![Daffy Duck and Porky Pig](https://3quarksdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Duck-Dodgers-1-empty-chart-copy-360x271.jpg)
It began at The New Republic. I don’t know just why I did it, but I bought a subscription to that magazine the year I went off to college. I remember when Robert Wright was there and I remember when he published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), which was about cultural evolution, a subject I’d been thinking and publishing about for decades. So I was paying attention when he formed Bloggingheads.tv in the mid-2000s. By that time The New Republic was no longer the magazine I’d originally subscribed to in the Jurassic Era. So I dropped it, even the online straggler version. But I loved Bloggingheads, which was a video webzine where two people would discuss important things.
That’s where I first became aware of John McWhorter, who appeared as a dialog partner with Glenn Loury, whom I also knew from having read an article or three in The New Republic. In time they became known informally as “the Black guys,” or so Loury likes to say. And I became a regular viewer.
Thus it came to pass that one Saturday evening I was attending a party at Rebecca and Kevin’s place on Pacific Avenue. They lived a couple of blocks from me in the Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City. It’s the oldest neighborhood in the city and is bisected by Communipaw Ave. (According to Local Rumor, Communipaw as once a path the Lenape Indians took to go fishing in the river where, in 1609, they rowed out to meet Henry Hudson, who was looking for the Pacific Ocean. I digress.) I was resting on a couch in Rebecca and Kevin’s front room when I looked up and saw this tall dark stranger. Is that…? I got up: “Are you John McWhorter?” He was.
The world collapsed. The World Wide Web was now in front of me in the flesh in an old neighborhood in Jersey City, only five blocks away from a house where A. Phillip Randolph housed Pullman porters on layover from their train trips, and four blocks from a church that hosted Oscar Wilde in the 19th century, the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and is now home to a Hispanic charismatic Christian congregation. Again, I digress. John and I started talking.
That’s when I learned that, in addition to being a nationally reputed commentator on race matters, McWhorter was also a linguist, with a particular interest and expertise in creoles, a pianist with an affinity for Broadway musicals, and a fan of Looney Tunes. These days he’s most widely known as a columnist for The New York Times, which mercifully hasn’t fallen as far as The New Republic. No matter. Because we’re going to talk about something really important: cartoons.
Caveat: The on-line availability of these cartoons is, shall we say, sporadic. They were available as I’ve indicated at the time I uploaded this article on January 26, 2025. Who knows what may have happened by the time you read it.
Getting started: Woody and Bugs
Bill Benzon: Hi John, I assume your interest in cartoons started when you were a kid, as mine did. I remember getting home from school, playing for a while in the neighborhood and then plopping down in front of the TV at, I don’t know, 4, 4:30, 5 PM and watching the “Woody Woodpecker Show.” It ran for half an hour. It would be many years before I realized that the theme song was based on the chord changes to “I Got Rhythm,” and that’s something we want to talk about, cartoon music.
What I particularly like about the show were those 5-minute behind-the-scenes segments. Maybe it would be about how to draw a character – Woody, Andy Panda, Chilly Willy, or one of the others – or how a character was animated, how the background was drawn, etc. I remember I’d treat the corners of my paper school tablets like pages in a flip book. I’d draw successive images of something in motion – I remember a small rocket – and then riffle the pages to watch it move. I retained my love of cartoons into adulthood, though the interest waned for a while.
How about you?
John McWhorter: My signature cartoon experience, as a 70s kid who grew up squarely in the Saturday Morning Cartoon era, was the Looney Tunes – specifically the Bugs Bunny Show weekend after weekend year after year, seeing a representative batch of them in rotation, as it were, during my formative years. Those were always the center of the morning for me. I watched the other stuff too – Hanna-Barbera and Filmation garbage. But I knew intuitively that Bugs Bunny and the Pink Panther were an order above the rest, although I did NOT yet know that the Pink Panther was done by the same people who had done the Looney Tunes. And, although Woody Woodpecker wasn’t running much in the Philadelphia area when I was that age, the Bugs Bunny Show also had some “fourth wall” segments about how cartoons were made. I was entranced. Little did I know that by the time I was an adult, those in between segments would no longer even exist in color – the original materials for those got lost as soon as the show went off the air, apparently.
