Heavy tipper and bullion: ALI BABA BUNNY (1957)
I wish I had known then what I found to be true many years later: that comedy is nearly always the stuff of the ordinary, concerning itself with simple matters and simple ambitions, with ordinary pursuits and ordinary ambitions.
Charlie Chaplin often, and the Coyote always, is simply trying to get something to eat. Daffy Duck, Jack Benny, and indeed Woody Allen are simply trying for human dignity, recognition, and, with Benny and Daffy, the added need to save or get a little money in the process. Daffy and Jack will try to explain this need to the audience. Daffy, after betraying Bugs Bunny to a huge forty-foot-high Abominable Snowman, says, “Sure, I know it’s a rotten thing to do, but better it should happen to him than to me. I’m different from other people—pain hurts me.” Or Jack Benny accused of penury by Mary Livingston. “When you had appendicitis,” she said, “you asked Rochester if he would do the operation.”
“I did not,” Benny replied angrily. “I only asked him if he could do the operation.”
Think of how simple and recognizable the needs are of all comedians: food, housing, love, the protection of another unfortunate, the eternal battle to find rationality within the establishment … always from the lowliest rung on the ladder.
In all Bugs Bunny films we opened on Bugs in a simple, understandable, and rational place for a rabbit to be: in the forest, in the meadow, down a hole, in a carrot patch, or in a pet store … but above all else living peaceably, contemplating an obscure Wang Dynasty dissertation on carrots—a sort of Professor Higgins in sweet solitude.
Then along comes someone with designs on his hide, his foot, his use as a meal or as an outer-space rocket passenger. It is a very simple formula. Bugs resists in every way he can imagine, and he is a very imaginative rabbit. He is also that unusual comedian: a comic hero, and they are very few. Bugs is what I would like to be: debonair, quick-witted, very fast on the comeback, a sort of male Dorothy Parkerish D’Artagnan.
Everyman Fudd
Most of our other characters are not noted for triumph. Inept contenders with the problems of life: Wile E. Coyote, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Cat, like Chaplin, Keaton, Woody Allen, Donald Duck, Goofy, Tom (of Tom ’n’ Jerry), Richard Pryor, are all mistake-prone, low men on a short and poorly carved totem pole. We recognize their simple ambitions. Their public mistakes, I think, help compensate for or at least make understandable our own private mistakes.
“I never met a man worse than I am.”
— GEORGE ORWELL
Genius frustrates hoist on his own intellect
I never had to leave home to develop any character I ever developed or helped to develop. All I had to do was reach down inside my own self and there lurking was the essence of Daffy Duck, the Coyote, or Elmer, or the Martian. It was simply a matter of bringing it to the surface.
We are all Daffy Ducks, Woody Aliens, Chaplins, and Coyotes inside. We are all haplessly and hopelessly hopeful. We are all to some extent avaricious, mean, traitorous, envious, jealous—but most of these charming characteristics we manage to keep fairly well buried and under control. If, however, one breaks out, we become tragedians. If we keep it under control, we remain comedians. If we are not all of us incipient comedians, why do we laugh at comedy? Why do we love great comedians? Not for what they look like, but for what they do … They are mirrors of what we do, or, in the case of the comic hero, what we would like to be able to do.
Among our stable we had very few comic heroes: Bugs Bunny, Pepé Le Pew, Tweety Bird, and the Road Runner about does it. The hero is what we would like to be, and so we cheer him on, hoping to emulate him but ruefully acknowledging that we probably will not. But the comic hero does extend the hope, the outside possibility that we, too, can swagger through life with the dashing assurance of an Errol Flynn, the wit of a Mencken, and the beguiling innocence of a Groucho Marx.
Pepé Le Pew and love potion: CAT’S BAH (1954)
I must have been an insufferable child, all children are.
—G. B. SHAW
We always had books in the house we lived in. We not only had books, we had books (old or new) that were fresh to us. The way it worked was this: a house in those days of the early twenties had books. Incredible as it seems, that’s what people did: they read. They read books and they talked to each other about what they’d read. We didn’t have a phonograph until I was twelve, a radio until I was seventeen, or television until I was forty-six.
So that left books. When you rented a furnished house, it was equipped with furniture and books. So when we were ready to move, Father would scout around for a furnished house. “Furnished” in his lexicon meant furnished with books, hundreds being mandatory, thousands being preferable. Colonel Terhune’s big house on the Speedway in Ocean Park had thousands of books, as did Times editor Harry Carr’s place on Mount Washington Drive, so the six or seven or eight of our family stayed in each house for over five years, until we had exhausted the supply, a sort of omnivorous plague of indiscriminate readers. If it was worthwhile for someone to print, it was worthwhile for us to read. Trash and treasure are soon separable to the inveterate reader, and we all learned this vital difference by experience, not by the force of an
