February 9, 2024
Disney is celebrating its centenary, and its icon, Mickey Mouse, has entered the public domain. There are those who despise Disney, but I am not one of them. If you are going to attack corporate capitalism, there are a lot better targets, and, as for the allegations of racist and sexist stereotypes, Disney has at least tried to grow with the times, revising the content of its cartoons and standing up for the ideal of inclusiveness in its parks enough to provoke the ire of Ron DeSantis. Any company that outplays and embarrasses DeSantis is surely deserving of at least one cheer.
Whatever one thinks of the later productions of the Disney century, Walt Disney was, at least originally, a great innovator in an artform, the animated cartoon, that grants more freedom to the imagination than almost any other. Cartoons can be, to use Northrop Frye’s term, as little displaced by the demands for plausibility and realism as is possible in art, and Disney’s early work has an exuberant energy, as if the artist were exhilarated by the endlessly metamorphic possibilities of this new medium, an exhilaration clearly evident in his breakthrough work, Steamboat Willie (1928), featuring Disney’s iconic character, Mickey Mouse. It was not the first Mickey Mouse short, but it was the one that, for good reason, made an enduring impact.
Why Mickey, though—why a mouse? Well, actually, first there was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, but Oswald, though created by Disney, was owned by Universal, a common occurrence in cartoons, comic strips, and comic books, so Disney had to return, literally, to the drawing board. Where do great ideas come from? Out of the woodwork, this time literally. Disney was inspired by an actual mouse that came to visit him and became half tame. The fact that Mickey became the Disney icon is interesting, given the ambivalent feelings that people have about mice. In a newsletter about the common animals in our lives (November 10. 2023), I remarked upon the phobic reaction so many people have to mice, a phobia that is stereotypically female but certainly not exclusively: Dylan Thomas had a horrified fascination with mice. Mind you, this may not be so mysterious in an alcoholic suffering from the DT’s, but the fascination preceded the phobia, so to speak: when they were young, Thomas and his best friend Dan Jones played a game of trying to calculate how many mice would need to be harnessed to pull large objects. Mice are rodents, a class of animals collectively never forgiven for having carried the Black Death 700 years ago—rodents are “dirty,” even though your cat probably carries as many diseases as the mice he kills. Mice, we might add, are also harmless: we say “timid as a mouse”: they are not, like your cat, predators who play with their half-dead victims. We also say “quiet as a mouse,” though I have to qualify that one after any number of nights when a mouse who has gotten inside the walls is apparently building a condominium. But mice are underworld animals: they appear and disappear from a hidden realm that we do not like to be reminded exists, especially when it exists within our dwelling space. They are intruders, and, like immigrants, do not belong in our space. We thus resent them on principle, and, because they intrude cleverly, leaving their evidence in places we would have thought impregnable, they seem like Tricksters, for all their gentleness.
Disney’s Mickey captures that dual nature of the mouse as the gentle Trickster, and it may be that such duplicity is one of the keys to his fascination. It is often observed that he got more gentle and less Tricksterish as time went on: the image of Mickey that is now in the public domain is the original, more tricky Mickey, not the later, softened image that has become the Disney icon. The science writer Steven Jay Gould published an essay on Mickey accounting for the changes in the way he was drawn by invoking an evolutionary perspective ("A Biological View of Mickey Mouse", utilizing the biological concept of neoteny as it was employed by Konrad Lorenz. Neoteny is the retention of juvenile traits by a species, and Lorenz theorized that the human mind was hard-wired with what he called “innate releasing mechanisms" or IRM’s that are triggered by the characteristics of babyish features, which include a large head, large eyes, retreating chin, and short limbs. Such features trigger, he said, affectionate and nurturing responses in adults—not only for human babies but animal babies as well, or for animals that retain such traits even into adulthood. (Joseph Campbell cites Lorenz’s IRM’s in the opening of The Masks of God in relation to the function of mythological images).
