From New Yorker bob (Bob Eckstein) — a regular visitor on this blog — in the West Side Rag (in NYC), as reproduced in his 8/9 newsletter The Bob, this charmingly absurdist cartoon:
(#1) Into an ordinary living room obtrudes one of the banes of urban street life, the often years-long scaffolding for construction projects — highlighted here by showing not just the scaffold structure of pipes, but also some green protective sheeting for the project (this in an otherwise b&w cartoon, so it’s shriekingly obtrusive)
Very roughly, cartoons and comics hinge on either word play (very commonly, punning) or the humor of situation. In turn, the humor of situation either comments on social, cultural, or political matters, or displays an absurdity — like surrealistic art, depicting discordant, inappropriate, ambivalent, or inexplicable elements of some situation, as if in a dream. And then, a lot of absurdos (absurdist cartoons) depict scenes that seem surreal because they unfold simultaneously in two different worlds, in what I’ll call an anchor world and an intrusive world.
The cartoon in #1 is a two-world absurdo. The anchor world is a modern middle-class living room, inhabited by three characters all sitting on comfortable furniture in the room: two women engaged in conversation about the third character, Harry, who’s engrossed in reading something. The trouble with Harry is that he’s covered in scaffolding, as in the intrusive world, a city street where construction is going on.
Two-world absurdos. I’ve been musing on these for several years, slowly working out how to talk about them. Early on, I saw their relationship to metaphor, while recognizing that appreciating the cartoons requires that the scenes they depict are simultaneously in both worlds. From this blog:
— in my 5/29/18 posting “Chez Le Fourmilier”, a delightful cartoon embodying a metaphorical translation from a seafood restaurant world to an anteater world (while the characters in the cartoon are, at once, both people in the restaurant and also, in appearance and dietary taste, anteaters)
— in my 8/4/18 posting “Cultural knowledge”:
In each [of three cases], the cartoon shows some situation from everyday life (which you have to know about) juxtaposed with, or translated into, another more remarkable world (which you also need to know details of).
— in my 9/9/20 posting “Crossed folk stories”, on a more complex case:
the cartoon is a kind of conceptual portmanteau, a cross between the [Pied] Piper legend and the [Tom, Tom the] Piper’s son nursery rhyme. Then set in a modern law-enforcement context, juxtaposing some (stereotyped) version of the real world with the world of these two folk stories.
Parallels in surrealist art. Fairly straightforwardly, in things like Meret Oppenheim’s Object (1936):
(#2) It’s both a tea setting (cup, saucer, and spoon) and a design in fur
Once again, one of the ways of understanding the thing — as a tea setting — is the anchor, and the other — as a furry design — is the intrusion; it is, so to speak, a tea service realized in fur, and the intrusion of the fur world has the effect of making the ordinary and the familiar strange. The sort of intrusion we see when narratives (books, plays, operas, whatever) are re-set in other worlds from the original (“You’ll love it, R.J.– it’s King Lear, but with mice!”).
Making the ordinary and the familiar strange is, of course, a way of showing that they are structured and complex in ways we are usually unaware of, as in Nathan Pyle’s webcomic Strange Planet. From my 12/29/19 posting “The time of mildly debasing yourself”:
Pyle’s [alien] beings seem to lack most of the framework of conventional knowledge of cultural practices and the vocabulary — idioms, especially — for talking about these practices, but otherwise have an excellent knowledge of English.
… They are then like pop-cultural fictional visitors to our planet who are to varying degrees unacculturated, or bring alien practices with them, or both — as with the Coneheads on Saturday Night Live.