One discovered that on UHF they ran OTHER Looney Tunes never seen on Saturday morning, and nerd that I was, I actually started recording the cartoons in a notebook – year, characters, title, plot summary. I even wrote a letter to the local station asking if they had a list of the cartoons they showed, and they actually DID and SENT me it! I still have it somewhere.
And of course there was Popeye and all the others. But what sealed the deal for me, and other cartoon fans, I sense, was Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice And Magic in 1980, with lists of every short every studio made and the history of each one. That book to me is still The Bible 45 years later.
Kid’s stuff, NOT
Bill Benzon: A quick one. As you know, when cartoons originated before WWII they were intended for any and everyone who went to the movies, adults and children together. But by the time we got to them, cartoons had become regarded as kids’ stuff. Did you have a proprietary feeling about them, this is OUR stuff? I had a bit of that. We’d watch Disney’s Sunday evening show as a family, which did have cartoons on some segments. And we’d sometimes watch The Jetsons and The Flintstones. But the other stuff was mine/ours.
John McWhorter: Yes, the best Saturday cartoons, to me, were just good. I didn’t think of them as “for kids,” and when I got a sense that they were thought of that way by some people, I was chastened, perplexed, because the best of them seemed like they were aimed at our intelligent natures.
I recall a peer casually referring in 1981 or 82 to something she called “Elmer Snerd cartoons.” To her these were trivia. Not sure why a 70s teen knew who the McCarthy puppet Mortimer Snerd was, although in our lifetimes you could catch the tale end of that cohort on TV variety shows. But even for her, Bugs Bunny wasn’t SIGNIFICANT.
Random example – Yosemite Sam throws Bugs into an oven. Bugs keeps coming back out asking for ice, chairs, as if there’s a party in the oven. After a bit Sam jumps in. Bugs decides “Aw, I can’t do that to the little guy” and looks in and there is a full color party (a clip from some movie or newsreel of the period). Bugs jumps in and just goes with it and the cartoon ends with joy. This makes no sense, and yet feels perfect as the ending of a 7-minute chase (it is, I think, “Rabbit Every Monday”).
That is NOT “Elmer Snerd cartoons.” That is quiet, ultra-competent genius.
Weird – thought of it last night.
Surreal but works just right.
Also the whole short is silent film gags – but timed better than you can do it with actual people. “Rabbit Every Monday” is hardly God, but it paces everything just right.
And, is witty. Bugs comes out of the oven and says “Hot in’ ere!” In not a single Disney or Lantz short does any character ever utter anything that perfectly vernacular and understated. I have shown that cartoon to my girls multiple times, and my younger, more mimicly oriented one, regularly says “Hot in ‘ere!” based on that.
I also wonder what color film that party they show is from.
Cartoon metaphysics
Bill Benzon: Right, the scene makes no sense, and yet there is a coherent order and flow to it. It’s like that famous sentence of Chomsky’s, “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It’s nonsense, but grammatical. Ideas just aren’t the sort of things that have color, except perhaps in some metaphorical sense, nor do they sleep, much less with fury. That sentence is a bunch of things slammed together. I believe that philosophers call these category mistakes.
It’s about ontology, though not in any deep philosophical sense. More in the sense the concept has come to mean in computer science and knowledge representation. Physical things have shapes, surfaces, and substance. Surfaces can have color and texture and so on. Things that are merely physical, like rocks, can’t grow or die. Plants and animals can do that, but they can’t think or talk. And so on through the whole conceptual world.
