"N***a!"

The more timid readers might want to pretend that says "Negra!"

By Bryan Zepp Jamieson

09/21/04

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Humor/n.htm

The biggest problem with the comic section in newspapers these days is that it’s mostly old farts who determine what gets run, and what doesn’t. That’s why, years after his death, Charles Schulz’s "Charlie Brown" is still trying to kick the football. "Mark Trail" stages its daily competition to determine which is more stilted, the drawing or the dialogue. Cartoons that ceased to be funny years ago, like "Hagar the Horrible," "Marmaduke," "Wee Pals" and "BC" are joke factories, using lame lines that Henny Youngman would have known well in the Borsch Belt days. Other cartoons, such as "Dennis the Menace" and "Blondie" are being done by a new generation of artists, which provides a weird mix of topicality and datedness.

When your target audience is pushing 60, innovation and modernity are not the watchwords of the day.

Unfortunately, humor tends to suffer from that. Being funny every day is an impossible demand for nearly everyone, and after 30 years, it’s a very rare talent indeed that can still be fresh, original and funny even once a month.

They do exist, of course. Garry Trudeau and Jim Davis prove that. And Garry Trudeau, while tamer and more refined than the "Doonesbury" artist who branded the asses of Nixon and Jerry Brown in the 70s, still draws howls of protest from an audience that claims to like Led Zepplin but secretly prefers Lawrence Welk.

One observer noted that newspapers have boxed themselves in with the policy of letting their audience cling to forty-year old reminders of their youth. Newpapers have an audience that is dying off, and the best way to attract young readers is with comics that will appeal to kids. I started reading the Ottawa Citizen as an eight-year-old after I discovered "Li’l Abner" and "Dick Tracy". Those were both great comics in the 50s that would be impossibly lame if their creators were alive and still drawing them today. If the Citizen was still running cartoons that were once funny in the 20s, I probably wouldn’t have become a newspaper reader. Well, maybe not. But I would have started later.

Nowadays, I still read the funnies, usually first. The Sacramento Bee is one of the few papers left that has a double-page spread of funnies, and the selection is pretty good. There’s even some that, while not exactly edgy, are at least engaging and unique. "Bizarro," "Sylvia," (although the Bee replaced that with an unfunny Mallard Duck clone called "Prickly City"), "The Quigmans," and of course, "Opus" (Berkeley Breathed’s second go-around after dropping "Bloom County" and it looks like the second time out, he got it right). There’s a dozen or so others that I like and read every day, but I doubt you need the entire list of my comic likes and dislikes. This essay is going to spawn enough fights over the dinner table as it is.

If you want funny and edgy, of course, the Internet is where it’s at. There’s Tom Tomorrow, Wolf Gulkey, Cunningham’s "Political Strikes," Tom Toles, Mark Fiore . . . it’s a long and amazingly accomplished list.

And, of course, the newspapers are oblivious to that. Between diminished space and a restrictive readership demand, they’re pretty much stuck with endless reruns of "Peanuts" and Marmaduke chasing an ice cream truck. Humorist’s hell.

But the Bee, and 250 other papers, do carry a strip that is funny, edgy, and willing to challenge its readers. The strip, by Aaron McGruder, is "The Boondocks." It’s about a couple of young hip-hop wanna-bees who live with their granddad. They are very much kids of the 21^st century, and granddad is pretty much old school. It sounds formulaic. It isn’t. The main topic of the strip is race. McGruder isn’t afraid of the subject, and he doesn’t use it to address grievances or preach. He’s riffed off of Bill Cosby’s remarks on how black families are dysfunctional and how blacks need to learn to speak good English and develop a work ethic, and it’s clear that he sees both merit and hypocrisy in Cosby’s remarks.

A favorite target of his is the cable station BET, which he clearly thinks trivializes and demeans black people.

This morning, I was amused to see an uncharacteristically timid lead on the front page of the Scene section (which includes the funnies) in the Bee. It read, "‘Boondocks strip spoofing reality shows may offend."

My first thought was, "Well, damn, I sure hope so." I don’t have much use for Reality shows. I would love to tell Donald Trump where he could part his cheesy comb-over. Let him fire me.

The Bee went on to explain that this week, McGrudger would be doing a parody of reality shows (on BET, of course) called "Can a N**** Get a Job?" (I learned, in the Mel Brooks movie "Blazing Saddles," that "N****" is pronounced "CLANG!").

Prior to this, the Bee would get letters to the editor from time to time, wuffling that Boondocks was racist. Who it was racist against wasn’t quite clear. McGruger doesn’t mind making fun of white liberals, but I’m a white liberal (You know, "Lily White, Lily-Livered") and I don’t see anything racist in it. Is Boondocks racist against blacks? Go look at a picture of Aaron McGruder. Get back to me.

His characters do a good job of showing his position. According to the Bee, one of the panels this week has one youngster asking the other, "You don’t think a show called ‘Can a N**** Get a Job’ makes black people look lazy and stupid?" The other replies, "No, it makes n****s look lazy and stupid."

It will probably cause an uproar, and several of the 250 newspapers that carry it have decided to rerun previous Boondocks instead, while others have changed "N***a" to "*****" Just between you and me, I think most of the 60 year olds out there are going to read the word "*****" and think "CLANG!"

It’s one thing to say that newspapers are family-oriented publications (although the Bee still ran a graphic picture of the face of a dead child on their front page – yes, in color – during the horrific events at that Beslan school in Russia last month), but the comics page has become kibble for the old folks home.

It just so happened that two nights earlier, I rented the uproariously funny Coen Brothers movie, "The Ladykillers." In it, there’s a scene where a young black "hippity hop" sort is wheedling a large black church lady, and says, "Is that any way to treat a nigga?" She rears back and belts him, and he retorts, "Hey, why you hit the nigga?" She hits him again. He retorts, using the Word. Every time he says the Word, she hits him. It leaves you wondering if he would have survived the movie even with a different ending. (No, honestly, you want to see this movie. It’s a scream!)

But I don’t remember a single critic complaining about the use of the word. And the Coen brothers aren’t even black. Nobody who has seen the movie has complained that I’ve heard about. I was going to complain, being a good white liberal and all, but I was laughing too hard.

Oddly enough, I didn’t come away from the movie with diminished respect for black people.

I don’t expect the comics page to become "R" rated, and with all the wild talent out on the internet, there’s no reason why it should be. But it is time for newspapers, who need young readers to survive, to recognize that the 50's are over, dump any comic that began before about 1980, and start with a fresh, young batch.

And if you want me to read them, make sure one of the strips is "The Boondocks."

FOLLOW-UP: From my email—