Mar 14, 2018
Comical Cartoon Dads
Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin, Dagwood Bumstead, Jerry Smith, Timmy Turner’s dad, Roger Fox, Randy Marsh, and Fred Flintstone. These are all fathers, and they all are borderline idiots. When you try to think of dumb characters in comics or cartoons, it’s almost always the father being the idiot of the group. There are very few instances of any comic or cartoon where the dad isn’t stupid. I’m curious to know why that is.
Right off the bat, newspaper comics have to appeal to a very broad audience. This includes wee children, conservative moms with too much free time, and crotchety, wrinkly geezers. Since children will be watching, the humor will have to be appropriate for all ages, a family friendly jokeapalooza. Cartoonist Stephen Pastis frequently tells stories about the people he has offended. These include the Turkish government, vegans, and the United States Polka Association (apparently, they write very seething emails). In Pastis’s treasury Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic, he mentioned how he made all the generic dumb characters white because readers got offended when an African American character did something funny and stupid. One of the minor plot lines he referred to a few times was “the box o’ stupid people”. They were the kind of people who left their shopping carts in the middle of the aisle and who put their knees on the back of chairs in front of them at the movie theatre. He commented he couldn’t include any person of color in there, because he knew he was going to get angry letters. In Marren William’s article “Newspaper Comics Stuck ‘Between a Crock and a Hard Place’”, Stephen Pastis said, “a strip that is a tame shadow of its original self — a bland echo of its groundbreaking creator. Elvis replaced by an Elvis impersonator.”
Now for more of the epic and edgy animated cartoons, this isn’t quite as clear. South Park and Family Guy and such can still get away with more racy subjects, but there continues to be clumsy father figures (Randy Marsh and Peter Griffin). Really, when you think about it, Hank Hill is the only cartoon father who isn’t an idiot. Fathers being the common comic relief is a common theme, it’s easy to laugh at a character that should be looking after a family, but is very bad at that job. It’s just become a common theme that seems to be replicated on many different levels of humor.
“Mr. Wacky Dad” is a totally original character created by the author, Leo Spencer. Any resemblance to any other animated character is purely coincidental.
Many comics revolve around a close-knit group, and usually in that group there’s at least one schmuck of the group, one bozo of the bunch. Everyone in The Far Side is stupid. About all characters in Garfield are comically dumb. Dogbert really is the only intellectual stable character in Dilbert. There are only a few comics that are accepted as funny without having any stupid characters. Rose is Rose is one, but y’all might not read that. Another that you may be more familiar with is Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin’s father isn’t the butt of jokes, even though he does joke around. But we are laughing with him, not at him. We’re laughing at his wit, not because he got his hand stuck in a pickle jar or because he put batteries in the dishwasher. Now, there are other instances of shows and movies that can accomplish having no dumb characters and still end up being a great comedy. It’s rarer for a show aimed primarily at a younger audience to be able to accomplish this. Clunky physical humor with a character we can easily laugh at really can be funny. It’s easier to pull off a character like this, and it doesn’t always cheapen the art. The Office had their fair share of morons and still managed to become one of the funniest and most loved shows on television.
In the end, it’s about being politically correct without offending anybody. In tamer settings, you can only safely make jokes about people who haven’t been severely oppressed. Women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community can be included in the comics, but if they are to be funny, they would have to make intellectual humor and be smarter characters than other people in the comic. In short, they can’t be portrayed as oafs. Dad’s are pigeonholed into this role. They are seen as family we respect but can make decisions that aren’t very well thought out. Comics especially rely on stereotypes to portray characters so we know what to expect without building much backstory. Fortunately the racist and sexist portrayals have died down a bit (still there, but not to the extent that they once were). Like the sarcastic cat, angry boss, and crazy scientists, dads fall in this list of less-offensive stereotypes. People rarely write letters to the editor about how their boss doesn’t yell at them like Withers yells at Dagwood or how their boss doesn’t drop them through a trap door like Mr. Burns does Homer.
In my opinion, I would love to see more diversity on the comics pages and in television, but it’s obviously clear making a minority look like an idiot can offend some people. Dads are an easy target. Dads have a stigma for being goofy and slipping up here and there, but at the end of the day they still love their families. And in shows featuring families of people of color, the dad is still goofy. But this tends to be more acceptable because in the show you also see the rest of the family may have their quirks, but they aren’t as clumsy as the dad. Cleveland Show, and The Proud Family exemplify this.
So, there’s the observations and conclusions I’ve made. Is there a moral to all this? Do things need to change? I’m really not in a position to say. This was more about bringing this subject to light than really doing anything about it or even claiming it as a problem. Or maybe I just don’t understand the assignment, I don’t know.
Works cited
Pastis, S. Sgt. Piggy’s Lonely Hearts Club Comic. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2004.
Williams, Marren. “Newspaper Comics Stuck ‘Between a Crock and a Hard Place.’” Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 4 Sept. 2015, cbldf.org/2015/09/newspaper-comics-stuck-between-a-crock-and-a-hard-place/.
