Broom Hilda by Russell Myers for February 28, 2010

Better he made the box into a TV than that he made your TV into a box, Broomie!

At least he had to use some problem solving skolls.

And he made good use of a scissors, exercising his fine motor skills.

Did he sign up for cable for his new TV?

He must be watching Star Trek. I see nothing but the icy cold of space on the tube.

Same mind-numbed blank stare.

This is probably better for his mental health.

When I was a kid, we had educational TV, Soupy Sales and the Three Stooges. Taught me skills for life.

I loved Soupy Sales! There was a topless stripper at his door seen only from behind over the shoulder, but you can tell Soupy liked it!

“Are troll offspring kids?”

In this strip they are.

What great comic art!

I don’t know if Russell Myers draws everything himself or if he has a hoard of assistants like some fabulously wealthy cartoonists, but it is always a pleasure to see how much fun someone must be having drawing this stuff.

It’s better than some of the stuff on TV these days.

I want my Empty TV!

On wikipedia, neither the entry for “Broom Hilda” nor the entry for “Russell Myers” mentions assistants, but that’s not necessarily definitive.

What IS heartening is that Myers is apparently famous for keeping a HUGE backlog of finished strips ready, in case of interruptions for poor health or something. (He was born in 1938, so he’s gettin’ up there.)

The amazing thing for me isn’t that his artwork stays fresh and fun, but that he’s still FUNNY after 40 years. I would imagine he’s still got a lot of kid in him. Maybe even a troll kid.

Yes the programming does look better, and he gets fresh air! The Trolls are fun on the comic strip.

I remember playing “TV” when I was that age! We’d cut up a cardboard box and pretend to be doing TV shows. A whole lot more challenging and creative than watching TV, which was part of the problem–everybody wanted to be in the show, nobody wanted to be the audience.

One time, we hit the Holy Grail of pretend TV: somebody pulled the guts out of a TV cabinet and put the cabinet in the trash. Oh, did we have fun performing inside that box!

There are no trolls in real life. Trolls in the comic strip “Broom Hilda” are the way that Russell Myers chooses to present them. Irwin is a fully-grown troll. Nerwin is a little kid troll. He acts like a little kid human. His friends are little kid humans. He goes to school with little kid humans. In real life, little kid trolls do not go to school with little kid humans. In real life, there are no trolls.

Perhaps when cartoon trolls die, they go to cartoon heaven and instead of sneakers and propeller beanies they have wings and halos. If Russell Myers wanted to establish that in the comic strip “Broom Hilda”, that would be his prerogative. 99.9999% of the readership of “Broom Hilda” would not find such a choice objectionable or worth questioning. But we know which 0.0001% would make a point of trying to turn it into an issue.

The Internet isn’t real-life… :-)

Moreover, I don’t think that You-Know-Who is a troll in that sense, because a troll’s purpose is to stir up trouble. YKW doesn’t intend to be unbearable, I think (although by this time he clearly knows what sort of comments are going to raise objection, and posts them anyway). I believe he honestly thinks that his positions are the only proper ones, that he has an obligation to enlighten the rest of us by his pronouncements, and that in a just world we’d all be thanking him for opening our eyes to the Truth. And if we don’t accept him as our hero, he’s content to be a martyr and bear our whips and scorns. But he doesn’t even have the grace to suffer in silence.

A true Internet troll would love knowing that this sort of conversation was being conducted about him, yet I believe YKW will take it badly. He wants attention, but the attention he wants is praise only.

I read a study once that said that religious fundamentalists(1) of ANY faith are the LEAST likely groups to find humor in ANYTHING, because much humor is founded in the overturning of expectations, and the fundamentalist mindset doesn’t deal well with having expectations overturned.

YKW’s insistence in pointing out the obvious, explaining jokes, and stressing the importance of exceedingly minor details at the expense of the major plot points leads me to believe that he often simply doesn’t get what the joke in a given strip is, and rather than admit his narrowness of view he insists that everybody else is laughing at the wrong thing.

