View From the Phlipside - Cartoons

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the Movies and more. I love them and I hate them and I always have an opinion. Call this the View From the Phlipside.

This must be my week to be puzzled. Because I do not get this next bit, not in the tiniest little inkling do I understand the allure. I understand where it comes from. This is the land of the mash-up. A mash-up, if the term is new to you, is where you take ideas, information, words and/or images from multiple sources and “mash” them together to create a new thing. Most mash-ups are pretty boring and predictable but a small percentage turn out to be quite inventive and interesting.

Sadly I don’t think these next two make the grade. The two stories crossed my desk within a couple weeks of one another. The two concepts are very similar so maybe one fed the other. It didn’t get better with age. The first is the product of a comedy team called Paul and Storm and author Josh Cagan. What the movie industry would call the “concept” sounds interesting, take classic cartoons from the New Yorker magazine and team them up with tweets from the Twitter account of pop singer and moron Kanye West. Yeah, take some of the most sophisticated cartoons of the century and team them up with one of pop culture’s shallowest thinkers. It’s the kind of thing that the more you say it the less appealling it sounds. You’ll find it under the hash tag for kanyenewyorkertweets. If you don’t know what that means here’s the good news, it’s not worth worrying about.

Now we have the next addition to this,what? With two can we call it a trend yet? That would be Jersey Circus where the mash-up brings together the cartoons of Family Circus with the um wisdom of TV show Jersey Shore. That’s right Jeffy and Barfy meet Snookie and the Situation. The resulting love child is every bit as unamusing as Kanye and the New Yorker.

I think what really repels me about all this is the underlying feeling of smugness I detect. Mashing together the simple, clean humor of Family Circus with the current rulers of American Low Brow doesn’t add anything to the pantheon of literature. Seeing little Jeffy supposedly mouthing the words of some Jersey Guido isn’t amusing it’s perverse. Forcing the words from the bottom end of our cultural intellect in the mouths of our brightest or most innocent is simple vandalism. It is an anti-intellectual form of thuggery. The assault on the innocence of childhood would be rejected in the harshest terms in any other venue.

Instead of being funny it ends up being nauseating.

Call that the View From the Phlipside.
"The View From the Phlipside" airs on WRFA-LP Jamestown NY.  You can listen to WRFA online HERE
Copyright - Jay Phillippi 2010