although it's been said many times many ways
By Todd Stadler · Thursday, January 3, 2002 4:18pm
But none of that makes for very interesting journal fodder, so I will spend the rest of my typing here complaining about the comics I read while on vacation.
There's something about Christmastime that lends itself to intense mediocrity in the artistic world.
If you don't know what I'm talking about, go purchase any Christmas album. What better way to celebrate the birth of Jesus than with a half-dozen shlocked-up standards and some bland generic holiday-esque filler?
Comic strips at Christmastime are no better. Writers confuse triteness with tradition and feed us the same tired jokes over and over again.
Not that anyone who reads Hagar the Horrible expects innovation (hey, look, Helga is overworked and underappreciated, and there is enmity between Hagar and his mother-in-law). But at least you're never sure which hackneyed joke you're going to see on a given day.
Not so at Christmastime. No, every Christmas Eve, without fail, some hack cartoonist will run out of new ideas and give us the old "Twas the night before Christmas" treatment, often with a wonderful modern twist. Chuckle. (Apologies if King Feature's server fails to show the comics I linked to - they worked when I wrote this)
But the triteness train has only left the station! For on Christmas day, we are reminded of that bone-tickling truism that kids get up earlier than adults on Christmas. It's funny because it's greedy. Chortle.
(And isn't it odd that all three examples I just cited are part of the United Feature Syndicate? Maybe they provide a suggestion sheet to the cartoonists who ran out of ideas years ago.)
But Christmas wouldn't really be Christmas unless it was followed the next day (and the day after that) by strips that humorously remind us of one of the major problems in life - returning gifts you don't like! And how! Guffaw.
Of course, not all clichéd comic strip ideas follow such a rigid schedule. You can laugh about fruitcakes all through the holiday season. Laff.
The surprise this year was that the formerly savvy Garry Trudeau chose to announce his slide into irrelevance by joining in the fruitcake chorus. Of course, he placed his gag at Ground Zero in Manhattan so as to make the strips seem topical, but a cliché is a cliché, even if it's surrounded by the aftermath of terrorism.
Not that other artists didn't try to weave the effects of September 11 into their Christmas cheer. And just as tacky sculptors once used Santa to remind us of the true meaning of Christmas, so now many cartoonists turned to Santa to remind us what we're all scared of these days. Accordingly, Santa decided not to fly this year, choosing instead to take a bus. Or if he did choose to fly, he chose an airplane over a sleigh, and suffered the fate of many holiday travelers at the security gate. Or if he did ride in his traditional sleigh, he got an escort from a phalanx of F-16s, in keeping with FAA policy. At least we know that Santa knows our pain.
Of course, I suppose if I had to choose, I'd pick the tedium of clichés over blasphemy. Fortunately, I don't have to pick, thanks to Bil Keane (okay, and Jeff, too). There's something magical about a "family friendly" strip in which a child directly correlates the birth of his savior with his accumulation of material possessions. Most cartoonists only allude to such concepts, but not Bil - subtlety was never his strong point.
That said, my greatest ire is reserved for wholly unecessary political correctness. And who is guilty of this label? That would be the team behind the Christmas Day Sally Forth, in which Hilary, the daughter, has spelled "Happy Holidays" in the snow.
Oh, sure, I understand that there are many holidays in December, from many different belief systems. But on the day this cartoon appeared, exactly none of them were occurring, as I understand it. Hannukah was over. The solstice was over. Eid al-Fitr was over. Kwanzaa had yet to start. The only holiday on that day was Christmas. So then, why does it say "Happy Holidays"? Were any non-Christians fooled into thinking this applied to them and their celebrations, or did they wonder why generic holiday wishes were not given at some generic holiday time?
It's clear the writers are trying not to say "Christmas", so Christians aren't really included in the message, either. In short, by striving for inoffensiveness, they have achieved blandness that pleases no one. Well, at least not me. I mean, I'd rather have the writers of Sally Forth wish me a happy Junkanoo, if that's what they really mean.
Gads, I'm cynical. Of course, you would be too, if you had to sit through the "lite jazz" holiday stylings of John Tesh, Mannheim Steamroller, and more, every time you got on an American West airplane in December. It's yet another example of how an attempt to please everyone (or at least not offend everyone) actually offends people, or at least me.
If I see another middle-aged white guy in a sweater playing a saxophone while surrounded by candles and other merry middle-aged white folks drinking champagne, I may just spit.