(1) I’m sure he’d object to that characterization, but insistence that the True Meaning of Scripture (i.e. HIS meaning) can only fully be grasped by a literal reading of the untranslated texts is about as fundamentalist as it gets.

@fritzoid, I find your analysis excellent. I think what puzzles me is, why do people get so bothered about all of this? Maybe I have a good tolerance for the obvious and the boring? Or maybe (blush, shudder) I don’t mind having the obvious explained to me, because I don’t always get it myself?

NO!! We will not go there!!

For example (sigh), I was wondering whether the TV had cable, and how I would be able to tell. Then I saw the antennae on top of Broomie’s TV. But there were two TV’s:

Then when I reread the strip I saw the hanger perched on top of Nerwin’s set (that answered my question), and I remembered when we had what we called “rabbit ears”.

What a pain they were. You thought you had adjusted them for good reception, but when you went back to sit down, you discovered that your body affected the reception. So you went to the TV and adjusted them, then back to your chair to check them, then back to the TV,… As I said, WHAT A PAIN.

I have a radio that gives me the same problem. Now, in 2010. Of course, I don’t know when it was manufactured - probably a long time ago.

My big thing is, if you explain the joke you kill the joke. If somebody ASKS “I don’t get this, what’s going on?”, then of course it’s considerate to provide an answer. But when actual descriptions of the drawings are given, or explaining what a Snuggie is, or pointing out that “Avatar is a very popular movie directed by James Cameron” or “Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a children’s book series” before even determining that anybody doesn’t know these things, it’s like being at a foreign film and hearing someone read the subtitles aloud. Or driving with someone who announces the make and model of every car as it passes the other way.

It’s knowing, every time a strip shows Nerwin at school, that it’ll be pointed out that trolls don’t go to school. Or being reminded that Broomie is 1500 years old and green, day after day after day. Or that in the Bible angels don’t have wings or halos, when 99% of all angels in comic strips have wings and halos.

He seems to think that if he just keeps on posting what he thinks each strip should be, the artists will conform the strips to his liking. And if you don’t agree with him, he’ll bad mouth you. On one occasion, a cartoonist himself suggested that YKW was misreading his strip, and since then he’s been trashing that cartoonist on other strips.

fritzoid, thanks for speaking so plainly at such length while not actually mentioning any names. You save me the trouble.

But I think I’d be living proof that what most people call “fundamentalism” and “humor” are not mutually exclusive. (In the strictest sense, I’m not a “Fundamentalist [capital F]” in theology, nor a “fundamentalist” as a Jungian psychologist would define the term - in the latter case I’m more like a “prophet” - but leave that aside.) I beg your indulgence on this point for a moment…

The problem with much of this world’s humor is not that it overturns expectations, but that it denies reverence to God and dignity to man, which are truly fundamental and sane values. But nobody is better than an ENFP like me at appreciating morally sound humor that yet stands expectations on its head - which is why I like BroomHilda so much. At the same time, I’m able to suspend disbelief when I see certain comedic icons here and elsewhere (as on Birdbrains), even if (again technically speaking) I don’t agree with their truth value.

GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) - any study is only as good as its definitions and assumptions.

Oh…and from the looks of them I’d suspect that the offspring of trolls are tribbles. :))

I’ll see if I can find a link to the study to which I referred. I read it in a book I no longer possess, but I believe the study itself was conducted at least partly through an international online survey, and the results I believe are still posted. Watch this space tomorrow.

One of the other surprising findings of the study was that Germans, who are notorious (at least among English-speaking peoples) for having poor senses of humor were actually the culture most likely to rank anything in the “Very Funny” category, regardless of subject matter. (Note: It wasn’t that they ranked more things funny than other cultures, they ranked things more funny.)

