The Koan of Krazy Kat
If you want to get a good belly laugh, read the front page of a newspaper. But, to find out what is really going on in the world, read the comics. This tongue-in-cheek statement is clear to anyone who believes that meme magic is real, that the comic strip is written to appeal to more universal patterns of behavior than the daily news, and the struggle to create relevance from daily events can result in farcical headlines. But does the comic strip have a higher purpose or meaning than to simply make us chuckle or laugh? Here, I will delve into some of the most popular schemas, or frames used in the last century and compare them to each other, and the time they were formed.
Most comic strips rely on schemas or running gags that consistently set up the punchline in a reliable pattern. In fact it is crucial that the pattern not deviate. The most ubiquitous example is from Peanuts, a meme quite embedded in Western Psyche. It is the famous gag of Lucy and Charlie Brown, in which Lucy holds the football and beckons Charlie Brown to kick it, only to pull it away at the last second. This is such a universal trope that it is applied to nearly every situation, political or otherwise, such as the frustration of the Trump agenda (or, just as likely, the prevention of a Bernie administration) from one or another house of congress, or the judiciary or the mayors of sanctuary cities. It becomes a handy trope to say, “Just like when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown, Trump just CAN’T seem to get his agenda pushed through.”
On one hand Charles Schulz was tapping into a universal frustration, we’ve all had a girl who stopped us in the middle of unclasping her bra strap to say, “Not here, not now, I have a boyfriend” you name it. So it is understandable as an artist to tap into this common experience of rejection, and use this self-deprecation of a character to appeal to the masses. But Charlie Brown is such a pathetic figure that, seventy years on, his tireless failure wears painfully thin. A boomer would have been exposed, on the front pages of his comics, to daily failure of old Chuck. He is unable to fly a kite, unable to pitch a ball, his modest attempts to buy a Christmas tree result in everyone taking pity on him and sprucing up the tree on his behalf. Not only is Charlie Brown unable to reach great heights, he has the ethos of a man unable to even achieve or maintain an erection, a basic human function. It’s hard to imagine this not having a profound influence on the collective boomer male psyche, at a time when post-war triumphalism should have been at its peak. Sure, there was Dennis the Menace and Nancy, but front and center, on the top of the page of the Sunday color comics, was good old lovable loser Chuck, getting his ass handed to him, again and again, for 50 years.
The triumphalism did show up eventually, albeit far more grotesquely, in the form of Garfield the cat. Garfield is the Humbert Humbert (of Lolita) of comics, the most unlovable protagonist in comic history. Garfield is slothful, gluttonous, proud, and violent. The most well-known schema is that Garfield kicks Odie, the dog, off of a table. Odie is dumb and loyal and Garfield takes advantage of both of these qualities repeatedly, by violently abusing the dog. Imagine someone kicking Marmaduke twice a week. This meme schema can be strongly identified with the 80s, when Boomers were hitting their stride and Reagan was President after the long malaise of the 70s. In Anchorman 2 they signified the transition from the 70s to the 80s by reading a Garfield collection. But, does reading such content have any value? It’s the equivalent of Charlie Brown kicking Lucy after all the years of frustration. Imagine taking your kid home from Sunday school and they start reading Garfield, undoing essentially any positive modeling you did that day for a laugh.
The middle ground schema rests in a more ingenious, and my second favorite comic of all time, which is Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin is a kinder, more intellectual version of Dennis the Menace with his trusty sidekick, therapist, and imaginary friend Hobbes. James Watterson did not rely on simple schemas as often as his counterparts, but one of his more well-known versions is the wagon-down-the-hill trope, where Calvin and Hobbes have a semi-philosophical discussion as they go downhill. My favorite is when they discuss the nature of time. Invariably, each discussion ends in the wagon crashing at the bottom of the hill. Watterson is clearly on a different plane than his predecessors, he wanted dearly to be a political cartoonist but meta-political, philosophical discussions were always more rich than simple partisan hack dynamics of most political cartoonists. The Wagon-down-the hill schema is a representation of man’s attempt at reaching for metaphysical greatness and order as the world inevitably slides into entropy. The other, perhaps more famous schema is that of Calvinball, in which Calvin and Hobbes constantly make up the rules as they go, contradicting each other and previous rules as the go along. This trope is often referred to in politics when a party goes against previously stated principles in order to advance in a new and different climate. It’s the closest Watterson gets to the “Lucy and the football” level of meme.
