Why So Serious?

Did you know that the New Yorker has talking, animated cartoons at their website? They are exactly what you expect from talking New Yorker cartoons: there is one frame, one of the characters delivers what would, in the magazine, be the caption, and the other characters respond minimally (in the two I watched, one woman in a boardroom backed away from a guy with a hand puppet, and in the other one a slug frowned). Why does the New Yorker have cartoons, incidentally? I mean, I like them; I'm glad they are there; but in an organ of serious long form journalism, why cartoons? Wikipedia tells me that Harold Ross founded the New Yorker because his old magazine, Judge, was too corny. From what I've dug up of Judge, Ross could've included just one cartoon about cowboy slugs a week, loaded the rest with depressing Seymour Hersh articles, and handily won the New York Magazine humor battle. Anyway, the cartoons stuck around, like the poems, sort of atavistically, and now here they are, littered among more technically serious business.

So that's that in cartoon/solemnity abutment; what about cartoon/solemnity melding? Not stuff like Watchmen, which is hardly really a cartoon, but stuff like Steven Millhauser's Cat 'n' Mouse or Derek Zumsteg's Bugs Bunny, Greatest Banned Player Ever, both of which consider, very very seriously, very very frivolous things. The former takes as its object of study Tom and Jerry cartoons in general, and the latter a particular Looney Tune, "Baseball Bugs". The former performs a sort of literary analysis on the lives and motives of a cat and a mouse not unlike Tom and Jerry, and the latter performs sabermetrics on a ludicrous game of baseball played, on behalf of a collection of geriatrics, by Bugs Bunny against some thugs. What they have in common is a relentless commitment to not wink. Millhauser's story has passages like this:

This makes the cat dangerous, despite his stupidity, for the mouse recognizes that he himself has long periods when the cat fades entirely from his mind. Moreover, despite the fundamental simplicity of the cat’s nature, it remains true that the cat is cunning: he plots tirelessly against the mouse, and his ludicrous wiles require in the mouse an alert attention that he would prefer not to give.

And also passages like this:

The cigar explodes. When the smoke clears, the cat’s face is black. He gives a strained, very white smile. Many small lines appear in his teeth. The teeth crack into little pieces and fall out.

The diction is the same; the authorial attitude is the same; and yet.

Zumsteg is similar, though he keeps asking how, rather than why, the preposterous events of cartoons have come to pass. He considers Bugs Bunny's unorthodox fielding style, and has this to say:

That means that Bunny was able to cause the ball to accelerate by at least 50mph/s^2. Based on these calculations, it would seem possible for Bunny to actually fly and even to achieve escape velocity and orbit the planet using only his heckling. However, it’s important to note that as demonstrated in this game, we can only definitely establish from the footage that he is able to perform the acceleration when drawing an object to him, and only on the baseball.

There is a natural inclination to say (many of the people who commented at USS Mariner have said) that the focus of serious critical apparatus on cartoons is simply a waste of time. Really? For one thing, in neither of these cases does it seem like a waste of time relative to the most probable alternative -- say, doing literary analysis on Ralph Nickelby rather than a mouse, or doing sabermetrics on like the Seattle Pilots-- and I don't even think any of those things is really a waste of time. Another inclination would be to say that somehow it's an eiron's work to treat frivolous things like cartoons as bits of seriousness -- that it levels down, and shows as frippery our attempts to take serious things seriously -- but I don't think that's right, either. What I think is that this work is a kind of leveling up: if Bugs Bunny has merited sabermetrics, if we give the same attention to Jerry the mouse as we do to Lambert Strether, maybe that is good news too for the rest of us; maybe eventually we'll all deserve remorseless analysis.