Cartoons typically wreak havoc with these semantic and cognitive conventions. Perhaps that’s one reason that both adults and children can enjoy them. All these gags play against our conventional sense of order. For adults they provide an indirect affirmation of that order while for kids, well, come to think of it, pretty much the same thing. They’re unexpected, funny, and expose the ordinary construction and mechanisms of the world we otherwise take for granted.
I assume you’ve watched “Duck Amuck” with your girls. How’d they react? When did they sense that bugs was behind all the nonsense?
John McWhorter: My girls indeed love “Duck Amuck” – my 13 year old considers it the best of the shorts she knows (which I’m proud to say is about 100 at this point). The joy of that one, for me, is the verbal polish (and Mel Blanc’s acting). It also gave me a linguistics example I use in assorted contexts, which is that understanding doesn’t entail standing under anything – because of that marvelous bit where Daffy calls for an understanding [starting at 4:30, but not, alas and alack! in that version, which seems to have gone blind starting at 2:45; try this link] and Bugs draws in that mysterious black substance that presses down on him from above so that he is “standing under” something. The girls have seen it too many times to be surprised by the ending anymore, but I’m sure they felt the way I did – I remember first seeing it on a Saturday morning and thinking “Nothing that good would ever happen on ‘Scooby-doo.’”
Small thing about “Duck Amuck” – given what a genius these filmmakers were, it’s almost odd that they tried to do “Duck Amuck” again with Bugs Bunny being the one tortured, by who turns out to be Elmer Fudd. Now, I know that in the 1950s they wouldn’t have assumed audiences already knew “Duck Amuck” – it had at that point only played for a while in theatres and then disappeared. But still, “Rabbit Rampage” is a dud – it’s off to see Bugs losing. Interestingly, though, my Dahlia likes it just as much – I suppose some of what makes Duck Amuck epic requires an adult sensibility …
Cartoon music
Bill Benzon: Cartoon soundtracks made frequent use of classical music, mostly, I’d guess, because it was in the public domain. In Tunes for Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon, Daniel Goldmark noted that many kids got their first exposure to classical music from listening to cartoons. I know that always associate the “Morning Mood” segment of the Peer Gynt Suite with cartoons, where it’s been used many times. How’d cartoons affect your interest in music?
John McWhorter: Well, old cartoon soundtracks did deeply affect my sense of music and what it should be like. Something about my wiring meant that I always listened not just to the parody stuff like “Kill da wabbit” but also the accompaniment in general – I found it beautiful. When I do cocktail piano accompanying today, I am often essentially imitating (and sometimes aping) Carl Stalling.
A good third of what I love about Looney Tunes is Stalling’s work. Also, it is too little known that Stalling did the basic scoring, but his music was orchestrated by Milt Franklyn, who was every bit as gifted as Stalling. Random example – “Tick Tock Tuckered” in 1944. Porky Pig and Daffy Duck are having trouble getting to sleep. At one point Porky is grappling with a curtain that refuses to stay down (c 3:40). Stalling plays “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” underneath. The orchestra swoons along in what was known as the “sweet” style back then, very Guy Lombardo. The string and brass sections trade off, as in good Big Band of the period, with luscious twinkles as needed by the action from the xylophone, and the Hawaiian guitar for when the curtain stretches. For the second chorus, [Carl] Stalling does a beautiful, leisurely key change, which begins with the saxes – that would have been Franklyn’s work. None of this was necessary – Stalling could have just tick-tocked along with no creative effort, as the house composer at Terrytoons did (Philip Scheib). It’s part of what makes Looney Tunes special.
Bill Benzon: And then we have “Long-Haired Hare” (1949), where Bugs goes up against an opera tenor and gets his final revenge when he disguises himself as Leopold Stokowski, who was known for wearing white gloves and not using a baton. He was the conductor in Disney’s Fantasia (1940), and, while the film failed to break even, it was seen across the country.
