It’s sad but nobody seems to know about L’il Abner or Pogo any more. Increasingly, I find myself needing to explain what Doonesbury was. They were all political satire. L’il Abner goes back to the 1930s and Pogo to the late 1940s.
Blondie started as social satire in 1930 before transmogrifying into the comic strip equivalent of a family sitcom.
Is it the comic strip that’s moribund or satire? I guess it’s arguable that all humor is satire these days but to me it’s almost entirely blue, mean-spirited, and unfunny. Basically, Lenny Bruce without insight or timing.
Well, the younger generation (i wish they would stay off my grass!) clearly has a different sense of humor I think. They watch Youtubes. They don’t tell jokes. They don’t read satire much. There just isn’t much of an audience anymore. The closest we get is stuff like the Onion, and a few cartoon shows, and even those are probably more commentary than satire.
That said, things are so bizarre now that a good satire writer would’ve trouble since outlandish behaviors are ore accepted. Also, anything that smacked of negative commentary would have no audience with half the country anyway.
Steve
Well, I think we are reasonably close in age, steve. Comedy is a favorite avocation, hobby whatever of mine. On Sirius radio, I serially tune in the comedy stations. Comedy clubs make a fortune off me (and my daughter). Mitch Hedburg died way to young. Listen to him and you will better understand me. Irony, absurdity and weird turn of a phrase.
Life is short. Don’t take yourself too seriously is my motto.
Life moves on. Dave I actually know Pogo and Lil Abner. The grandparents. I never really got Bruce. You correctly, I think, identify a degradation in talent. But what are you going to do?
Crude, and perhaps relying too much on filthy language, but we could use more Chris Rock.
Well I used to be a kid. Sixty years ago or so, I used to come home from school everyday and grab the paper from the front porch and lie on my belly reading the two jammed pages pages of comics that the daily newspaper in a nearby metropolis of 25.000 people thought sufficient for the subscribers … PEANUTS, of course, LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE, MARK TRAIL, TERRY AND THE PIRATES, DICK TRACY, THE SHADOW, NANCY, and yes. LIL ABNER, POGO, BLONDIE. A byegone era. I look off into the distance, unseeing, and sigh as I think of it.
Or maybe it’s just lost childhood is in my gaze.
And yet, I don’t know that things are that awful today. There’s a lot of comics on the internet if you go looking, some new (XKCD, GUNNERKRIGG COURT, QUESTIONABLE CONTENT, SCANDINAVIA AND THE WORLD), some as old archives (DOONESBURY, BLOOM COUNTY, SHOE, GIRL GENIUS, CALVIN AND HOBBES).
I could go on giving examples — my COMIX subfolder has about 60 Favorites at the moment, most of them visited only at great intervals because I don’t have the time to keep up with them all. Which is sad, since by and large they don’t strike me as “blue, mean-spirited, and unfunny.” There are conventions these days for people who follow web comics. There’s a TV series — RIVERDALE — about Archie Andrews and Jughead and Betty and Veronica. There have been two LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE movies. There was a veritable explosion of Japanese manga and anime thirty or forty years ago that intersected American culture in interesting ways — cosplay, for example.
There’s no shortage of Stuff, in other words, if you’re willing to settle for stuff. The serious adventure sort of comic strip — ANNIE and JUDGE PARKER and PRINCE VALIANT — is pretty much kaput. They don’t seem much in tune with modern moods in retrospect. The sort of funny ones — BEETLE BAILEY, for instance — could run today without much change; I think TERRY AND THE PIRATES would have a whale of trouble navigating the western Pacific today.
Sigh! I guess the real loss is the shared culture. We all used to read DICK TRACY, it seems, for 20 pushing 30 years. We read LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE. And BLONDIE. And NANCY. And CATHY, eventually. They were there — 3 or 4 panels in black and white, 8 inches wide and 2 inches tall in the newspapers we read 6 days of the week, and half in page in glorious color every Sunday … We read the comics. our friends read the comics, our parents read the comics … there was a newspaper strike in NYC I recall, back in the 30s, and the mayor of the city went on the radio each day to read the comics aloud to people forced to live without their newspapers. That was in an America with 130 million people. And now we have 320 million people and there are no more stories we all read together.