How to Survive Your Own Stupidity
Andrew O'Hagan
If you watch The Simpsons or South Park - cartoon serials where gangs
of doodles get to demonstrate the wisdom in modern stupidity - you come
to feel that the characters are really doing something quite old-fashioned.
They may be media savvy and product-articulate, these yellow-faced goons,
but in essence they go in for the kind of stuff that used to have people
rolling in the aisles of the music halls.
Homer Simpson is a kind of Grimaldi, an air-guitar-playing, nacho-chomping
version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble
with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases,
patter and multiple personalities. The old comics were human, of course,
but the startling thing about the newer television cartoon characters
is that they often appear more human than real people, more alive than
anybody you've ever met. It doesn't happen so much in the cinema nowadays,
though. Modern movie actors are much like ourselves, only better-looking,
with faster cars; people like Tom Hanks or Helen Hunt derive the major
part of their appeal from what we might call their apparent ordinariness,
and only occasionally, as with Jim Carrey or Robin Williams, does an actor
come along who seems to have the superhuman plasticity of a cartoon. These
movie actors, whatever else they happen to be, are works of animation:
they can make their faces, and their emotions, do anything, and they live
their on-screen lives in stark defiance of death. ...
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