Each individual line in comprehensible but taken on a whole, this strip makes as much sense to me as, well, the song of the same name.
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Comics I Don't Understand 
Oh, might as well…
Mutt and Jeff were driving to Florida, but Mutt decided to go on a roundabout route because the road was better. Unfortunately, he then got lost and they don’t even know what city they are in. Mutt’s eyes are red (probably because he’s been driving in an open car), and the policeman reacts with concern. In response, Mutt responds that there is nothing wrong with him and jokes about white rabbits, which have red eyes when their whiteness is caused by albinism (as frequently is the case) – it is not considered to be anything wrong with them. It’s an inappropriate joke, but it’s par for the course for Mutt and Jeff, and we’ve all known people who joke inappropriately.
I wonder if we are supposed to understand Mutt and Jeff. I honestly don’t get any of them but I get a sense of a consistent theme of conversation snippets that parse but miss the unstated but implicit assumptions of conversations. The situation here is that although it seems natural to drive around and get lost and ask a cop what city you are in, it is utterly incomprehensible that anyone can actually drive into the heart of Manhattan and not know what city they are in. And I suppose it is a familiar trope that a cop ask an erratic driver (and not knowing you are in Manhattan is erratic) if he’s been drinking and a common sign of drinking is red eyes. So again derailing implicit et unstated assumptions there are other cause than intoxication for red eyes. For example white rabbits have red eyes. So by the *stated* laws of logic and syntax, the conversation *ought* to be acceptable. But by the unstated by assumed laws of context this is simply absurd random spewing of a lunatic.
Perhaps that *is* the point?
That’s all I’ve got.
Where did they start out? I kind of assumed that it was set in New York, but the first panel pointing them there.
I couldn’t tell you what this means. Go ask Alice. I think she’ll know.
The problem may be that logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead.
One of my biggest disappointments was when I got a big book that reprinted a fair number of Krazy Kat cartoons, and despite everything I’d heard and read about this classic cartoon, I quickly discovered that the strip itself was utterly impenetrable and stupid, even with the best will to want to understand it and like it. I didn’t even really want to admit to myself that I didn’t like it, but the book has remained unread to this day, despite the many attempts I made early on to plow through it. It just seems pointless, unfinished, rather random, and not at all what I am expecting in a comic: I either want continuity, and a story, or I want gags — but random whimsy is not a gag. Krazy Kat seems to come from a time before the elements of a gag had been discovered and refined. And apparently people didn’t know what they had never encountered, and the weird pointless stuff going on in Krazy Kat was good enough for the audience. But me, I grew up in a post-gag world, and Krazy Kat is totally lost on me.
Which is all to say, from what I see here, Mutt and Jeff was pretty much more of the same.
Early audiences were enthralled by early films of ordinary stuff, like a train pulling into a station — people screamed, women fainted. We cannot watch that same piece of film today with the same awe and reverence. It is just a rather boring, static, silent shot of a B&W train pulling into a station. This stuff isn’t lost in translation, it is lost in subsequent sophistication — once you’ve moved on to the next level, you can’t go back again.
Mutt and Jeff was an absurd strip when it was originally written (and absurdly popular, too), but in the seven to nine decades since then, the language and all of the ancillary details have become.so dated that it just seems weird to modern readers. It was eminently worthwhile when GoComics reran the “Little Nemo” Sunday pages, but these retread, recropped, recolored, and incessantly rerun Mutt & Jeff strips just don’t seem worth the trouble of dissecting to find out what was going on in Mr. Fisher’s (or Mr. Smith’s) addled brain back then.
I’m going to disagree but empathize with larK’s assessment of Krazy Kat. I love Krazy Kat and love the gags such as they were and I think I understand it. But it does take immersion into the time and style at the time. And there are a *lot* of narrative conventions that readers and authors of the time take for granted. I don’t think it’s dated so much as alien.
Hmmm…. I remember in the 70s B.C once had a gag that 13 year old me thought was gross and a little out there (about crippling minnows with a handgun) and I asked my families opinion if it was acceptable material for a newspaper. I asked my grandmother who was definitely of the assumption comics were for children and she simply hadn’t read any since she was eight. I pointed out the strip and she (I think she was deliberately exaggerating) couldn’t tell where one comic strip ended and another began– she asked if she needed to keep reading into Rex Morgan and couldn’t understand or distinguish the single panels of B.C. Gordo, or Rex Morgan.
