The Melting Pot

See it here.

Today, we pay tribute to immigrants in America, the ultimate nation of immigrants, with an elaborate tableaux encompassing the entirety of the immigrant experience.

For starters, immigrants get their own festival day, at least once a year, whether it's the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York, St. Patrick's Day Parade in Boston, or the Festa Italiana in Crestwood. Each immigrant population is allotted one day per calendar year where they are allowed to openly admit to, even celebrate, their heritage, so long as semi-authentic food is plentiful and ample opportunity for drink provided.

Ethnic pride, however, is carefully counter-balanced with cultural assimilation. America, the melting pot, accepts and blends all cultures together, until any food can be obtained "on a stick."

Each ethnic group is assigned a hilarious stereotype to simplify identification, a truth which is cleverly disguised in the panel, probably for fear of crossing the line into ethnic slur. But, if you carefully parse the use of the word "gotta" you will find it. Any standard reading of the term "gotta" does not work in this sentence. "I got to manicotti" makes no sense at all and "I got a manicotti" implies they have only one. No, we are obviously meant to read this particular bit of dialog in a hilarious, exaggerated, Father Guido Sarducci-esque Italian accent.

Despite the stereotyping, or perhaps because of it, accurate cultural identification of an ethnic group is not possible. The food stand may conjure up the image of a Mafiosi proprietor (Joey Walnuts), but it also includes obviously cross-cultural terms, such as Bistro and du jour, not to mention serving some distinctly non-Italian fare, such as pea soup. The vendors, themselves, may be Italian stereotypes of a hairy-backed man and a hairy-chinned woman, though they could just as easily be Eastern European.

In the end, the panel clearly implies, their actual ethnicity is much less important than whether they have food on a stick.

And then we have Burl, carrying a fanny pack full of coins, clearly a reference to the low-wage exploitation of immigrant workers. While the immigrants slave over their vats of pea soup, Americans satiate their gluttony with facefuls of watermelon (or perhaps steak, it's hard to tell) and ask for more manicotti on a stick than they can reasonably carry, and leave behind only coinage in payment.

What does the punchline have to do with any of this? Nothing. The punchline is nonsense, utter gibberish. As such it is the final perfect metaphor for our experience living in proximity to immigrants, with their nonsensical, gibberish-based languages. Why don't they, the panel plaintively asks, learn to speak English?

Looka da marginalia:

• Honestly, asking us to look at Burl's saggy man-nipples was already too much for one week. Now we have to see his bare-midriff?
• I imagine those are supposed to be the manicotti on a stick in the background, but they look more like dripping paint brushes.