I find myself wondering whether animals recognize the young of other animals by some such mechanisms as well. Certainly dogs and cats display a remarkable degree of tolerance for small children, putting up with ear twisting, tail pulling, and general mauling with resigned patience. I have seen deer in the front yard tolerating the baby groundhogs and raccoons who sometimes naively and fearlessly go right up nose to nose with them in their eagerness to get at the food. If you have features that cause people to go “aw!”, you will be forgiven much. Gould’s essay not only describes but shows through illustrations how Mickey’s animators over time altered his features, whether deliberately or just instinctively (no pun intended), to look more childlike, more gentle and warm and innocent. The article dates from an era before the huge eyes of anime figures were familiar, much less the entire mythology of cuteness known as kawaii, but there have always been dolls, and “large eyed dolls” turns out to be an entire search category on Etsy and Ebay. Still, there may be a limit to the principle. The field mice who visit me here have eyes designed for seeing in the darkness whence they came, but which are so huge, dark, and shiny that they seem less cute than uncanny.
In Steamboat Willie, Mickey’s default setting is cheerful, but it is true that he looks more “ratty,” as Gould calls him, and that his cheerfulness has a touch of orneriness to it. He nevertheless has our sympathy. His chief antagonist, already called Pete in Steamboat Willie, is of course a big, mean cat. He too went through his changes. For a while, he was Peg Leg Pete, until Disney got rid of the peg leg due to a combination of his increasing worry about seeming to make fun of people with disabilities and the fact that Mickey’s great artist, Floyd Gottfredson, had a tendency to forget which leg was which. In later years Pete would sometimes be shown as an outright criminal, Black Pete, complete with a gang of toughs. But in Steamboat Willie he is merely the perpetually bad-tempered captain perpetually attempting to bully and intimidate his one-mouse crew, with perpetual lack of success.
It is not always noted that the Mickey Mouse mythology was elaborated and developed as much in the newspapers, and later in comic books, as in the animated films, and much of that development came from Floyd Gottfredson. The same is even more true of the other iconic early Disney character, Donald Duck, who was developed by a man who, in comics rather than animation, was perhaps as great a genius as Disney himself, Carl Barks. As a kid in the 1950’s, I had my relationship to the Mickey of that time: I had a Mickey Halloween costume and devotedly watched The Mickey Mouse Club on TV. I was a Mouseketeer—that is why I am writing on the subject—had the usual boy crush on Annette Funicello, and can still sing both the theme song (“m-i-c-k-e-y-m-o-u-s-e…”) and Jiminy Cricket’s sung spelling of “e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a.” But when I got slightly older I paid more attention to the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics—Scrooge McDuck is Donald’s uncle, the richest duck in the world, with his money bin—not so much because of Donald himself, whose irritability was a deliberate contrast to Mickey’s mellowness, as because of the imaginative universe that Barks created.
I spend occasional time in some selected areas of popular culture partly because I enjoy and admire them, but partly because, as Northrop Frye often pointed out, the kind of popular culture that is creative and not commercial junk affords an undisplaced view of the primary patterns of the imagination—that is indeed why it is popular. The basis of drama is conflict, and the commonest conflict in comedy is between the character types that the Greeks called the alazon and eiron. The alazon pretends to be and thinks that he is better than he really is. The eiron understates or pretends to be less than he is, and is the underdog who is eventually victorious. The conflict between the two appears in Greek Old and New Comedy, and is commented on by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is still going strong in Steamboat Willie, which can be watched on YouTube (7:47 long). There really is no plot in Steamboat Willie, in the sense of an action that has a goal at the end that it either reaches or fails to reach: it is more like a sketch off a comedy show like Saturday Night Live. The contest is between two characters who embody two attitudes: the Captain’s domineering, angry, killjoy attitude and the Mouse’s high spirits, sense of fun, and exuberant creativity. Mickey is having a good time steering the boat in the beginning, but Pete throws him aside and takes over himself, hurling Mickey down belowdecks to perform menial tasks like peeling potatoes. Mickey refuses the role of proletarian victim and rebels. He knows what is truly important in life, namely, love and art. His first act is to procure Minnie Mouse, who had arrived late and was left behind running along the shore. With a hook on the end of a winch, Mickey catches Minnie under her skirt by her bloomers and lifts her up onto the deck, a touch of mischievous but innocent eroticism, catching his girlfriend by her underwear. But he’s a gentleman—he uses the hook to smooth her skirt back down modestly.