John McWhorter: One thing I didn’t know watching these shorts on TV in the 70s was that even back then, they were often quietly edited for “violence,” often in arbitrary ways. Until I saw Long-Haired Hare in a theatre (or maybe when home video came in) I didn’t know that one of the three opening gags, when “Giovanni Jones” punishes Bugs physically for singing during his practice session, was cut – Bugs is playing “When Yuba Plays on His Tuba” on, of course, a tuba he for some reason has – and Giovanni hangs him from a tree branch by the ears. For some reason this was seen as potentially more damaging to children than all of the other smashings and explosions in the cartoon.
[BB: Perhaps it carried echoes of a lynching?]
The full cartoon doesn’t seem to be online. This segment includes Yuba and also the bobbysoxer.
The other cut in this one was when Bugs disguises himself as a bobbysoxer and gives Jones TNT. And thing is, the dialogue in the scene is anthropologically key – at least to me! The bobbysoxer loves Jones and says “Bing and Frankie aren’t in it!” That HE’S NOT IN IT, between the wars, meant “He’s not the one I’m hot for.” You only learn things like that these days from listening and reading around. The cut meant that I learned IN IT from other stuff much later, damn those censors!
Something else about this one – it taught me how to sing legit. I didn’t grow up with much opera, but I did grow up seeing this cartoon a couple times a year. I developed an imitation of the opera singer in the cartoon – our voices sit in the same place – and that imitation has been precisely how I have sung the occasional legit role in my time. The reason I could fake a Sarastro in a small Magic Flute production in 1998 was directly because of “Long-Haired Hare,” and I can still sing every note of the character’s big solo that Bugs conducts at the end!
The return of kid’s stuff, with “adult” content
Bill Benzon: That inexplicable censorship brings up the notion that cartoons are somehow not worthy of adult attention, that they are kid’s stuff (for Saturday mornings). As you know, that certainly wasn’t the case before World War II. Cartoons were created for the general movie-going audience. They were part of a package. You’d see a feature film (two on a double-bill), a newsreel, a short subject, and a cartoon. It was only after the war that cartoons were consigned to a kid’s ghetto. And then we have the case of anime in Japan, which brings in a whole raft of other issues. But neither manga (comic books) nor anime (animation) are regarded as primarily intended for children. Things have been changing, of course, what with The Simpsons, South Park, Adult Swim on Nickelodeon, and, come to think of it, Pixar, but the bias still exists.
John McWhorter: The idea that all of this is for kids is a shame, really. Chuck Jones often said that they made the cartoons for themselves, and overall the Hollywood cartoon people were clearly not thinking of kiddies, especially with all of the sexual references and, at Warner Brothers, the theatrical level of verbal wit. Television programmers in the 50s used the cartoons as diversions for children, and that cemented the association. If the cartoons had simply been discovered around 1980 and shown at festivals, no one would have thought this was child material. It creates the endlessly heard remark about the Looney Tunes – “There are things in those that I didn’t get until I was a grownup!” As if the baseline notion is that you would think of Bugs Bunny as a child’s character.
Bill Benzon: I hope you don’t mind if I stick in a word for one of my all-time favorite cartoons, “The Greatest Man in Siam.” My particular reason for liking it is that there’s a really kick-ass jazz trumpet solo on the sound track, along with some marvelous Lindy hopping in the visuals, but that’s not why I bring it up here. The plot is simple: A Middle Eastern potentate decides his daughter needs to get married. So he announces a contest: Which ever man can prove that he’s the greatest man in Siam, he gets her. It came out in 1944, so it was during WWII.
This cartoon has been scarce online, but at the moment you can view it on this Facebook page. You’ll have to toggle the sound on.