Then again I never saw the original Superman movie (1977) when it first came out and never saw it until twenty years later and …. um, is it *supposed* to be comprehensible? Gene Hackman, who had *orange* hair, was supposed to be Lex Luther???? a villian? Is there *any* aspect about him that seemed sinister or threatening? Any? and the “Can you read my mind” voice over … was it supposed to be poetry???? … is that? … what *WAS* that??? … and why the hell did she ask him what color underwear she was wearing… I know it was the seventies but did it not occur to them someday having a character *ask* a superhero to sexually harass her might seem dated? And weird? And gross?
So…. yes, I guess, a *lot* requires conventions of the day. I can *almost* get this if I view as just a surreal conversation. But I *expect* a punch line that never comes or a breaking point where it *becomes* absurd or a refusal to go into the absurdity. But I guess a lot of contemporary humor do require everyone, even the victims of the pratfall, be aware of conventions. If we watch modern sit-coms of today there are a *lot* of characters behaving utterly sureally irrationally just to follow conventions of a humor style. (Why the hell are the uptight squares after making a point just *standing* around *waiting* for the cool protagonist’s comeback? What sense does *that* make?) Objectively these are just as incomprehensible.
The M&J strip reminds me of two jokes, which may or may not have been around at time of its first publication and may or may not have been intended as glancing allusions:
The first (re ‘better road”) is the old “I lost my wallet over on Peachtree Street” — “Then why are you searching for it here?” — “Because the light is better.” wheeze, which probably *does* go back that far.
The second (re eyes) is a one-liner I once read somewhere, possibly as a Playboy Party Joke or the like: “Just because my eyes are red it doesn’t mean that I’m drunk — for all you know, I might just be a white rabbit.” But I think I encountered that one only the once, forty or fifty years ago, so it’s unlikely it dates back to MUTT AND JEFF (which may even have been its ultimate inspiration).
Surrealism seems as good an overall explantion as any. (Are we sure that Jeff *isn’t* a little white rabbit?)
@ woozy – I’ve only seen a few Krazy Kat pages, but the main reason that I didn’t really enjoy them is that I have never had a chance to read the strip in its original (full page) resolution; they were always reproduced so small that even with a magnifying glass, it was very difficult to make out the text. This problem was (and is) a major defect in both “Little Nemo” (cited above) and the “Origins of the Sunday Comics” feature offered at GoComics, but that’s partly because computer monitors just aren’t as big as newspaper pages.
P.S. As for “dated” movies, just last week I happened to see the beginning of the original “Planet of the Apes” on TV. I thought it was supposed to be a “good” movie (a popular box office success with good reviews and several sequels), but watching it now, I couldn’t figure out why anyone ever liked it: slow, cheesy effects, hideous music. I quit watching before any of the apes showed up, so I guess I don’t get to complain about the rubber masks.
The reason Planet of the Apes is remembered fondly is because of the twist at the end (which, apparently, is not in the book). That’s why people who like Planet of the Apes don’t talk about the four sequels very often. You have to remember the nature of science-fiction movies up to the period involved cheesy storylines and often very poor visual effects. This is because the budget for such movies was about $39, because the studios didn’t think audiences would turn up for science-fiction. Lucas showed them otherwise, but he didn’t have enough budget for all his visual ideas, either.
“White Rabbit” isn’t supposed to make sense. It’s Lewis Carroll.
The Planet of the Apes ending both is and isn’t the same as the book. This is not the place to be more specific.
Without being a spoiler, I think the Planet of the Apes film is well-remembered, despite its flaws, because it was some pretty good science fiction. It put forth scenarios and ideas that have relevance to the human condition, holding a lens to throw society into focus. A few months later, with the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, however, PotA could clearly be seen to be a second-rate, albeit interesting, effort.
There’s pretty close to no science in PotA. It’s fantasy, not SF.
The slow pacing of Planet of the Apes isn’t a flaw inherent to the film itself. It was just standard film making at the time. Look at just about any movie from around 1967/68 until the late 70s, even films that were considered fast-paced when they came out have a bit of a slow burn before things really get going. 2001 takes absolutely forever to get anywhere. If Star Trek: The Motion(less) Picture had come out 5 years earlier, the pacing probably wouldn’t have been considered such a problem, and more focus could have been put on its many other flaws.
