The Elder of the Two


Kliban CartoonAs with any artform, the history of modern humor hopscotches from one cataclysmic breakthrough to another. The periods between these explosions are relatively stable; humorists and their students pick up and minutely examine the shards left by the blast, and strategize small new variations, insignificant new wrinkles, on their freshly detonated craft.

But what we people-who-like-to-laugh crave more than anything is the explosions themselves, which afford us the delicious realization that someone has discovered a way to be funny that no one has ever found before. That’s the sort of thing that makes life worth living.

I very clearly remember — perhaps miraculously, given the circumstances — a moment of realization like this. It was 1975. A group of my fellow high-school students had slagged off Geometry class — a highly recommended pastime, I still insist — and had hightailed it to the open countryside behind school to smoke dope, make out, and generally contribute to our fund of teenaged turpitude. Someone had brought along a copy of B. Kliban’s Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head And Other Drawings — a book I’d never seen before. I opened it to a deeply strange drawing of a rather fat woman in gardening clothes, holding a basket of tools and staring at two extremely ugly men who are buried up to their necks amid her vegetables. One of the men is speaking. The caption read, “‘You may wonder what we’re doing in your garden,’ said Andrew, the elder of the two.”

I concede that I was in a particularly, er, what’s the word, receptive state of mind for this utterly new kind of cartoon. Raised on a bland but steady diet of Peanuts and B.C. — and in my beardless youth yet unalive to the labyrinthine wordplay and masterful draftsmanship of Walt Kelly’s Pogo — I was a babe in the cartoon woods. The single-panel form seemed incomprehensibly arch, an impression gathered from many puzzled examinations of my parents’ copies of The New Yorker. (It’s only now, many years later, that I realize the reason I didn’t find New Yorker cartoons funny is that they’re frequently — hey! — not very funny.) Mad Magazine was, by the ’70s, a sad, stridently unfunny hulk. Druggy and deliberately obscure, “Underground” cartoons were aimed at a bone far removed from my humerus.

It has taken me some self-examination to decide why I found that Kliban cartoon — and all the others in that book and the few others that he published before he died in 1990 — just so achingly, bladder-endangeringly funny. But I think I’ve got it. The deliberate ugliness of the characters is certainly part of it — Kliban was never far from overt misanthropy. (When, a few years later, I saw my first Gary Larson cartoon, my first thought was that his fat, myopic children, his beehived, cat-spectacled women and pomaded, sweaty men were a direct lift. But Larson’s ugly characters are charmingly artless; Kliban’s seemed to arise not only from a powerfully accomplished pen but from a frightening, fathomless loathing of people. Perhaps this chimed a sympathetic chord in me.)

But ultimately, I’ve realized, it was the caption that occasioned my explosive guffaws of recognition. It’s the addition of the utterly irrelevant detail of the relative ages of the two men that raises it from the mundane to the transcendently funny. “‘You may wonder what we’re doing in your garden,’ said Andrew” is not at all funny; “…said Andrew, the elder of the two” is eyeball-explodingly so.

The addition of that detail changes the entire context of the cartoon. Without it, the observed moment is simply that, an isolated instant in time. The detail present, the caption becomes one sentence in what may very well be a long series of sentences, a series in which the fact of the men’s relative ages forms an important plot-point. This is to say, the added detail makes the caption read as an isolated sentence from some bizarre comic novel that exists only in Kliban’s mind.

This, then, is what I intuited when I thought, that day in 1975, that Kliban had discovered a way to be funny that no one had ever found before. He’d taken the single-panel cartoon from its customary, strictured isolated-moment-in-time format and made it (at the risk of sounding pompous) literary.

As I said earlier, this breakthrough inspired other artists to examine their craft anew. After Kliban’s groundbreaking work appeared in the mid-1970s, other, less revolutionary artists picked up this paradigm-shattering idea and wrung every drop from it. Think of the times that Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes narrates the fantastic Spaceman Spiff action in his own mind as we see it unfold on the page, in Watterson’s masterful use of dramatic irony. Or just remember this wonderful 1986 Gary Larson cartoon:
Larson Cartoon

You look at this and see Gary Larson — peace be upon him. “Somewhere, off in the distance, a dog barked…” It’s “the elder of the two,” refined, with its edges knocked off! I look at it and remember that day ten years earlier when B. Kliban blew the top of my stoned little head off.

A collection of Kliban’s later cartoons may be seen at the B Kliban Picture Gallery (scroll down a bit, somebody fancied himself an HTML rebel in 1997 or so…)

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January 24th, 2007
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