A triumph of the avant garde in Dinette Set today. A joke whose effectiveness is based entirely on audio
cues in a format that is entirely visual.
Are the tornado sirens actually going off or is Joy imagining things? The reader cannot possibly know.
Is the TV's volume low or high? The reader cannot possibly know.
All our visual cues, from artwork to dialog, suggest that the TV is on extremely loud, I admit. (With the notable and confusing exception of Joy's Helen Keller-inspired T-shirt.)
But in the same way that the operator of the Tornado Siren cannot definitively know anything about the ambient noise level in Burl and Joy's living room, neither can the reader.
And, with that form-follows-function metaphor operating throughout, The Dinette Set creates and negates the joke and the panel itself, all in a single master stroke.
I can't hear you over the noise of the marginalia:
- What the hell is going on with the windows? I am at a total loss to explain what that crazy repeating pattern in each window pane is supposed to be.
- The text on the TV screen is similarly mystifying. "Tonight's Movie" means we're about to see a movie. "'Hear No Evil, See No Evil; Check your TV'" appears to be the title of the movie, but if so what is "Check your TV" doing there? "Best Dumb Videos" suddenly suggests that it is not a movie but a home video show instead. I suppose this is in keeping with the entire panel, insofar as it negates itself in one fell swoop.
2 comments:
It think they are inside of a kaleidescope. This makes no sense as an isolated observation, but perhaps it is meant to represent that every time I look at this comic, it appears to be nothing but a horrible jumbled mess of shapes and incomprehensible nonsense.
Also I don't think that Joy can even see the TV from where she's sitting. Good to see a cartoonist not having to bother with the boundaries of perspective any more than she worries about the inclusion of logic or humor.
It looks like Joy and Burl's have rented (or more likely borrowed) a copy of "Apocolypse Now" for their bizarro DVD/VCR/VideoDisc/8-track player. Too bad cartoons don't come with spell-check.
Post a Comment