posted on www.eruditorumpress.com America a Prophecy 1: Exegesis
This structure does not inherently preclude a sincere or substantive engagement with 9/11–it’s entirely normal for comedy to use its final reveal for brutal effect—a stunned, awkward laugh that makes use of the shock of a perspective shift. But that’s not what’s going on here. The revelation that Snuffy has been talking about 9/11 does not provide any incisive commentary on what has gone before—it is simply a sudden intrusion of grief into a context that had done little to suggest such a thing was coming.
Is this supposed to be funny? Certainly it in practice is funny, in that the strip is a ridiculous absurd thing. But this is a humor of bathos—one in which we laugh at the strip instead of with it. Indeed, it is funny only to the precise degree that it isn’t supposed to be. If the strip is read as insincere, with its punchline meant to be funny then it becomes a cruel and ghoulish thing. What is funny about it is its misapplied sincerity—the fact that it genuinely appears to be engaging in an act of public mourning and is getting it wrong, instead ending up weirdly and dissonantly tone deaf.
When I wasn't in high school, one of the most compelling English class assignments I ever got was to find an ad from a newspaper or magazine and do a close critical reading of it to develop a deeper understanding of the cultural context in which that ad was created, what its specific goals were, and how it aimed to achieve them. It was a blast, and one of the most influential projects for me in developing my critical eye towards the world around me.
In this post, Elizabeth Sandifer turns the same close reading techniques towards the installment of the newspaper comic Barney Google and Snuffy Smith published on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, which takes a particularly bizarre approach to commemorating the event. 9/11 is already a notably strange cultural touchstone in the US, and so coming at it from such an odd angle suits the subject perfectly.