Mort Drucker and Stan Hart, “Strange Interlude with Hazey” ( Mad 85, March 1964); George Woodbridge and Stan Hart, “Strange Interludes in Everyday Life” ( Mad 90, October 1964)
2021; Penn State University Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.42.2.0111
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoAt first glance, Eugene O'Neill's work may not seem an obvious subject for parody, the famous gag of Groucho Marx delivering Strange Interlude–inspired asides in Animal Crackers (1930) notwithstanding. But in the highly allusive, polyglot Mad universe, dumping elements of The Great God Brown and Strange Interlude on top of Mad's typical platform of media parody and social satire made some kind of warped sense. Granted, selecting O'Neill as a departure point for skewering bourgeois values by insinuating him into both the popular '60s sitcom Hazel and the observational comedy common in early-to-mid-period Mad may seem like an unusually highbrow choice. I certainly don't wish to claim any deep cultural engagement for Mad, even though its lambasting of the Carter administration in issue 206, “The Carterbury Tales,” was how I first learned about Chaucer. But the context of Mad's Rabelaisian continuum in the two pieces reprinted below needs a little unpacking. The closest historical anchoring point for these parodies seems to have been José Quintero's revival of Strange Interlude at the Actors Studio in 1963, as well as its associated cast recording. However, a broader overview of how Mad's humor and reach evolved over the previous decade may shed further light on author Stan Hart's brazen lampooning of O'Neill and other sacred cows in these two works.From its beginnings in the fall of 1952, Mad maintained a kitchen-sink approach to its comedy, parodying American life from every angle. The early years saw plenty of twists on obvious kids' fare: TV westerns, science fiction (“Captain Tvideo!”); gangster sagas (multiple installations of “Ganefs!” and “Dragged-Net”); monster movies and horror (“Frank N. Stein,” “Outer Sanctum!”); and especially other comic books (“Mickey Rodent,” “Starchie,” “Superduperman”). The film parodies that would eventually dominate the magazine took a while to materialize, but in time they appeared steadily. Shane was mangled as “Sane!,” “The Cane Mutiny!” made an appearance, and “From Eternity Back to Here” is notable for presenting Mad's first egregious shattering of the fourth wall, with an editor's note apologizing for the original ending of the film and then rewriting it. This knowledgeable tweaking of audience expectations would become a hallmark of Mad film and television parodies. Yet even early on Mad featured takeoffs of famous literary works canonized in high-school syllabuses and elsewhere. “Shermlock Shomes” made his first appearance in issue 7 and would reappear in The Hound of the Basketballs (#16). Treasure Island and “The Raven” (#9), Robinson Crusoe (#13), and Alice in Wonderland (#18), complete with Tenniel-style drawings by Jack Davis, would also feature in Mad's first two years of publication. In addition, there were takes on “Casey at the Bat” (#6), “The Face Upon the Barroom Floor” (#10), “Paul Revere's Ride” (#20), and even Ulysses (#27), which duly begins with the opening lines from Joyce's “Sirens” chapter before the editors frantically “intervene” and throw the narrative back to ancient Greece.Mad underwent a substantial editorial change with issue 24 in July 1955. Formerly an authentic four-color process, ten-cent comic book, it now came billed as “The New Mad,” in a larger, magazine-sized format. Beneath the new twenty-five-cent price tag, the cover boasted “Cheap!” to reassure potential buyers, as it would on every issue afterward, regardless of actual price. Maria Reidelbach notes that founding editor Harvey Kurtzman pushed through the changes in response to the expense of printing in color and the censorial threat of the nascent Comics Code Authority, created after the moral panic over the comic books of the mid-1950s.1 Although Mad stuck with its trademark anything-for-a-laugh style, it also anticipated the magazines of the 1960s with its more pointed jabs at mainstream American print culture by sporting soberly monochromatic pages and dead-on print ad parodies of products like Maidenform brassieres, Pond's Cold Cream, Band-Aid, and Jell-O. The refurbished Mad would in subsequent years include such contributors as TV innovator Ernie Kovacs, comedy duo Bob and Ray, Sid Caesar, and even Danny Kaye. Issue 34 featured no less an august set of the era's comedy figures than Tom Lehrer, Orson Bean, and Jean Shepherd. Amid the new orientation toward more politically and culturally oriented satire, the literary parodies also took things up a notch. Issue 24 featured the prose-heavy men's