Saturday, February 27, 2010

Cursing = Comedy

The joke in today’s new-run of For Better or For Worse is that the comedy program Elly is watching uses a lot of comic strip profane dialogue. Considering Elly wasn’t laughing at the program, it raises the question of whether or not it was truly comedy or simply a form of humour using punctuation symbols and not bad puns. Nevertheless, when Elly remoted TV off as Mike entered the room, it gives you the impression that Elly felt the comedy was inappropriate for Mike. Ironically, this comic strip is supposed to be funny, but it hasn’t made me laugh in years.

As for the time when this occurred, Lynn has already established in this strip that in the new-runs, the Patterson family has a remote control. However, this was not the way of the old Pattersons. This strip shows the old style of Patterson television, where John agrees to get cable in 1980.

You can see from this strip that back in 1986, the Pattersons did not have a remote control. The first appearance of the remote control in the strip in occurs in this strip in 1987.

As for the content of the programs, this strip from 1981 shows the first time we see Elly censoring what the kids watch. However the theme of the Pattersons protesting the content of television programs goes way back. In this one, Elly comments about the sick people on TV talk shows. Clearly she doesn’t censor what she watches. And Elly’s censoring of the kids’ watching habits slacks off when she gets older. This strip and this strip and this strip show the kids watching inappropriate content shows. I am sure you can tell from all these links, today’s strip is expressing a theme which is pretty common for this strip over the years.

6 Comments:

Blogger Holly said...

Yaaaaaaawn. Yes, Lynn, we get it. TV is the ultimate evil and it is nowhere near as good as it was when you were young and Father Knows Best was the height of sophisticated comedy. Now put down the sledgehammer, your point has been made.

Ironically, this comic strip is supposed to be funny, but it hasn’t made me laugh in years.

My reaction, too.

1:04 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Now this is going to sound strange coming from me but it seems that Lynn put more effort and finesse into wielding her sledgehammer back in the day; beforehand, she showed you what she hated while now, we get what might as well have been squiggly lines in Zulu.

4:26 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

Re. the strip from 1987: Oh, Mike--you won't keep your children from watching programming like this. You'll be so wrapped up in your muse-induced "wierd [sic] fantasy bubble" that they could be watching snuff and you wouldn't notice.

A related question--does Canadian cable work the same way that US cable does, in the sense that programming with all the stars, quiggles, and punctuation marks means that the Pattersons must subscribe to premium channels, like HBO? Because otherwise, we get a bunch of "BLEEEEP" instead of "@#*&^." And if it's the same way in Canada, I'd suggest that John and Elly get rid of their premium channels.

5:50 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I remember that Bill Cosby's old "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids" animated series did a couple of episodes tackling the exposure of children to pornographic and obscene entertainment.

They managed to explain why such content was age inappropriate without getting preachy or talking down to the audience.

I realize Lynn has "only 30 seconds a day!" to make her point, but she could learn a lot by watching a couple of 23 minute cartoons made decades ago.

9:17 AM  
Blogger FDChief said...

And this is the woman who went out of her way to mention that her avatars looooved them some comedy so much that they traveled all the way to godless Frenchy Montreal to see some sort of big comedy festival there. It must have been eh PG-13 one without all the #@^&*@!.

What's kind of sad is watching Lynn follow her idol Sparky all the way to the grave, including the revolting marketing overkill and the nobody-can-possibly-give-a-shit-anymore-so-why-NOT-just-phone-it-in.

And you think that there was a time when people like Hal Foster and Windsor McKay used to rock the comics pages. Now you get this %$&@!, Beetle Bailey and Garfield. How have the mighty fallen.

9:31 AM  
Blogger howard said...

Technically Winsor McCay and Hal Foster were from 2 different eras and there was not a time when both artists were producing work for the newspaper comic strip page. However, I get your point. The comics page is no longer a place for ground-breaking art.

8:22 PM  

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