Then, Mickey and Minnie collaborate to make music. While a popular song called “Steamboat Bill” gave the cartoon its title, Minnie has brought aboard the sheet music for the fiddle tune “Turkey in the Straw.” The steamboat turns out to be a veritable Noah’s ark of animals, in fact everything but turkeys, and unfortunately a goat has eaten both a ukelele and the sheet music. But Minnie and Mickey turn the goat into a living Victrola by cranking its tail so that music comes out its open mouth. Then, in a triumph of escalating, exuberant invention, they metamorphose all the animals into a whole orchestra of living instruments by pulling the tail of a cat and some piglets, tweaking the mama pig’s teats, and using a cow’s teeth as a xylophone. This is the episode that has given Mickey the reputation for some mild sadism, but I think that is a bit extreme. We are clearly given to believe that no animals were harmed or traumatized—at worst, momentarily startled and annoyed—in the making of this cartoon. Indeed, to me the goat looks rather pleased to discover he has musical talent. Even a parrot that keeps taunting Mickey, who once gets a bucket of water on his head and once gets knocked into the drink by a potato, crying “Help! Help! Man overboard!” each time, is clearly unhurt. Serves him right for making fun of people. That’s about it, plotwise. What is the point? We could call it The Triumph of the Spirit of Music over Capitalist Oppression. No doubt some Marxist critic has done so somewhere. But we hardly need such allegorizing. Steamboat Willie’s contest of eiron and alazon delights us by showing creative inventiveness and sheer joi de vivre as irrepressible. Every time Pete tries to crack down, it boomerangs: he tries to kick Mickey, misses, and kicks himself instead. I have been playing the musical Hadestown for my Honors class because we are studying the myth of Orpheus, and it is the same contest: between Orpheus the eiron, the maker of song who animates the world of nature so that even the trees uproot and follow him, and Hades the lord of the underworld in all senses—a gangster capitalist with a bass voice and the alazon’s humorless bad temper. It is interesting how Steamboat Willie looks forward to Disney’s most ambitious effort: Fantasia (1940) is also a mostly wordless wedding of animation to pieces of music.
The contest of eiron and alazon, played for laughs in this short cartoon, nevertheless has implications so profound that they will have to be explored in another newsletter. What is interesting to explore at the moment is Steamboat Willie’s relation to slapstick, to physical humor as a mode of comedy. The short was a technological breakthrough at the time in its use of synchronized sound, but in fact there is no real dialogue. Not just the animal-orchestra scene but the whole film consists of physical humor—the humor of the body, with the emphasis on the body’s ridiculousness and lack of dignity: we here make connections with yet another recent newsletter, on our relation to the body (January 25, 2024). Pete at the wheel spits into the wind (thereby showing himself a fool in the cartoon’s first 60 seconds). The first time, he gets lucky: the spit goes behind him and rings a bell, which he thinks is funny, so he tries again, only to spit into his own face. He throws Mickey down a flight of stairs so that his head goes into a bucket of water. And so on. Cartoons are supposed to be for kids, and kids love slapstick. It sometimes gets them so excited that they have to be restrained from acting it out in a harmful manner. My brother and I loved The Three Stooges. I remember a comic strip, maybe by the late, great cartoonist Richard Thompson, in which a character remembers discovering that the sketch involving use of a pair of pliers on someone’s nose is best not acted out in real life. The Stooges were not only vulgar, but that was part of the humor: they were constantly scandalizing people by their shameless vulgarity. Slapstick has a reputation for being low humor, all right for children (or, to some minds, maybe not even that), but otherwise popular among those of arrested development—which often means uneducated, lower-class people. Discomfort with slapstick often has a basis in class snobbery. One of the best-known exchanges in the Stooges is when a respectable character expostulates, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!” and one of the Stooges says, “Who came in?”