adventure parody “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Soup,” ostensibly written by “‘Pappa’ Heminghaw”; issue 35 glanced at Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan's scandalous Baby Doll (1956) in “Sin-Doll Ella,” its first panel depicting a dead ringer for Carroll Baker curled up, naturally, in an oversized crib.By the early 1960s Mad had largely abandoned its puncturing-of-literary- pretentions satire and was adding new writers, who began for the first time to receive byline credit for their work. Although Mad's “usual gang of idiots” included regulars who contributed frequently, the editorial crew was the only salaried staff, and most of the writers and artists were freelancers who maintained healthy careers outside of the magazine.2 Dick DeBartolo, a frequent contributor from the early 1960s onward, was head writer for game-show producers Goodson-Todman, writing material for such staples as Match Game, Family Feud, and To Tell the Truth.3 Jack Davis, Norman Mingo, and Will Elder were all successful commercial artists in addition to being Mad cartoonists. Stan Hart was no exception: he debuted in issue 79 (June 1963), having graduated with an M.A. in Renaissance literature from Columbia in 1959; his thesis, “Unity and Disunity in ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’” is still available from that university's Rare Book and Manuscript Library. In the early '70s, Hart would take over head writing duties for The Carol Burnett Show, winning two Emmys along the way.4 Hart was coauthor of the book for the Mad magazine musical that was staged off-Broadway in 1966. Starring Linda Lavin, Richard Libertini, and Jo Anne Worley, it included a parody of “The Girl from Ipanema,” composed by Stephen Sondheim and credited to “Esteban Rio Nido.”5Ultimately, the two pieces below, the first drawn by Mort Drucker and the second by George Woodbridge, offer divergent approaches to the Strange Interlude technique of interior monologue combined with the mask metaphor borrowed from The Great God Brown. In “Strange Interlude with Hazey,” the device upends the characterization of the sitcom under attack; in “Strange Interludes in Everyday Life,” it becomes a novel but efficient mechanism to deliver the expected messages about societal hypocrisy.“Hazey” represents Drucker and Hart's second collaboration in a partnership that would extend well into the 1990s. Drucker's penchant for precise and readily identifiable yet irreducibly comic caricature made him a natural for writing media parodies: the splash panel of “Hazey” quickly introduces, much as a dramatis personae does, the traits of each character. Reidelbach observes that even though Hart's brief introduction and title make reference to Strange Interlude, the visual look of Drucker's artwork is built on the device of the masks in The Great God Brown, though the masks are not overtly mentioned in “Hazey,” as they are in the play.6 As it turns out, the direct address to the audience that O'Neill developed is in line with the tenor of the typical Mad parody, with the characters alternately paying lip service to the hackneyed dialogue and then explaining, sometimes in exuberantly self-aware fashion, the tropes they are parodying. The fulsome responses the Baxter family trades with each other even echo the hollow pleasantries the Brown family exchanges in the prologue to The Great God Brown.What Hart intended by the bizarre juxtaposition of Hazel and O'Neill—other than mere absurdity—is anybody's guess. But there is nevertheless a critique here, targeting both run-of-the-mill domestic foibles and the shallowness of the sitcom format, with a needling of the film and stage careers of the real-life actors in the series added in. Like the TV show, “Hazey” is built on the meddling of the family's maid (played by Shirley Booth on TV), the central character in the Baxters' lives, as she threatens the dynamic of the nuclear family by usurping the parental and spousal roles through her blunt and humble demeanor. Even on the title page, as Reidelbach notes, the persona being wielded by “Hazey” in the upper right-hand corner is that of Hazel, the cartoon character created by Ted Key in 1943.7 This characterization of Hazel herself in the move from comics page to TV screen shows her transformation from a harsh, domineering authority figure—a subversive working-class domestic seizing control from her upper-class masters—to the benevolent yenta-like caricature of a sweet if bluff busybody. Where Key's iron-willed version of Hazel was capable of exerting her influence far beyond her station, the '60s TV version parceled out twenty-five-minute doses of saccharine domestic homily.The panels of “Hazey” proceed in an almost completely disjointed fashion. The splash panel sees the family gathered