Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood

341 Pages·2011·3.15 MB·English

by  Daniel Goldmark

Funny Pictures
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support
of the Ahmanson Foundation Humanities Endowment Fund of
the University of California Press Foundation.
Funny Pictures
Animation and Comedy
in Studio-Era Hollywood
Edited by
Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Funny pictures : animation and comedy in studio-era Hollywood /
edited by Daniel Goldmark and Charlie Keil.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-26723-7 (cloth : acid-free paper)
isbn 978-0-520-26724-4 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
1. Animated films—United States—History and criticism. 2. Wit and

humor in motion pictures. I. Goldmark, Daniel. II. Keil, Charlie.
nc1766.u5f86 2011
791.43'340973—dc22 2011005494

Manufactured in the United States of America
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible
and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book
on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100 percent postconsumer waste, recycled,
de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It
is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.
Contents
List of Figures vii
Introduction: What Makes These Pictures So Funny?
Charlie Keil and Daniel Goldmark 1
Part One. The (Filmic) Roots of Early Animation
1. The Chaplin Effect: Ghosts in the Machine and Animated Gags
Paul Wells 15
2. Polyphony and Heterogeneity in Early Fleischer Films: Comic
Strips, Vaudeville, and the New York Style
Mark Langer 29
3. The Heir Apparent
J. B. Kaufman 51
Part Two. Systems and Effects: Making Cartoons Funny
4. Infectious Laughter: Cartoons’ Cure for the Depression
Donald Crafton 69
5. “We’re Happy When We’re Sad”: Comedy, Gags, and 1930s
Cartoon Narration
Richard Neupert 93
6. Laughter by Numbers: The Science of Comedy at the Walt
Disney Studio
Susan Ohmer 109
Part Three. Retheorizing Animated Comedy
7. “Who Dat Say Who Dat?”: Racial Masquerade, Humor, and the Rise
of American Animation
Nicholas Sammond 129
8. “I Like to Sock Myself in the Face”: Reconsidering “Vulgar Modernism”
Henry Jenkins 153
9. Auralis Sexualis: How Cartoons Conduct Paraphilia
Philip Brophy 175
Part Four. Comic Inspiration: Animation Auteurs
10. The Art of Diddling: Slapstick, Science, and Antimodernism in the
Films of Charley Bowers
Rob King 191
11. Tex Avery’s Prison House of Animation, or Humor and Boredom
in Studio Cartoons
Scott Curtis 211
12. Tish-Tash in Cartoonland
Ethan de Seife 228
Part Five. Beyond the Studio Era: Building on Tradition
13. Sounds Funny / Funny Sounds: Theorizing Cartoon Music

Daniel Goldmark 257
14. The Revival of the Studio-Era Cartoon in the 1990s
Linda Simensky 272
Bibliography 293
List of Contributors 311
Index 315
Figures

2.1. Max Fleischer’s Little Algy 36
2.2. Max Fleischer’s E. K. Sposher, the Camera Fiend 38
2.3. Sheet music implicitly acknowledging the Fleischers’ debt to the “Yama
Yama Girl” 42
3.1. The Fire Fighters and Mickey’s Fire Brigade 61
4.1. When My Ship Comes In 76
4.2. Honeymoon Hotel 77
4.3. Those Beautiful Dames 78
4.4. Playful Pluto 81
5.1. The Sunshine Makers 97
5.2. Music Land 103
5.3. Funny Little Bunnies 107
7.1. I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You 133
7.2. Bosko the Talk-Ink Kid and Gertie the Dinosaur 135
7.3. Ads for Moran and Mack and Christy’s Minstrels 141
7.4. Lucky Ducky and Uncle Tom’s Bungalow 145
8.1. Panel from Mad magazine’s “Starchie” 163
8.2. Panel from Mad magazine’s “Shadow!” 163
8.3. Powerhouse Pepper cover 164
8.4. Basil Wolverton self-portrait 171
10.1. Charley Bowers’s Life’s Little Phonies 195
10.2. Advertisement for Egged On 197
10.3. Charley Bowers in Many a Slip 199
11.1. Droopy’s Double Trouble 218
vii
viii Figures
11.2. Dumb-Hounded 222
12.1. Plane Daffy 239
12.2. Jerry Lewis in Artists and Models 243
12.3. Cinderella Goes to a Party 245
13.1. Making ’Em Move 260
13.2. Making ’Em Move 261
13.3. The Herring Murder Mystery 263
Introduction
What Makes These Pictures So Funny?
Charlie Keil and Daniel Goldmark
In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) John Sullivan, a movie director tra-
versing the United States in an attempt to define the soul of America, finds
himself wrongly imprisoned and part of a chain gang. Invited with the other
prisoners to attend a screening at an African American church in a southern
bayou, Sully discovers what really speaks to the human condition when he notes
the spontaneous and heartfelt peals of laughter generated by the film chosen to
amuse black parishioner and white jailbird alike. The film in question? A Disney
cartoon.1
In asserting that Hollywood entertainment finds its purest expression in the
cartoon hijinks of Pluto and Mickey, Sullivan’s Travels confirms what has become
a strongly held assumption; namely, studio-era animation, in particular shorts,
has been long associated with comedy. At least as far back as E. G. Lutz’s book,
Animated Cartoons: How They are Made, Their Origin and Development (1920),
a volume that greatly inspired the young Walt Disney, comedy has loomed large
in the success of cartoons, evidenced by an entire chapter, “On Humorous Effects
and on Plots,” dedicated to the topic. Lutz even begins the chapter with the seem-
ingly obvious statement: “The purpose of the animated cartoon being to amuse,
the experienced animator makes it his aim to get, as the saying goes in the trade,
a laugh in every foot of film.” 2 But if equating the short cartoon with Hollywood
humor now strikes us as axiomatic, much as it did Lutz in the early days of the
studio era, we should resist accepting the logic of the association at face value,
if only to explore how the animator’s pen came to be enlisted consistently as a
primary tool for entertaining the masses through cartoon merriment.
Of course, studio-era animation need not be funny, nor was it so at all times.
1