Some cartoonists hardly relied on schemas. Larson wrote one panels with no recurring characters, which is in itself demonstrates amazing creativity. Dilbert hardly relies on schemas, except maybe broad situations that adults can relate to. The boss has a bad idea, Dilbert points out why it’s bad, the boss asks him to do it anyway. While a good argument could be made for Watterson, Gary Larson, or Scott Adams as greater cartoonists in their own way, there is a specific schema I think that is the best among all comics, and it comes from Krazy Kat.
(Here is where I will pause and note that after writing this and beginning to proofread it, I came across an appreciation of Peanuts and Krazy Kat by none other than Umberto Eco. He has very different conclusions, and, well, I can’t deign to compete or argue with this legend, but allow me to clarify that I am comparing the dominant frames or tropes from the two comics. Other tropes, such as Lucy and Schroeder at the Piano, Lucy at the Psychiatrists office, are more nuanced and superior to the more common fall gags of Charlie Brown. I encourage you to read his essay as well.)
The Origins of Krazy Kat
Krazy Kat originated over 100 years ago and while it is well known among cartoonists but has lost recognition among mass consciousness over the years. The artist was George Herriman and he had attempted multiple strips and finally Krazy Kat became a favorite of publisher Randolph Hearst. The story goes that Krazy Kat was not originally popular with the public but as it was a favorite with Hearst he kept the strip going. The strip ran from 1913–1944, but the Sunday full page strip started in 1916. The Sunday strips have been compiled more recently by Fantagraphics books, one of my favorite titles being: “Love Letters in Ancient Brick”. Krazy Kat had an unorthodox style, as Herriman had been given complete creative control by Hearst, he broke open the panel format and played and experimented with the landscape. The setting was Coconino county, Arizona and Mesas and Western desert provided a spacious background. The language was poetic, vivid, and charmingly superfluous, it was a favorite of H.L. Mencken and e.e. cummings (who wrote the foreword to the first printed collection). For the uninitiated the characters and their relationships are thus:
Krazy Kat is a kind, free-spirited creature who likes to sing and pines for his true love Ignatz Mouse
Ignatz Mouse is a cruel, cunning, crafty and has a single-minded desire to bean Krazy Kat with a brick any chance he gets.
Officer Pupp is the arbiter of law and order who wants to protect Krazy Kat at all Kosts from the Kontemporaneous Krank Ignatz mouse.
Allow me to start with Ignatz. The desire of Ignatz to bean Krazy with a brick is at first glance very logical and commonplace. It is the starting point of many Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons. The target audience is children, and the prey animal getting the upper hand on a predator in this sense represents a child’s desire to overcome an angry and perhaps abusive father. Warner Brothers tends to be more malevolent on this front. Consider these common predator-prey pairs:
Elmer Fudd/Yosemite Sam — Bugs Bunny
Sylvester — Tweety Bird
Wile E. Coyote — Roadrunner
Tom and Jerry
In a more playful and less violent manner, Chip and Dale get the best of and disrupt Donald Duck’s plans (Donald is not a predator). In all of these pairings the prey animal wins out, but the initiative is always taken by the predator. That is, Bugs Bunny is just enjoying his happy hole until Elmer comes around with a shotgun. The predator acts like a predator. This makes the inversion of the predator-prey relationship incomplete, but does provide sufficient narrative tension, and is logical.