Okay, the Stooges were ground-level entertainment, and maybe a boy thing—girls never seemed to like them (maybe because they weren’t “supposed” to). But standing just behind Disney was the great tradition of silent film comedy, of which the greater part was slapstick. Disney has explicitly said that the creation of Mickey was influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s little Tramp, and most sources believe that Steamboat Willie plays off Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., which had been released just 6 months earlier. Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd: there is a body of work here that cannot be dismissed as merely naïve entertainment (we may add the Keystone Kops on the ground level). There is an early Chaplin short that consists largely of the Tramp’s battle with an escalator, a battle that he loses miserably. It is amazing, half acrobatics and half ballet. Those of us of sufficiently advanced age remember the old Saturday Night Live skit inspired by the fall that President Ford took coming down a set of aircraft stairs. The comedian Chevy Chase imitated that fall so many times that he did damage to himself. In Steamboat Willie, there is Mickey’s fall down the stairs into the bucket of water. In 1939, James Joyce published what is probably the most complex work of literature of the 20th century, maybe of any century, Finnegans Wake. Yet it is based on “Finnegan’s Wake,” an Irish drinking song in which a hod carrier, meaning a construction worker, Tim Finnegan, falls off a ladder, is knocked unconscious, and taken for dead. At his wake, the inevitable drunken brawl starts up, whiskey is spilled on Tim, and he comes back to life. Tim’s fall, along with the fall of Humpty Dumpty, is taken as a symbol of the Fall and resurrection of God, humanity, and the cosmos—though it’s still a slapstick Irish drinking song. Among the thousands of puns in Finnegans Wake, I would not be surprised to find one about Mickey Mouse. In fact, I would be surprised not to.
The conventions of silent film were derived from the 19th century popular stage, which in turn derived from the commedia del arte, a form of theatre that thrived from Shakespeare’s time into the 18th century. The commedia del arte of troupes of traveling players was improvisational, depending on a number of typical scenes enacted by stock characters, the scenarios going back to Greek and Roman New Comedy, which was an influence on Shakespeare. The eiron/alazon conflict was one of those scenarios. The names of some of the characters are still familiar, especially in the forms used in the English version of commedia del arte, called the Harlequinade, including Harlequin, a Trickster who derives from the “tricky servant” character of New Comedy, his love Columbine, and her overbearing father, Pantaloon. Harlequin and Pantaloon are eiron and alazon respectively. The harlequinade was largely mimed, making it a direct ancestor of silent film slapstick. Picasso was fascinated with Harlequin, and painted many versions of him.
An offshoot of the commedia del arte was the Punch and Judy puppet shows: Punch was originally Pulcinella, a character from the plebian class. It too was partly improvisational, based on stock scenes with stock characters, and the slapstick of a Punch and Judy show was often violent. Mr. Punch has a stick, and beats everyone who comes up against him, including his wife, though she may provoke him by being violent first. Needless to say, we no longer approve of domestic violence, but one wonders about the prevalence of role reversal in the slapstick tradition. The classic comic strip by George McManus, Bringing Up Father, later retitled Maggie and Jiggs, had a run of 87 years, from 1913 to 2000, and the humor of many of the strips was based on Maggie’s violence against her henpecked husband Jiggs: she specialized in rolling pins and flying crockery. Maggie and Jiggs are Irish-American working class people who won the lottery and are rich but retain their working class ways, in the pattern of The Beverly Hillbillies, so the lower-class affinities of slapstick are evident here again.
