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Funnies Are Good for Us: Healthful Benefits of Humorous Comic Strips
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# : |
20479 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
3,692 Words |
| Author
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Arthur Asa Berger
Arthur Asa Berger is professor of broadcast communication
arts at San Francisco State University. He is the author of
numerous books and articles on popular culture and the mass
media. His most recent book is Reading Matter:
Multidisciplinary Perspective on Material Culture,
(Transaction Books). |
From The Yellow Kid, generally held to be the first American comic strip, to Calvin and Hobbes, probably our most interesting new strip, Americans have produced an incredible number of both humorous and serious comic strips. Many of them have lasted for forty or fifty years or more. We start reading them when we are young and continue reading them into old age. Among the most memorable, Krazy Kat ran from 1910 to 1944, Li'l Abner started in 1934 and ended in 1977, and Blondie, begun in 1930, is still being published (though the artist has changed, of course). Equally remarkable and still going strong are Peanuts, which started in 1950, Beetle Bailey (1950), and Doonesbury (1970).
In recent years, scholars, both in America and elsewhere, have been examining these comics for what they reveal about our society, values, and beliefs. I have written several books and numerous articles on the subject, and several other scholarly books have been published on this topic. But just twenty or thirty years ago, the idea that professors of literature, or sociologists and psychologists, might find comics interesting and worthy of study was considered laughable. Comics, we were told, were what you wrapped garbage in. (Of course, this was in the dark days before we had garbage disposals.)
Comic strips can be defined as narratives or stories, told in frames, with continuing characters and dialogue (usually) in balloons. (Cartoons generally have only one frame and do not have continuing characters.) Most comics now are gag strips, with a new joke or humorous comment each day, but others have continuing stories that last weeks or months. Nowadays, most U.S. daily newspapers almost exclusively use humorous comic strips and cartoons (such as The Far Side). Every strip that runs in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, is a gag strip.
In fact, humorous comics have been a part of American life for almost a hundred years, and it has been suggested that they form a unique "American idiom." They became popular in America, and American artists have created some of the most remarkable examples of this art form. We have produced extraordinary comic strips over the past seventy or eighty years, and we are still producing great funnies. Notable among today's interesting new strips (some of which are not nationally syndicated) are Bill Griffith's Zippy, Matt Groening's Life in Hell, and Victoria Robert's Little Women. But why are comics such a vital part of our daily and common experience? Just what do we "get" from the funnies?
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