Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 27

The Canon and the Comics

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New Mexico A&Ms of this world.) But you miss a good deal of the
nuance and subtlety of the strip if you do not have a broad knowledge
of the sacred canon.
My second example is from a newer strip, "Fast Track". In this
strip one of the major characters is a hard-bopping feminist with the
delightful name Wendy Rommel. (Her name itself carries a certain
amount of intellectual baggage.) She is married to a genial slob
named Art Welding and she is pregnant. They are discussing what to
name the child. She has several suggestions, Gloria Steinem
Welding, Betty Freidan Welding, and so forth. He raises the
question of what to call the child-to-be if he is a boy. She rises to the
occasion with two inspired choices-George Sand Welding or George
Elliot Welding. That, I submit, is a marvelous feminist joke. But I
must also note that when I read it I had a vision of Duke, Brown, and
Stanford graduates looking up at their well-educated spouses and
asking what in the world the punchline meant. For their sakes I hope
their spouses attended a backwater college like New Mexico A&M.
For a third example I refer to yet another new strip, "Funky
Winkerbean." This strip, set in a modern American high school, their
mascot, the Scapegoat (once again a broad smattering of biblical
knowledge makes a good joke better), has an interesting cast of
characters. One of the principal figures, the Band Director, is
constantly involved in fund-raising activities on behalf of his band.
His chosen vehicle is, of course, the Band Boosters' Club. They
apparently have a sizable bank balance, and the computer, which
handles their investments and has a mind and voice of its own, has
michandled the funds. It has placed all of the Boosters' funds in the
Silas Marner S & L. As an aside, I might add that the Band Director,
furious at the computer for losing all the money, asks it why it didn't
invest in something safe like U.S. Treasury securities. The computer,
in its defense, asks the director if the money should have gone into a
fund whose owner is three trillion dollars in debt. As in the earlier
case of "Fast Track", here again is a very topical joke with a clear
antecedent in English literature. Again I hope that those
academicians and their followers who find Western Civ. repugnant
didn’t miss the joke, but in my limited experience with those of their
ilk, I have not noticed a well-developed sense of humor welling out of
them. That snide comment aside, I do think we will be cheating their