The Sad Humor of Cemeteries

In the end, all that will be left of us on this earth will be names carved on stones in little parks all over the place where we hope at least someone cuts the grass once in a while. Our name is our pride, our calling card and our burden (sometimes). Forgive me for finding humor in some of these:

1. The Tickel family, needless to say, were tickeled to death.

2. Sooner or later everyone loses their stuffing.

3. Wasn't he the Wichita Lineman?

Popeye the Sailor Man- A critical reassessment

I expect the thing that makes Popeye so annoying besides his obvious substance abuse (spinach), his devotion to Olive Oyl (a woman of infuriating ambivalence), his laugh which is like a demented monkey, and his chain smoking which has obviously wrecked his singing voice, ...is the level of violence in which he lives. Bluto is a mesomorphic sociopath, of course, whose crude sexual advances ultimately lead to failure. Perhaps he should back off the steroids. Why not try some spinach? Bluto on spinach would be unstoppable. And how about Olive? If she got some of that stuff what could she do? Surely she could fend off Bluto.

All the characters seem to be remarkably unobservant and are very slow learners. Unfortunately spinach eating by others never occurred to either one of them. But then I expect there would be a vegetable-eating arms race that would lead to armageddon.

And then there's Betty Boop. She lives in a surreal, possible drug-induced hallucinatory world. She has the smallest mouth of any cartoon character alive or dead. Once she got stuck in a fat vibrating machine, and then sent her little nephew off in search of an electrician. Her nephew, clearly unequal to the task, wandered the streets, forgetting his Aunt Betty's emergency entirely and looking for a "politician". He finally finds an old box spring set and attached a couple of springs to his feet, and then goes happily bouncing down the street destroying a shop awning and a few other things before bouncing through the third floor window where Betty is still suffering at the hands of the fat vibrating machine. The little boy falls and pulls out the power cord, and so Betty is released from the machine. She has overdone it. She is skinny as a she can be, the sight of which the little boy starts to laugh. Betty starts to laugh too, and then, what is REALLY weird, the vibrator machine grows a face and starts to laugh along with them, as does a hobby horse, an armchair, and a grandfather clock. Betty AND the little boy have grown enormously fat while laughing. Fade to credits. Not sure what it is those animators were smoking when they dreamed this one up but it probably was not legal.

On the other hand another cartoon "Goofy Goat Goes on a Spree" is even weirder. I am not making any of this up. In that one, GG wins a fight with an accordion monster that can subdivide itself like a planarian and which finally is ingested by a pelican that goofy goat is riding before a midair collision after which he and his cow girlfriend float back to earth on her skirts, which serve as an umbrella.