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Totally normal and healthy.
I assume those are US stats; it’d be interesting to see global figures.
Interesting comment thread.
Thread.
I know the guy who wrote the original article… originally was going to get his phd from John Hopkins, dropped out and years later came back to university to get a phd. He’s now working at AHA (for a limited term), and he had the brightest prospects of all of us and a great set of connections. If he can’t get a job…
He also is a dick and left his wife, but that’s another story…
But somehow I ACTUALLY MISSED that MICKEY MOUSE was based on MINSTREL SHOWS and BLACKFACE.There feels like a lot more that should be said here, and I wanted to take some time to come up with some sensible thoughts, but that doesn't seem to be working. So I am going to try writing whatever and see if it's useful.
Minstrel shows fall under the usual question of how to deal with problematic history behind things, but they feel like a particularly distilled case. They’re so penetratingly awful, painful to so much as look at, it makes sense people only want to discuss them as an example of pervasive racism. I mean, they certainly don’t deserve to be celebrated for anything.
But then they also seem to be more important than that allows. It turns out a lot of familiar melodies come from them – things like Turkey in the Straw, Blue Tail Fly, and Oh Susanna that I think are still children’s staples – so they must have had a major role in musical development. It’s unpleasant but not surprising to hear they also had a major role in comedic development. I mean, how would you expect American culture to develop, except along the lines of American society?
So there is the usual problem of beloved things having this poisonous root, awful to credit and awful to ignore, and how to acknowledge the hurt from it. But also as a secondary matter – very secondary to the harms from this kind of racism, you understand – I think it would be interesting to know how else culture has been shaped by them, which is then not much discussed.
For instance here is my very frivolous question from all this: is this why Woody Woodpecker is such a mean dick?
Mind, I’m not trying to take something important and make it all about the one cartoon bird instead. Rather, he’s a well-known example of what seems to be a general change in comedy. For instance, people usually know Warner Brothers characters from their golden age where they are mostly about wacky but justified violence. There is a formula where someone will wrong Bugs Bunny three times, which you of course realize means war, and so they deserve whatever he dishes out.
But there are also the older versions where one character just non-stop harasses another for no apparent reason, like Woody, and for that matter he has newer cartoons where he is always wronged first. The real difference appear to be what era of the characters are remembered. In other words, at some point cartoonists decided slapstick cruelty needed to be provoked to be funny – so that it isn’t simply bullying, as I think Chuck Jones put it – but somehow they didn’t start out that way.
Which always struck me as strange, that the bullying versions were ever considered fun, as if this new medium somehow had to independently rediscover how sympathetic characters work. But, to finally return to the point, I wonder if instead this isn’t also a legacy from things like minstrel shows. Maybe there the point was that the characters were supposed to be uncivil, or allowed to be harassed, or them mistreating others was thought of as humorous “punching up” in its own broken way (like the ancient stock character of the sassy slave)? I’m only guessing; I’ve never seen any, and would hate to.
But again, it turns out I have been singing songs from them since I was little, and I wonder how much else America picked up from them.
…So that ended up a lot of paragraphs. I hope it also ended up sensible. Here, for making it through, have a tangentially related comic.