Not so with Krazy Kat. Krazy doesn’t chase Ignatz, doesn’t seem to eat much at all, and doesn’t have a malevolent bone in his body. The quality that makes the Krazy Kat strips a complete, rather than incomplete inversion of the predator-prey relationship is that Ignatz initiates action and acts as a predator, instead of reacting to the predator. Not until Garfield does this occur again (remember, Garfield kicks a dog). However, adding to the mystery of this schema is that Krazy Kat actually enjoys being beaned by Ignatz, often exclaiming in ecstasy “Oh my dahlink, he still remembas me”. Beaning Krazy with a brick leaves him in nearly post-coital bliss, while Ignatz walks off with the phrase, “Good hunting” (thus officially assuming the role of predator). Ignatz never understands or acknowledge that he is actually bringing great joy to Krazy. This double reversal defies logic and induces cognitive dissonance, which may have turned off many of the public while remaining appealing to the literati.
Over the course of several years Herriman began to introduce Officer Pupp and another wrinkle to the paradigm. Officer Pupp seeks to protect Krazy, another reversal from normal animal hierarchy. As opposed to the (simple, boring) Tom and Jerry cartoons, where Tom chases Jerry but accidently runs into a doghouse to be mauled relentlessly (ha ha, get it), Officer Pupp seeks out and often arrests Ignatz Mouse, often above the lamentations of Krazy Kat, who wants nothing more in life to be beaned by bricks. The idea of a dog protecting a cat from a mouse can be described as nonsensical, illogical, it is also funny. You can tell by reducing the four schemas to sentences:
1. A girl holds a football for a boy to kick it, and pulls it away at the last second.
2. A cat kicks a dog off a table.
3. A boy and his doll have a discussion while riding down a hill.
4. A dog protects a cat from a mouse.
Whatever the quality of the cartoonist and rhetorical flourishes and deviations he may add, only #4 is funny when reduced to bare bones. The situation also allowed for variations, each being funny in their own way. For example, if Ignatz can’t afford to buy bricks that day, Krazy can pine away that he misses being beaned by a brick. Or, Officer Pupp catches Ignatz with a brick and lands him in jail, with Krazy outside serenading him. Or, Ignatz can accidently hits Officer Pupp with a brick and high-tails it out of town. This amount of variation of a single schema was simply not found in the other strips.
Krazy Kat and the theory of consciousness
Is it anything but funny? Consider that perhaps the three characters represent aspects of our unconscious, with Ignatz representing the Id, Krazy representing the Ego, and Officer Pupp representing the super-ego. Is Ignatz driven solely by the pleasure principle, and once he unleashes his payload on the gentle bean of Krazy Kat, is he sated, at least for the time being? It certainly appears so. Does Officer Pupp, in role as external authoritarian figure, embody the internalized repressive super-ego to oppose Ignatz at any and all opportunity? This is most definitely true. So, then, is Krazy, the mediator of these two opposing subconscious forces hence the very definition of ego? It’s interesting to note that Freud’s Ego and the Id was published in 1923, 10 years after Krazy Kat made the dailies and six years after making the full page Sunday strips in all of Hearst’s papers. Could one of these end up in Vienna? Krazy Kat cartoons were developed by Hearst and added to his newsreels as early as 1916 and a major run was produced in 1920. Most likely Freud never laid eyes on Krazy Kat, and Freud’s description of the Oedipus complex was published in 1910. So, perhaps this idea, that of the triumvirate of subconscious opposing forces, was in the ӕther, or maybe it was Freud that influenced Herriman. But, perhaps in another timeline, I could see the modest cartoonist working daily on memes having one bubble up somehow, someway either in print or film across the Atlantic and ending up on The Great Psychoanalytic’s desk, possibly brought to him by an overeager Jung, hitting him squarely like a brick.
Which brings me to my interpretation of the work, after reading several years’ worth of Sunday full page comics. The “brick” is content, and Ignatz is a manifestation of Herriman eagerly attempting to provide content for the bony skull of the audience, represented by Krazy Kat himself. These love letters in ancient brick are attempts to get great content in the form of lyricism, poetry, and artistry. The editors, critics, censors, schoolmarms are the Officer Pupp blocking and preventing this great content from beaning us, the audience, in the head.
But, these mysteries, reversals of the natural order of predator and prey, are left unexplained. Unlike the other frames which can be easily understood, the Krazy Kat Koan is to be examined and turned over in our mind, to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and evoke enlightenment.