around the table in their breakfast nook, aping the concluding shot of the show's original title sequence. Drucker's clean style is relatively free of what early Mad illustrator Will Elder termed “chicken fat,” his designation for the little background details that cram in as many gags per panel as possible, no matter how irrelevant.8 The two examples of this kind of joke in the splash panel are Harried (Harold, played by Bobby Buntrock) reading Mad behind his mask, and the goldfish mask concealing the tiny shark inhabiting the fishbowl from the Hazel set. We find the plot thickening on the third page, where George Baxter's boss initiates the sketchy A-plot of the episode, complaining to Baxter that he is going to lose his real estate investment. After Hazey magically solves everybody's problems by serving them fudge, the bottom half of the last page throws a number of things into doubt. Whitney Blake's character, Messy (Missy), angrily excoriates Don DeFore's Georgie (George) for neglecting her (uncharacteristically for the show); this brings their familial crisis to a head. While her mask is yelling, Blake the actress complains sotto voce that she's not getting enough screen time: “[Hazey] blocks me out like a Green Bay Packer tackle!”Familial as well as professional jealousy abounds, as it does in the two O'Neill plays. Although Messy clearly wishes she could push Hazey out of their lives, the real conflict is evident in the lower left panel on page 46 (fig. 1B), where Harried remarks, “Why is my mother always sticking her nose into my child-parent relationship with Hazey?” This ambivalence over parental roles recalls the main plot of Strange Interlude, particularly act 7, where the young Gordon's annoyance with Ned Darrell, an interloper whom Gordon never realizes is his real father, vacillates between enmity and affection. Here, although Harried's feelings may be similarly confused, he is sure of his relationships with the adults in his household: “Daddy feels Hazey represents a mother substitute to me! He's wrong! Actually she's a father substitute!”The final panel of “Hazey” shows a typical '60s sitcom bedroom, with the hapless Baxters preparing to sleep in single beds and their housekeeper barking out “For Pete's sake, Goodnight” from her own bed on the other side of a modesty screen. The punchline to all this bickering throughout their day is the three-handed grumbling about the dismal states the actors themselves have plunged into, with DeFore noting acidly to Booth that she is a shill for Ford, and Blake reminding him (erroneously) of his co-starring turn with skater-turned-failed-actress Vera Hruba Ralston.“Strange Interludes in Everyday Life,” published seven months later, finds Hart working in familiar Mad territory with George Woodbridge. In contrast to Drucker, Woodbridge usually deployed quick-hit social satire vignettes to illustrate, sometimes pointedly and in highly schematic gag structures, the irony behind everyday interactions. By this point, Mad knew that its readers were practiced consumers of television, film, and celebrity news, as well as connoisseurs of the language of advertising; the location of the Mad offices at number 485 “MADison” Avenue—so the magazine styled it—was never lost on the writing staff.In the prologue, Hart explains the mask and monologic devices yet again, though the piece itself is written in a standard Mad format. The subject of this piece, the hypocrisy of the attitudes that bind the middle class, is a Mad favorite and a target of O'Neill's in The Great God Brown. At the bottom right of page 13 (fig. 2B), two women at the reunion try to outdo each other for status. The one on the left brags about her daughter's accomplishments but agonizes over the fact that the young paragon remains unwed, while her interlocutor outwardly disdains her relatives and inwardly longs to impress both them and her present companion. The other separate narratives tackle gossip; the sinister incompetence of a dentist; the hopelessness of school guidance counseling; and, finally, the flagrant miscommunication common in blind dates. All these scenarios would connect with Mad's youthful readership. The last entry in the series depicts a conservatively dressed couple who secretly mock each other's appearance, until finally at the end, they shake hands good night. They both remark inwardly after the panels of sustained, slow-burning vitriol, “Come to think of it, this was the best date I've had in months! It's great to meet someone who is really your type!” As with everything Mad, we are locked in a bleak and hopeless world as constraining as anything in Kafka or Beckett. Or perhaps, with these powerful tropes borrowed liberally and insouciantly from O'Neill, we see lowbrow art truly approximating real life.
Referência(s)