Chuck Amuck

can remember that my wife and daughter would start to weep bitterly and seek hiding places whenever they saw me head toward the tool drawer, if only to hang a picture. I have never reached into that devilish drawer without starting a chain of errors and disasters of various but inevitable proportions. Like any other man, I would rather succeed in what I can’t do than do what I have successfully done before. I have never reached into that drawer without encountering one of those spiny things you stick flowers in. We don’t keep that thing in that drawer, but it is always there. I count it a good day when I get only one spine under a fingernail. I tried to get the spiny thing out of the drawer once, but found out that the last time, when it had stuck to four fingers at once and been in fact lifted a few inches out of its nest in the resulting shriek, it had fallen on a tube of glue, puncturing the tube and affixing itself to the drawer for all time. I have tried lackadaisically from time to time to remove it, and have succeeded in breaking a rattail file, a kitchen knife, three fingernails, a nailfile, a pair of manicure scissors, an eggbeater (in one of my more fanciful efforts), and a window, when the tail of the rattail file separated from the rattail file.

Coyote checking Acme purchases, 1948–63

No, I don’t have to leave home to know what the Coyote is likely to try and how he is likely to fail, and I don’t have to dramatize as much as you might think, but even while taking the risk of bruising the budding egos of little children, I have eased a good many of my own tensions. It is easier for me to have the Coyote make one small human error and fall on his face than it is for me to fall off a ladder carrying a bucket of yellow paint. I have never fallen off a ladder carrying anything but yellow paint.

There is absolute logic to the devices that the fanatically single-minded Coyote uses. They should work, but there’s always one tiny thing wrong, and, as with most of us, that tiny thing leads to disaster. Human beings, of course, in even their most grandiloquent plans, often resemble coyotes. Instance: in one of our government’s first efforts at space exploitation, the element that failed in that half-billion-dollar unmanned space rocket cost thirty-five cents. It seems obvious that the government was poaching on the Coyote’s territory. That thirty-five-cent article was obviously purchased from the Acme Corporation.

… and more products

The Acme Corporation stemmed from games the Jones tads played in their juvenile dotage. My sister Dorothy fell in love with the title Acme, finding that it was adopted by many struggling and embryonic companies because it put them close to the top of their chosen services in the Yellow Pages. Today, of course, it is commonplace to see AAAAA Cleaners and Dyers or AAABBBCCCDDD Drugs, which sounds like a Porky Pig establishment. But in those simple days such verbal chicanery was unheard of—Acme was a word; it was that simple.

So, many years later, it seemed logical to use Acme in our films, from Acme Dancing Academy for Infant Ducks to the Acme Corporation we put on our door when Chuck Jones, Inc., lived on the twelfth floor at Sunset and Vine, followed by our slogan: “We build fine Acmes.”

First models of Road Runner and Coyote

Long before that, however, the Acme Corporation had become the sole supplier to Wile E. Coyote. Whatever his needs were, the Acme Corporation was there to supply. It was a perfect symbiotic relationship; no money was ever involved. The Acme Corporation supplied the Coyote’s requirements: Acme Jet-Propelled Roller Skates, Acme Burmese Tiger Trap, Acme Leg Muscle Vitamins, Acme Female Road Runner Costume, Acme Batman Outfit, etc. All of them almost perfect. But surely the jet-propulsion group should have eschewed the use of the Acme Little Giant Bobrick, even at the bargain rate of thirty-five cents.

The rules and disciplines are properly difficult to identify. But there are—there must be—rules. Without them, comedy slops over at the edges. Identity is lost. “Comedy is not so much what you do,” said Groucho Marx, “as what you don’t do.” The rules that apply to Chico or to Harpo do not apply to Groucho. Groucho stands between Chico, who speaks with charming illogic, and Harpo, who acts with equally charming physical illogic. Groucho, in his own way, balances them with his own version of logic. Being led by Chico into a strange fourth-dimensional argument about purchasing and/or building a house, he says, “No. It will have to be over here. I don’t want Junior crossing the railroad tracks on his way to reform school.”

Only Groucho could say that line. He is always well within his self-made rules. And they become logical only because he demands that they be obeyed.

During Laurel and Hardy’s long feud with Edgar Kennedy and Jimmy Finlayson, the most astonishing discipline was one that contradicted all existing rules of combat; namely, you can’t do anything to me when I’m doing something to you. In one of their early encounters with Kennedy, he methodically destroyed their car while they were destroying his house in the Christmas-tree salesman episode. Taking turns, each would rip off a fender, break a window, smash a headlight, or rip up a tree, without interference from his opponent. These were fights in which there was no defense, only offense. A strange and unique rule—but one of the most hilarious in the annals of comedy.

Just as I later decided that there would be no dialogue in the Coyote–Road Runner series because it seemed like a good rule, or indeed it would become a good rule if it was consistent; all comedians obey rules consistent with their own