Slapstick appears outside the dramatic tradition for satiric purposes involving loss of physical dignity. It can be used for contrast in some surprisingly high-toned places. One is in Dante’s Inferno, in which characters may be punished in humiliating ways such as being dunked in pitch so thoroughly that they become unrecognizable. At one point, some devils salute their captain by farting in unison. You may have been the epitome of aristocratic dignity on earth, but once you are in hell, you become lower-class in a moral sense beyond mere social class. Milton audaciously gives us celestial slapstick, in, of all places, the war in heaven recounted in book 6 of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, losing badly, invents gunpowder out of the infernal ingredients of hell, and shoots cannons at the good angels, who have never seen artillery before and do not know to get out of the way, so they are knocked over like bowling pins, “angel on archangel rolled.” Presumably this is God’s way of teaching them the lesson of humility. The whole war in heaven is in fact cast in the mode of slapstick farce: the pissed-off angels retaliate by dumping entire mountains on the devils. The point of the humor is serious: this is the same war that Satan’s tremendous speeches in books 1 and 2 showed from the perspective of high heroic tragedy. The reversal of perspective is God’s, which means Milton’s, lesson for the reader that things appear quite different if you change perspective. To God, the war games are trivial: when the Son finally comes out in his chariot, the devils are so terrified that they leap into hell to escape him. Goethe echoes this scene at the end of Faust. When Faust dies and angels arrive like cavalry to rescue his soul from the devils who claim it, the scene is pure slapstick, the opposite of high tragedy of the final scene in Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Goethe’s angels have a secret weapon: they pelt the devils with roses—the original flower children—so that the devils are completely demoralized. Mephistopheles roars:
O curse! O shame upon such bumpkins! Here’s devils standing on their pumpkins, Cartwheel on clumsy cartwheel turned, They plunge to Hell arse-over-face. (lines 11,735-38, Walter Arndt translation)
The Classical precedent for this is the donnybrook in the Iliad, book 21, in which the gods, wanting ringside seats for the final match between Hector and Achilles, come down from Olympus and sit upon the hills, only to get into a brawl like rowdy patrons at a soccer match. It is pure slapstick right before the darkest of scenes, and the contrast is intentional. The gods are the opposite of lower class, but they are spoiled aristocrats and end up losing their dignity, just as Hector will momentarily show that the human race may face ultimate tragedy with heroism. All of these scenes are from “high” literature. In the genre of satire, reversal of perspective is the whole point, and slapstick abounds. In Rabelais, the giants put out a fire by urinating on it.
Such is the line of the tradition of slapstick moving backward from the early Disney cartoons. Moving forward, there are of course many other cartoon characters whose humor is predominantly physical, including Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker, and Road Runner. The Road Runner cartoons strip the eiron/alazon conflict down to its bare essentials, returning even to the silent film tradition of being without dialogue, unless you count “beep beep” as dialogue. The alazon is Wile E. Coyote, whose very name is over-reaching because he is anything but. He sets a trap, and Road Runner turns it against him every time. It is the Coyote who runs right off the cliff instead of the Road Runner. He stands in mid-air for a moment, until he looks down and realizes, and then plunges. It is Coyote who gets the anvil on his head. But the audience convention is that we need not be concerned or appalled, because the characters are not really damaged. Homer’s gods and Milton’s devils can be hurt but not killed, and their injuries always heal. Although they do not have immortal bodies, cartoon characters pick themselves up and go on. The genre that has inherited this is superhero fight scenes, which are really slapstick played for melodrama more than humor. But the violence never seriously harms the characters. However hard a hero is slammed against a brick wall, however hard they are beaten by the Incredible Hulk, they rise again, hardly even ruffled let alone injured. I am not a fan of big-time wrestling, but I know intelligent people who were and are, and I can totally relate, because of my love of the superhero genre. Apparently I am not alone: in my favorite science fiction utopia, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge (1990), we find that utopia has WWE-style wrestling. One of the most intelligent characters, a lawyer, has a second calling as a wrestler.
