"Funnies"

The New York Times Tries to Keep Up

By Andrew Fox

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illustration by Sarah Hotchkiss
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With the introduction of a new magazine section, "The Funnies," the New York Times is seeking to expand its portrayal of "the way we live now" beyond the limitations of straight journalism and into the heady worlds of art, comics, satire, and fiction. Readers of The New Yorker, Harper's, or Atlantic Monthly are familiar with the methods of this project: carefully selected, demure comedic essays; cartoons wanting of explanation; fictive pieces that often sit comfortably within the status quo of contemporary prose. What is remarkable about the new section of the NYT magazine might have less to do with its content, and all the more to do with its delivery; it's available, as of this week, via podcasts, mp3 files downloadable directly to your 40 gigabyte reality firewall.

Even a cursory glance reveals how far the section has departed from the norms and conventions of the funny pages developed over the last century. The comic strip was born in 1896, when Richard Oucault began to add speech bubbles to his comic "The Yellow Kid." The twentieth century saw innumerable iterations of the comic strip, the most prominent being the serialized narrative (a la "Dick Tracy" and "Spiderman"), the classic character driven strips ("Peanuts" and "Calvin and Hobbes") among them, and the absurdities of the one trick pony strip ("The Far Side", for instance). "The Funnies" may conjure up the colorific Sunday comic pages of youth, but don't expect to find the exuberant, simultaneously high and low brow humor of Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson here. Instead, find a watered down humor well suited to the forty-five-year-old aesthete, flipping through on his way to the Style section to pick out a new scarf for the great-grandkids, or for the stay at home Dad, who might secretly enjoy reading "The Family Circus." "The Funnies" simply doesn't push any buttons or any boundaries—and particularly disappointing is the comic page itself, a format most foreign to the magazine where experimental, or at least poignant, satire could have a home.

My, How Your Pretty Face Lies

This is not to say that the magazine's efforts are ill conceived. The first of the serialized sections, called simply "The Strip," is a graphic novel by artist Chris Ware. In the first installment, a piece entitled "Building Stories", a four-story brownstone apartment building is depicted as becoming self conscious when a lady across the street pauses to gaze at its façade. Though the building's initial reaction to the anonymous admirer is rather bellicose, it eventually warms to its voyeur, thinking how its empty apartments would surely benefit from the activity of a human being. Unfortunately, as quickly as she arrived, the woman walks away, leaving the building to spend "the rest of the day with curtains drawn, not even bothering to look up." Cute punning, well-drawn speech bubbles, somewhat humorous content, but lacking in sheer comedic power, the feather-ruffling force that any avid reader of Comic Rodeo, Providence's local comic newsletter, might expect. Comic Rodeo, which literally bombards readers with a hectic tour de force of local comic talent, often forces the reader to question what the hell a comic is, any way, and in messy and exaggerated boxes, weaves absurdist narratives taking full advantage of graphical reality. "The Strip" is by no means challenging to convention or form, taking light comedy as its central conceit.

Following "The Strip" is a section called "True Life Tales," which promises essays on everything from "baby stories to family shopping trips to giant dinosaurs by the side of the road." This past week's tale was written by Elizabeth Gilbert, a novelist who recently moved from the Northeast to Tennessee, an experience she crystallizes in her essay "Yoga, Y'all." "I've not succumbed to Yoga Snobbery," says she, lambasting the droves of yuppie yoga fanatics who require pristine and cushy environs for their practice (though admittedly, as the daughter of a Yoga instructor and student in an Ashram, she's probably one of them) and proceeds to relate a tale of sun salutations in the South. Amid the potshots at the Southern accent, which certainly reinforce the regionalism inherent in this unapologetically North-Eastern-centric publication, Gilbert manages to convey the fascinating interplay between Southern athletic dogma and new age spirituality. Perhaps Gilbert's work best aligns itself with the proposed goal: to present "the way we live now." The essay depicts a new South, where the fervor of the football field is carried over to the yoga studio.

Lastly, the "Sunday Serial" presents a new chapter each week of a novel written by Elmore Leonard, who is the darling of both critics and supermarket paperback lovers. One can see why—his historical fiction is incredibly readable, rife with fluid and subtly referenced prose. The first story is a tale of German POWs in American work camps, clearly a topic well researched by Mr. Leonard, as he crafts a narrative heavily laden with the language of 1940s military America. The choice of a war-camp setting, in an era during which American-run POW camps are clandestine and unmonitored, is apt. Though it is not funny, per se, Leonard's "Sunday Serial" is nonetheless a compelling tale, albeit one that is for the most part doggedly conventional.

Ruffie, My Loafers!

With the birth of "The Funnies" section and the expansion of the Sunday Magazine's means of storytelling, the New York Times is unabashedly embracing its target demographic of wealthy, educated North Easterners. The literary pieces are tame and largely inhibited; the comedy is pun-addled and cutesy. All this, in conjunction with the adjacent advertisements (one for the "Ford Plantation," an idyllic 1,800 acre, 400-family sub-development in Georgia), indicate that the Magazine is avoiding pushing any boundaries or buttons, and is pandering to the comfortable intelligentsia. There is no confusion that when the magazine talks of the "Way We Live Now," it refers to the lives of members of this rarefied constituency.

But that, surely, is no surprise. More intriguing is that "The Funnies" arrives at a time when the New York Times is recasting itself as a digital entity. Log on to nytimes.com and you will see exclusive, subscriber-based content, called TimesSelect, marked by a gothic 'T.' To preserve itself as a relevant cultural entity, the New York Times has shifted distribution strategies, recognizing that print media is now secondary to online access for many readers. Offering "Funnies" content as podcasts speaks to our current ethos of communication—personalized and downloadable. Contradictions abound in this project. Its very name is reminiscent of newspaper sections of a bygone era, while the digital delivery of its content is contemporary in its ambition. Its comedic wit and literary content seem antiquated, rather than empowered by the novelty of the format. And finally, the magazine's readership likely already consumes The New Yorker, so really, it's expanding into well-charted waters. So if you have a taste for the insipid and a hankering for pseudo-intelligent, bleached humor, downloadable to your slick ass new iPod, look no further than "The Funnies."

I wish I was an Oscar-Meyer Andrew Fox B'06

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