The first man who shows up has mental and physical challenges, but he’s presented as the smartest man in Siam. He even presents a diploma that says “This boy’s head is most likely to recede…” All of a sudden, he’s got on a black graduation gown, pulls it up, and shows a gold fish bowl around his knee as the voice-over says “he’s got water on the knee.” Remember, this was war-time and he’s obviously trying to evade the draft. And so a guy comes in with a sign on his back, “draft board,” and hustles him off to the navy. A bit contrived, but not exactly kid’s stuff. The next suitor is billed as the richest man in Siam. He shows up with a bunch of food and a fistful of tickets, one of which is a gas rations ticket. So he’s been taking gas illegally.
![](https://3quarksdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Siam-Phallus.jpg)
But what really gets me is all the images that look awfully phallic to me. But are they, really? I’m trained as a literary critic, where a big issue is whether or not what the critic sees in a text, is it really in the text? Or did the critic put it there? It turns out – I read an article, John, in your paper – that Shamus Culhane, the director, was quite consciously seeing what he could get past the censors. Again, not kid stuff.
These games are all over the place in cartoons.
John McWhorter: Indeed there are quite a few penises in old cartoons. At MGM when in four cartoons the wolf goes nuts over a sexy woman on stage, he shoots out horizontally – painfully obvious. A related case – in one proto-Looney Tune with Bosko (“Bosko’s Picture Show”), he seems to yell “The dirty fuck!” The mouth movements are clearly an F. It’s 1933! Over the years, I have decided that Bosko is likely really saying “The dirty pup!” – which was an actual common expression back then for, roughly, “asshole.” But I’m never sure I fully believe that …
Zen and the art of Road Runner
Bill Benzon: I’d like to switch gears and close on Road Runner. I have vague memories of seeing my first Road Runner cartoon when I was a kid. We could only get one channel on our TV – you needed a special antenna to get all three network channels. So I didn’t often watch whatever TV program the Looney Tunes were on. One day I was at a friend’s house and saw my first Road Runner cartoon. It was a revelation!
Here we have things reduced to a minimum. There’s only two characters, a mangy coyote, Wile E. Coyote, and a clever bird, Road Runner – who seems to be a contemporary instance of the Trickster so common in folklore and mythology. Only these two characters in all the Road Runners. We’re in the desert, so scenery is minimal. And there’s no talking, none, in any of them – a radical difference from The Simpsons or South Park. But there’s always written language of some kind, such as the labels on those devices Wile is always purchasing from the Acme Company.
Here’s some examples of writing depicted in Beep! Beep! (1952) – which, by the way, if you listen carefully, sounds more like “meep, meep.”
In the upper left we have a blueprint for some device that Wile hopes to unleash on Road Runner. At the upper right Road Runner is flashing a sign at the coyote, and a rather ironic sign at that. While obvious enough, you do have to think for a second or two to appreciate the irony. At the lower right we see some cactuses forming themselves into an exclamation after an explosion in the mine that we see at the lower left.
The mine’s tunnel system is magically depicted using an x-ray view through the rock. We see a chase (starts at about 3:28) in which Road Runner and Wile Coyote are represented as two dots moving along those black bars, obviously mine tunnels. How come we find it so easy and natural to read that convention? Looks a bit like a video game, though they didn’t become common until the 1970s. You could teach half a course on visual semiotics using nothing but Road Runner cartoons.
Look at what Stalling does with the music at about 4:02 (alas, I couldn’t find a version I could insert here, but if you go to this link you’ll find it, at least for the moment). Stallings zigzags it to match the visual motion (I believe it’s called “Mickey Mousing”).
John McWhorter: The Road Runners are often criticized for being the same thing over and over, but this misses the point. For one, no one at the time had any reason to view them in sequence – you might catch one every two years in the theatre, if that. But also the art is how much Jones and writer Michael Maltese do with so little. As well as the utterly surreal aspect – the Coyote salivating over that scrawny and inaccessible creature makes about as much sense as Krazy Kat getting turned on by Ignatz Mouse hitting him with a brick. The spare, Sibelius-like air of the whole business is especially clear when, in the earlier entries, something a little too particular intrudes like the Coyote dressing as Little Bo-Peep – too specific; the Road Runner isn’t supposed to have read books or been sung nursery rhymes; he should be a running, smiling abstraction with the occasional fillip of attitude usually serving as a good finale.
