I have never found the classic cartoons fun. I am thinking of the Warner Brothers work of Tex Avery and Chuck Jones in particular, but I mean the cartoons that feature those instantly-recognizable characters that continue to generate a great deal of money through products like T-shirts, novelty mugs, and (for parties other than their owners) tattoos — Bugs, Tweety, Woody and so on. Most of these characters were created just before, during, or just after World War II, though the bulk of the classic cartoons that feature them were produced in the 50s and 60s. I am specifically not thinking of Disney’s cartoons, which seem to me to have been, from the start, of a more comforting and saccharine character. And I am not thinking of cartoons from after 1970, which are of a different age, even those that feature these same characters.
I find these cartoons remarkably depressing. If they contain humor, it is of a dark, almost nihilistic nature that seems to me to prefigure the plays of Samuel Beckett (citations of which have become a cottage industry of their own, albeit in more rarified circles and with less merchandise). These cartoons, like Waiting for Godot, feature characters who frequently get beaten, are often dumped in ditches, and feed only on dilapidated root vegetables. The difference is that viewers of the cartoons are expected to see these characters’ travails as light amusements, Merrie Melodies, rather than tragicomic arguments about the human condition.
I have heard this sentiment shared by many other inmates of the post-Boom generations, especially people born after 1970 (although they are not universal among my age cohort or any other). I think that for Generation Xers and those after, it has been harder to not personally identify with funny anthropomorphic animals. They are not novelties; they have a genealogy and a history. They are the older, sadder relatives of the neon animals of our youths, and it is difficult to not take their tragedies seriously.
The saddest of all, for me, is Wile E. Coyote. His milieu is the desert of the American Southwest. And it is specifically the modern American Southwest, because a road crosses it. Little is constant besides this road. There are rocks and sand and sky (the sand and the sky often barely distinguishable in color), and the cacti that grow upon them. And, of course, there is the coyote’s nemesis, the Road Runner, whose proper milieu is marked in its name: the road.
The essential characteristics of the Coyote and the Road Runner are expressed in the schoolboy-Latin names they are given at the beginning of most of their shorts. The Road Runner is Velocitus incalculii, Fastius tasty-us, Speedipus rex. The Road Runner is fast and perhaps edible. The Coyote is Eatius birdius, Famishius-famishius, and Famishius vulgaris ingeniusi. The Coyote is hungry and perhaps clever.
From a classical comic perspective, given that the Coyote is our protagonist, or, at least, the character who receives by far the most screen time, the outcome of the scene should be predictable from these names alone. The Coyote, though unable to catch the Road Runner by means of his (I believe the Coyote to be a he, though I have never been able to determine the sex of the Road Runner) physical prowess alone, will devise some trick or contraption by which the Road Runner may be caught. There will be some amusing setbacks, but ultimately his cleverness will win out; he will eat the Road Runner and finish the night with a full belly.
But as we all know, this is never how it happens. In the nightmare stasis of the classic cartoons, no resolution is possible. The Coyote’s cleverness will never suffice to catch the Road Runner, no matter how subtle his traps and how sophisticated his devices. The Road Runner will not outsmart the Coyote, though often the Coyote will be too clever by half and his schemes will collapse upon themselves. This is as it should be, for the Road Runner is not clever, it is fast.
But, more perversely, the Road Runner will rarely even outrun the Coyote, in the strict sense of the word. The Road Runner’s speed is a constant; it cannot be altered by those things we know in life to check the speed of moving bodies. Perhaps it should be called fastness, in the sense of light-fastness or color-fastness. This fastness is impervious to both physical law and the usual rules of narrative logic. It is a premise and a conclusion all on its own. The most horrifying example of this fastness, I believe, is the case of the painted tunnel. Here, the Coyote contrives to paint a tunnel on a cliff face to trick the Road Runner into running into the cliff, whereupon it will presumably be stunned and edible. Instead, the Road Runner runs into the tunnel, its fastness turning the image of the tunnel real. Confused by how this could have happened, the Coyote peers into the tunnel and is promptly flattened by a train that emerges from it.
The Coyote always remains hungry. That this is the status quo of this cartoon is no surprise. A surprising proportion of the classic cartoons are about food insecurity. Tom failing to eat Jerry, a hungry Bugs creeping towards the carrots as a hungry Elmer creeps towards Bugs, the horrific Woody Woodpecker short Pantry Panic, and so on. But only here do we have a protagonist who is not only hungry and charming — a classic American underdog filled with classic American ingenuity — faced with an antagonist who has no personality beyond its perky smugness and its perpetual victory. Only here are we asked to accept the perpetual suffering of the only figure we have to identify with in all of this awful desert and call it funny.
He serves, in a way, as a bleak mirror of Bugs. Both Bugs and the Coyote are anthropomorphic animals that have traditionally been regarded as trickster figures (by the traditions of cultures that have been oppressed in America). They are both marked by their cleverness, their tendency to resort to stratagems. And their plotlines both tend to center around hunters and those hunted. But Bugs is the hunted, not the hunter. And his tricks work. Bugs’ world is rich and green, its ground gives forth food, and gravity looks the other way in his favor, not against it.
Wile E. Coyote is a new thing, or at least a rare thing, in the annals of trickster stories: the trickster who has nothing and always fails. And, especially since the Road Runner is such an insufferable prick, I can never bring myself to laugh at his failure. If even the Coyote, with all his labors, all his applications of the fruits of modern industrial culture — which can produce a wealth of weapons, signs, and pharmaceutical nostrums, but not an ounce of edible food — cannot catch one obnoxious bird, what hope is there for us?
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