Mom, is "fellatio" a bad word?
Many
comic strips and animated shows feature children as characters. In the
vast majority of them, children are actually small adults in children's
bodies. There seem to be very few comics in which children really are children so that they think, act, react and perceive the world the way real children do.
The only counterexample I could think of was the online comic "You Damn Kid". In that comic, humour emerges from situations in which these kids misunderstand some English phrase or take it too literally, or that they don't know and thus can't follow some social convention of tacit silence but blurt out something embarrassing. (After all, an important part of "growing up" is learning what you can't say no matter how true it is.) As I posed this question in my Finnish blog, a commenter reminded me of the comic strip "Baby Blues", in which humour comes from the hard work and massive sacrifice of your life that parenting small children really is.
In both of these comics, parents are depicted in an extremely realistic manner so that at least off the top of my head, I can't think of another comic in which the parent characters were equally realistic. This is definitely not a mere coincidence. In comics and animated shows where the parents are narcissistic, stupid or mentally at the level of a child (e.g. "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy") it is absolutely necessary for kids to be small self-sufficient adults. For example, "The Simpsons" would immediately collapse into its own impossibility if Bart and Lisa had the mental capacity of real 10- and 8-year-old kids (similarly in "Family Guy", imagine if Stewie was a real baby that does nothing but lie, cry and poop), forcing their fathers to stop clowning around and start behaving like adults.
Narcissistic and irresponsible adulthood is totally incompatible with raising children, since children are a constant reminder and assertion of objective reality, the number one enemy of every narcissist. Children are so unimaginably dumb, inane, sensitive and weak and they have these constant stupid needs that just can't be ignored or postponed. They will never make a witty quip when the situation is stacked against them, nor will they appreciate the rich cultural references and meta-level irony between the lines of a quip or a putdown coming from an adult. (I know, since I have myself tried that several times in some fit of boredom, but in vain.) Real children have a tendency to require real parents, since they are not little adults from the start who could be given the same freedom and responsibility as adults have.
"American Dad" sidesteps this problem nicely by having a semi-realistic mother and the kids already in their teens so that they don't need constant supervision, while the little kid substitutes of the show are literally aliens and thus outside any realistic needs. When looked from this angle, "Calvin and Hobbes" was also an interesting comic: Calvin was a little adult mentally and could thus act extremely freely and irresponsibly, but he still had realistic parents (well, except that they never seemed to notice that Calvin sure used pretty big words and concepts for his age). Another classic comic, "The Peanuts", had no visible adults at all, although it was clearly understood that they take care of things in background. Neither did the show "Beavis and Butt-Head", in which the total nonexistence of adults was simply ignored, and some magical force kept the boys alive, housed and fed.
The only counterexample I could think of was the online comic "You Damn Kid". In that comic, humour emerges from situations in which these kids misunderstand some English phrase or take it too literally, or that they don't know and thus can't follow some social convention of tacit silence but blurt out something embarrassing. (After all, an important part of "growing up" is learning what you can't say no matter how true it is.) As I posed this question in my Finnish blog, a commenter reminded me of the comic strip "Baby Blues", in which humour comes from the hard work and massive sacrifice of your life that parenting small children really is.
In both of these comics, parents are depicted in an extremely realistic manner so that at least off the top of my head, I can't think of another comic in which the parent characters were equally realistic. This is definitely not a mere coincidence. In comics and animated shows where the parents are narcissistic, stupid or mentally at the level of a child (e.g. "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy") it is absolutely necessary for kids to be small self-sufficient adults. For example, "The Simpsons" would immediately collapse into its own impossibility if Bart and Lisa had the mental capacity of real 10- and 8-year-old kids (similarly in "Family Guy", imagine if Stewie was a real baby that does nothing but lie, cry and poop), forcing their fathers to stop clowning around and start behaving like adults.
Narcissistic and irresponsible adulthood is totally incompatible with raising children, since children are a constant reminder and assertion of objective reality, the number one enemy of every narcissist. Children are so unimaginably dumb, inane, sensitive and weak and they have these constant stupid needs that just can't be ignored or postponed. They will never make a witty quip when the situation is stacked against them, nor will they appreciate the rich cultural references and meta-level irony between the lines of a quip or a putdown coming from an adult. (I know, since I have myself tried that several times in some fit of boredom, but in vain.) Real children have a tendency to require real parents, since they are not little adults from the start who could be given the same freedom and responsibility as adults have.
"American Dad" sidesteps this problem nicely by having a semi-realistic mother and the kids already in their teens so that they don't need constant supervision, while the little kid substitutes of the show are literally aliens and thus outside any realistic needs. When looked from this angle, "Calvin and Hobbes" was also an interesting comic: Calvin was a little adult mentally and could thus act extremely freely and irresponsibly, but he still had realistic parents (well, except that they never seemed to notice that Calvin sure used pretty big words and concepts for his age). Another classic comic, "The Peanuts", had no visible adults at all, although it was clearly understood that they take care of things in background. Neither did the show "Beavis and Butt-Head", in which the total nonexistence of adults was simply ignored, and some magical force kept the boys alive, housed and fed.
Calvin & Hobbes is another comic with kid acting like kid.
Posted by Anonymous | 2:07 PM
I have to disagree in part with your assessment of The Simpsons. Homer indeed is a child in an adult's body, but Marge acts like a fully responsible adult. The family could sustain itself, without creating any logical contradictions, if Bart and Lisa acted like the young children they are - but then the show wouldn't be nearly as funny.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 4:17 PM
Last year on my blog, I wrote about something that touched on this issue:
'Calvin & Hobbes is not in the line of comics that try to paint a "realistic" picture of childhood. Calvin is far less like actual children than Crockett Johnson's Barnaby or the characters in John Stanley's Little Lulu. Watterson uses Calvin to do what Charles Schulz uses Charlie Brown and the gang to do in Peanuts. Schulz and Watterson use their children to externalize and dramatize the internal struggles of the human (adult) condition. (Johnson and Stanley, on the other hand, get at their truths by recreating the internal and external concerns of childhood.) This is what makes Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes the most popular comic strips in University philosophy departments.'
Posted by Jon Hastings | 2:30 PM
The reason Calvin's parents (who interestingly had no names, but very specific jobs-- patent attorney and housewife) did not notice their son's giant vocabulary is that he never used it in real life, only in his mind.
Another comic which is both very realistic and which revolves around wordplay and the child's mangling of language is Rick Detorie's One Big Happy. I really don't see how that strip could be translated at all. Every second or third strip is a pun of some kind. But somehow sports translates. Americans loved Andy Capp's rugby and soccer, and Europeans Charlie Brown's baseball and American football, even if they didn't understand it.
And of course ice hockey plays a big role in For Better or For Worse, which is very big all over the States, though I don't know about overseas.
Posted by Reg Cæsar | 1:51 AM