The darkness of the series is also key. It’d be one thing to, when the Coyote goes off a cliff, to then switch to ground level to show him hitting the dirt. And Jones does this if something interesting is going to happen to him down there like a boulder slamming down on him right afterward, etc. But otherwise, to hold the camera over the gulch and show the Coyote falling down, down, ever smaller an image, and then hitting the ground with a small puff [at 2:21 above] and the quiet little crunch on the soundtrack that is what we would hear from that distance – is genius. It’s one of countless ways that sound engineer Treg Brown was an artist (similarly whenever a Looney Tunes character gets a squeeze on the nose, Brown plays one of those squeeze horns, the ones with the rubber bulb. Squawk! – but noses don’t make that sound when squeezed; you just kind of wish they did!). That way of doing the Coyote fall communicates a kind of resigned distance, conveying that the fall is essentially ordinary, not even worth zeroing in on. The perfection of this glum dismissal – a Keatonesque air, in fact – is clear when we imagine how it would be handled in any other cartoon. If Tom of Jerry went off a cliff, Hanna and Barbera would surely zero in on him smacking the ground (landing on a bulldog, or whatever).
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Bill Benzon: I want to wrap things up with a clip from a live action film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), albeit one that includes cartoon characters, known as Toons, in the same physical universe. We see two grand pianos on the stage, one played by Donald Duck and the other by Daffy Duck. In reality, of course, those two would never appear in the same cartoon as they are the property of two different studios (Disney and Warner Brothers, respectively). In this scene they’re playing Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2,” which has been used in at least two cartoons: Tom and Jerry, The Cat Concerto, and Bugs Bunny, Rhapsody Rabbit.
I wonder if this dates back to Harlem rent parties, where pianists would perform to help raise rent money. Do you know anything about this, John?
John McWhorter: I’m not sure there is a line from the rent parties to the scene in Roger Rabbit.
More immediately, piano duos were a thing on Broadway in the 20s – Arden and Ohman did some Gershwin shows, for example, and also recorded. There was another duo like them who did piano medleys of shows in the 30s whose names I forget just now. Then, in Britain there were Ferrante and Teicher, who were well known enough that Noel Coward name checks them in a 50s show tune.
Bill Benzon: Good enough.
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Hiromi was inspired by watching Tom and Jerry cartoons, but also, and very obviously, by stride piano – like they played at those Harlem rent parties:
Jerkface paints Sylvester the Cat (September 2014). This is (or was?) on Fairmont Ave. in Jersey City, not far from where I first met John McWhorter:
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I have written quite a bit about cartoons. I’ve got blog posts under the labels, cartoon. I also have a number of working papers. This one is about “The Hottest Man in Siam.” I’ve got two about Warner Brothers cartoons:
Walt Disney:
- Walt Disney’s Fantasia: The Cosmos and the Mind in Two Hours
- Walt Disney’s Dumbo: A Myth of Modernity
- Freud Does Disney
Japanese anime:
- Sex, Power, and Purity in Kawajiri’s Ninja Scroll
- Miyazaki’s Metaphysics: Some Observations on The Wind Rises
I published these two in Mechademia:
- Postmodern Is Old Hat: Samurai Champloo
- The Song at the End of the World: Personal Apocalypse in Rintarô’s Metropolis
Finally, I have three working papers about Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, which is a feature-length film where Paley was the writer, animator, director, and producer.
- Notes on Ritual: Sita Sings the Blues
- Notes on the Agni Pariksha in Sita Sings the Blues
- Nina Paley on the Agni Pariksha
I’ve also written one 3QD article about Nina Paley: Seder-Masochism: Nina Paley began at the end and ended at the beginning.
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