In the TV and movies I grew up with, there was more slapstick than there seems to be now. The Dick Van Dyke Show is by reputation one of the most intelligent sitcoms of its time (1961-1966), and was very much in the commedia del arte tradition of partly improvisational comedy including the gifted slapstick of Dick Van Dyke, with his rubber face and ability to make a major production out of falling over a chair. In film, there was the notorious farting-around-the-campfire scene in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles (1974), and the hilarious fooling around in all the Monty Python records and movies. The eternal question of slapstick is “How low is too low?”, for going low is the whole reason for slapstick’s existence. In Jungian terms, slapstick is a healthy subversion of the persona, the socially respectable mask we wear that grows so tiresome at times. In academia, that mask becomes a kind of intellectual armor of superior ironic self-consciousness that puts itself in a position above any pretenses to anything ideal—only to become tiresomely pretentious itself. Postmodernist and post-structuralist literary theory and philosophy did not invent this pose: one of the stock characters of the New Comedy tradition is the pedant. Working class people such as I came from laugh readily at “low” humor because they feel less need to feel superior to it. In 1998, I took my 72-year-old mom to see There’s Something about Mary. The title of the Farrelly brothers’ other famous movie, Dumb and Dumber, tells you all you need to know about what kind of comedy you may be expecting, so I wondered what my mom would think of it, including the scene in which a teenage boy cannot make his date because he gets his scrotum caught in his zipper (an event I discover was based on real life!), and the even more notorious scene in which Ben Stiller answers the door to Cameron Diaz, who notices something hanging from his ear and asks, “Is that hair gel?” We know that it is definitely not hair gel. To use the appropriate phrase, my mom laughed her ass off, as I expected she would. Kindred spirits are where you find them: my former wife and I used to enjoy watching America’s Funniest Home Videos, which, if it is not as low as you can go, is pretty near it. I am amazed to find that that show is still running after 34 years.
Somewhat more recently, we have seen Roberto Benigni imitate Chaplin in making a slapstick comedy about Hitler, Life Is Beautiful. When it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1997, Benigni stood on top of the back of the seats in front of him in jubilation. When he was present the following year, there was a net to restrain him if he got out of control again. Pushing the envelope even harder was Sasha Baron Cohen in Borat (2006), also award-nominated despite one of the most outrageously disgusting slapstick scenes of all time, a naked wrestling match between Borat and another character who had the hairiest ass I have ever seen in my life—which at one point is planted firmly over Borat’s face in a way that could not possibly have been faked. The things one does for art.
Slapstick seems, as I say, marginalized at present, yet it survives, and one place it survives is in improv comedy, which of course carries on the commedia del arte tradition. The skits of Laugh In and Saturday Night Live are scripted, yet there is an improvisational spirit, and frequent pratfalls. And I was overjoyed to discover that what was to me one of the funniest shows of all time, far worthier to survive than America’s Funniest Home Videos, has continued unbeknownst to me until recently. Whose Line Is It Anyway? began as a British show, but I knew its American version that ran from 1998 to 2007, hosted by Drew Carrey (from Cleveland!). I did not realize it has been continued by The CW until last year, with the same brilliantly talented cast, especially Ryan Stiles, Colin Mochrie, and Wayne Brady. I used to watch Jonathan Winters on the old Red Skelton show when I was young, before “improv” was a word. There was always a 5-10 minute episode toward the end of the show in which Winters was given an object—a pencil, a balloon—and he went on endlessly inventing something out of it, sometimes assuming the voices of the various characters he had created. Around the time the American version of Whose Line ended, we saw Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie live, performing the same kind of improv as in the show, and a good deal of it was slapstick. Such as the task of having to wend their way through a whole minefield of mousetraps—blindfolded. Those traps went off, and some of them must have hurt! We laughed hysterically anyway.
Why do we laugh at the proverbial banana peel? Not out of cruelty: slapstick that was actually malicious would be repellent, not funny. Because we need the banana peel to remind us that sometimes we fall down, sometimes we lose our high pretensions, and that that is a very good thing. Mickey Mouse became an icon, sometimes was said to embody the American spirit itself, because he faced life’s pratfalls with plucky cheerfulness and a spirit of exuberant improvisation. One of my favorite poems by Yeats is “Prayer for Old Age,” in which he prays to be saved
From all that makes a wise old man That can be praised of all; O what am I that I should not seem For the song's sake a fool?I pray -- for word is out And prayer comes round again -- That I may seem, though I die old, A foolish, passionate man.
In Finnegans Wake, Joyce at one point sums up life: “They lived and laughed and loved and left.” At another point, he prays, “Lord, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low,” which is the best possible response to the statement of the human condition in the first saying. Two prayers, to which, having become old myself, yet still laughing, I can only say “Amen.”