, illustrations by Lane Smith. This one happens to be about Halloween but there were plenty more in the same eerie style about more conventional things. All the time I was scanning these pictures I was trying to recollect where I'd seen this style before and it finally came to me: in "Silent Hill," the horror video game about pervasive evil and dismemberment. These ABC pictures are by Lane Smith, two-time winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Book award. The book is one of the big, expensive ones. Can't publishers find a way to bring the prices down?
This green picture of the house is also by Lane Smith. So far as I can guess it appears to show a bunch of convict slave zombies carrying the kid and his house to Hell, or perhaps to outer space.

The gigantic, yellow, expensive blob of a kid is, believe it or not, from a story Dr. Seuss wrote in the 1970s. Why do minimalist books cost so much?

When my kids were young I couldn't get them to read most of their illustrated books. They found my bound copies of Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge books and poured over them, even before they knew how to read.

WHY CARTOONS FAVOR ZOMBIE AUDIENCES

It's amazing how many vintage cartoons contain zombie audience scenes like this one (above) from Clampett's "Henpecked Duck."
Look at the audience behind Daffy. The characters in the background painting are hazy and ghost-like, with blank faces as if they were just bussed in from Hell.

Here the audience has acquired some definition but they're still engulfed by an eerie mist and are lit from only one direction. Why did so many old-time directors favor this kind of weird treatment? The obvious answer is that drawing each individual head in the crowd would have been time-consuming and take too much attention away from the main characters. Look at these sharply-drawn Jack Davis heads (above). I don't know about you but I spend a lot more time looking at the faces in the crowd than the people in the car. So that might be the answer.....but it's not the only possible answer. Maybe zombie audiences were just plain funny.

IT HELPS IF YOU KNOW YOUR OWN TIMES ARE FUNNY

Here's my memory of what men wore in the mid-80s(above): Dr. Martin's high top shoes, spandex bicycle racing pants, fanny pack, and a buccaneer shirt with puffy sleeves and collar wide enough for a second head, if needed. An Elvis Costello, close-on-the-sides haircut, of course. I left the shirt label out which was something guys did later on in the 90s but it looks so good with this outfit that I threw it in anyway.

I knew the 80s were funny when I was living through them. I'm furious with myself and other artists for not chronicling that period with pictures. I didn't because I thought a million other artists must have had it covered. It turns out they didn't. Amazingly the funny part of the eighties passed without drawings to record it. Equally amazing, the period we're living in now is passing unrecorded. All the bling, nose rings, baggy pants and bald heads are going to pass into oblivion, unrecorded by artists.

I know what you're thinking : plenty of underground comics and animated TV shows are recording our time, but are they? The kind of drawings I have in mind are done by artists who can see our time as campy and ridiculous, the way people in the future will undoubtedly see it. What we need are artists from the year 2040, fresh out of the time machine. For me Crumb and Wood fit that description. Both of these artists knew they were living in funny times and they took full advantage of it.

I didn't have time to find illustrations by these artists that would fit what I was trying to say. The Crumb drawing doesn't make the point at all but I'll leave it in. I did stumble on a drawing by Wood (below) that sort of fits. Guys, do you want to see it?

ANOTHER BOOK REVIEW: "THE CRIMINAL PERSONALITY"

I thought I'd take some time out to explain why I like one of the books in my profile. I picked this one because it's the title most likely to be misunderstood. I'm not really interested in criminology per se. What I like about this book is that it's a work of practical philosophy.

The author, Stanton Samenow, is a prison psychologist. When he wrote the book he'd been working with prisoners for over twenty years. He definitely believes there's such a thing as a criminal type, someone who likes the excitement of crime and would rather die than lead a normal life. This condition is generally regarded as incurable but that's not how Samenow sees it. He came up with a therapy for it.

According to Samenow (above) the natural criminal doesn't reject the way ordinary people think, his problem is that he can't even imagine it. Not in the least. The natural criminal is a manipulator. He can't imagine any other way of thinking. He believes everybody else are manipulators too, he's just better at it. The first time you tell him him that ordinary people are not manipulators he's genuinely shocked because he's never even considered the possibility. He thinks you're putting him on.

Therapy for this type of person consists of asking him to keep a detailed record of everything he said and did with other prisoners, with an emphasis on the small things. The therapist listens to the criminal read the record and he stops the reading whenever some oddball manipulation comes up.

For example, the criminal says he asked another prisoner for a cigarette. The therapist stops him and asks if the criminal really needed the cigarette. The criminal matter-of-factly says he didn't but it was an opportunity to mess with the other guy's mind. The therapist replies that an ordinary person wouldn't ask for the cigarette unless he really wanted it. The criminal is dumbfounded and doesn't believe it. They talk about it for awhile then go on.

The criminal says he asked for a light and held the other guys arm steady when he held the match. The therapist asks why he held the arm and the criminal says it was to show the other guy who's boss. The therapist says ordinary people wouldn't have held the arm unless the light was in danger of going out. Once again the criminal is dumbfounded. It goes on like that. Over a period of two or three years the criminal gradually learns how ordinary people think. He has to learn it, just like learning a subject in school, and when he's learned it his behavior changes because people naturally adapt to new enviornments once they comprehend them.

Now I haven't the slightest idea if this if this therapy really works. What interested me about it is that it made me wonder if some people, including fairly ordinary and intelligent people, might think so differently than myself that we almost inhabit different worlds. When someone vigorously disagrees with me but seems to have a weak argument, we might be at an impasse based on completely different assumptions about life. These assumptions are often hard to articulate and the person holding them might not even be aware of them. The same goes for me.

After reading this book I decided to make an effort to get over these impasses by arguing to what I assume are the unspoken assumptions. I also decided to assume the other person was as rational as myself and had no secret animosity or evil intent in their make-up. I've been doing this to some extent ever since I read this book and I think it's worked, or at least it works half the time, which is a lot. Of course there are genuinely crazy and evil people and this technique won't work with them, but most people aren't like that.

WHERE ARE THE FUNNY CHARACTERS?

I wonder why mainstream animated features have so few funny characters. This popular film had only one, which is shown above. She wasn't on the screen very long and had only two or three expressions that I can recollect but at least the film earmarked one character for comedy and we can be thankful for that.


The family in the film weren't intended to be comedians. They were dramatic characters with occassional slightly humorous moments.


Walt had a different idea about how to inject comedy into a feature. He threw in a bunch of clowns who slurped their soup, fought with each other and engaged in broad slapstick.



To balance out the comedy he made the mean character REALLY, REALLY mean. She wasn't neurotic or mischievous, she was downright evil. The extreme behavior of the witch created so much tension that we were glad when the slapstick scenes came up. Modern fims have mild, tepid villains and slapstick, with all its funny animation possibilities, seems out of place.


If the villain in the superhero movie had been stronger, then the film would have needed a more overt and funny comedy to balance it out. Maybe comedic characters a little like those shown above, or like George Liquor (shown below) or the animated equivalent of the characters in "Dumb and Dumber," or the dog in Clampett's "Hair Ribbin." I think the audience would have liked that.


  As it was, there was no strong villain and therefore no truly funny comedy relief.