Johanon, the book I mentioned is called “Quirkology”, by UK behavioral psychologist Richard Wiseman.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/21974694/richard-wiseman-quirkology

The discussion of fundamentalists and humor wasn’t part of the online-study which ranked different countries, but is from part of the same chapter on “The Search for the World’s Funniest Joke”. Wiseman cites studies by Vassilis Saroglou, a psychology professor at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium (also director of the Centre for Psychology of Religion):

“Saroglou argues that there is a natural incompatibility between humor and religious fundamentalism. The creation and appreciation of humor requires a sense of playfulness, an enjoyment of incongruity, and a high tolerance for uncertainty. Humor also frequently involves mixing elements that don’t go together, that threaten authority, and that contain sexually explicit material. In addition, the act of laughter involves a loss of self-control and self-discipline. All these elements, Saraglou argues, are the antithesis of religious fundamentalism, and research shows that those who subscribe to it tend to value serious activities over playfulness, certainty over uncertainty, sense over nonsense, self-mastery over impulsiveness, authority over chaos, and mental rigidity over flexibility.”

It’s not merely a question of subject matter whereby fundamentalists are humorless; they tend to be uncomfortable with most of what makes anything funny.

As far as humor which “denies reverence to God and dignity to man”, there’s a classic Jewish Grandmother joke which I find hilarious, but I wonder whether it falls outside your boundaries of “morally sound humor” (which seems to me to be a good addition to the list of “World’s Shortest Books”):

“A Jewish grandmother is walking along Miami Beach with her young grandson, when a huge wave rushes in from the sea and carries the boy away. The woman gets down on her knees and cries ‘Oh, Lord of Israel, how could you do this to me? My only grandson, a poor innocent! Have I sinned against you in some way, that you punish me with the loss of my dearest treasure, right before my eyes? Have I not kept your Commandments? Woe, woe, and treble woe falls on my head, and against this all my pleasures are as ashes in my mouth!’

“Suddenly, a SECOND huge wave rushes in from the sea, and deposits the young boy safely back by his grandmother’s side, a little confused but entirely unhurt. The grandmother stands, brushes the sand from her dress, looks up at the sky, and says ‘He was wearing a hat.’”

Is that irreverent to God? I suppose it is. Does it deny dignity to man? Eh. It seems to me that man denies his own dignity a thousand ways every day. But is it funny? That is the question.

First instinct: Yes, it’s funny, and no, it doesn’t deny dignity to God and man. Because when you have those two, you can add element three: a recognition of human nature for what it is, incongruities and all. Despite a famous pair of verses in Jeremiah 17 about the perversity of human nature, I like to say that he who can’t laugh at his own foibles is in fetters.

Saraglou need only look at the Bible closely to see how completely wrong he is. The Hebrew-Christian Bible is shot through from one end to the other with each and every thing he talks about being essential to humor. A lot of the humor is missed in Hebrew Scripture (even by Jewish standards) because it depends on “how one says what one says”, the melodic rendition which was lost when the Second Temple fell and was only rediscovered by Suzanne Haik-Vantoura in the Masoretic Text beginning in 1976. But much is nevertheless verbal as well, and Saraglou surely is blind when he overlooks it.

Then there is the question of “fundamentalism” itself. Dr. Linda Berens’ workbook on the four temperaments categorizes the Improviser temperament as being “fundamentalists” at worship. Yet there’s nothing wrong necessarily with their sense of humor, nor yet with those of the other three temperaments with their own styles of worship.

C.S. Lewis pointed out (via his satirical Screwtape) that with regard to sex, people have two kinds of humor. Some talk about sex because it leads to incongruities; some cultivates incongruities because it leads to opportunities to talk about sex. Much else could be said based on that gem. Nobody could say that Lewis lacked a sense of humor (indeed a sardonic wit), yet he was one of the most famous conservative Protestant apologists of his time.

Again, GIGO.

Good response, but I admit you’ve gone beyond my ability to answer. The passage from the book which I quoted was around page 215, I think, and the portions where Wiseman elaborates on Saraglou’s methodology and data can be found immediately after. But I haven’t read (or been able to find, although my search was brief) Saraglou’s writings themselves, so I’m neither able nor willing to defend him.