Remember: Mutt first met Jeff in the asylum.
@ignatzz, can we figure from your name that you are or were a fan of the Krazy Kat strip?
“even films that were considered fast-paced when they came out have a bit of a slow burn before things really get going. 2001 takes absolutely forever to get anywhere. ”
2001 was *never* considered “fast paced” at the time. It was deliberately slow pace.
Kubrick intentionally used many long cuts in the final edit of 2001. Unfortunately for him (and his film) the trend since then has been to many, many more cuts and much, much shorter intervals between them. 2001 can feel interminable to modern eyes.
Throw in the fact that the ending is visually but not narratively interesting, and it’s no wonder that 2001 got one sequel and Star Wars got 11. Nobody has trouble understanding the ending of Star Wars (except the part where Chewbacca gets stiffed at the medal ceremony… nobody has an explanation for that.)
@woozy: Poor writing on my part. I certainly didn’t intend to imply that 2001 was ever considered fast paced.
2001 had one movie sequel and 3 book sequels, which counts because 2010 is based on the first book sequel.
Mutt is the tall one and Jeff is the short one.
Given that they mention going to New York, and the sign says New York, the song makes a lot more sense than this strip does.
SPOILER ALERT for Planet of the Apes (movie). . .
The thing is, when I got to the end of the movie, I wasn’t surprised by the twist, not because I had “cleverly” figured it out, but because I had assumed throughout the movie that the writers had intended for us to assume the “twist” all along. I hadn’t realized that we were supposed to be thinking that Heston had landed on a completely different planet, with humans and apes that somehow looked exactly like those from our planet, and amazingly, also spoke English. (Although I now know that this was fairly standard for SF at the time.)
@woozy: Gene Hackman was a humorous version of Lex Luthor – and he does reveal his bald head at the end. I thought it was amusing – he and his inept henchmen could actually pull off his grandiose plans, often because he anticipated how his henchmen were going to screw up (I may be remembering this wrong, it has been a long time…)
!eloh tibbar eht nwod tnew erus eno siht ,yoB
So far as I know I’m the only one with this reaction but having not seen the original Superman at all but hearing of it and even seeing the second in bits in pieces, that when I did see it on television with commercial breaks it appeared to just be a jumbled hackneyed mess and I kept thinking “What *IS* this? This isn’t the actual *movie* is it?”. The “Can you read my mind” bit seemed to be what a third-grader would write if you put LSD in their drinking water. (Which is similar to what I thought when I first installed windows 8 “Well, that was annoying; now where’s the actual Operating System?”)
woozy: If you met an alien who could fly, see through things, shoot laser beams of of his eyes, etc. . ., it seems like it would be reasonable to wonder if he could also read minds. She doesn’t know it at the time, but he does have the ability to erase people’s memories.
“it seems like it would be reasonable to wonder if he could also read minds. ”
When you wonder if you should have taken the 5th street exit rather than the express way, does the your voice suddenly go over the soundtrack in sing-song saying “Should I have gotten of there? If not then where? Was my exit 5th street? I’m driving my car. Is the expressway too far? Was my exit 5th street?” all the while you stare out off camera with a stoned out look on your face?
MY internal monologue is ALWAYS louder than the soundtrack. AFAIK, it’s rarely audible to others. Then again, AFAIK, I’m not a character in a movie, and NONE of the people I interact are aliens from anywhere other than Earth.
Aside from having been around long enough for inflation to have had its merry way with me, I’ve also it seems been around long enough for language to have shifted out from under me. I rewatched the Can You Read My Mind sequence from Superman just now, and what struck me more than anything else was the “ugly” accent Margo Kidder had, and how it undermines any semblance of poetry or who knows what they were going for to have her to whine, “ken you read mahye miahynd?” Did she really talk like that? Apparently. What’s odd is that it sounds so foreign to me, instead of familiar; I assume I just took it as a voice like any other back in the day when it first came out (and I thought Margo Kidder was kind of hot), but now it’s almost show stoppingly annoying.
I remember a similar focusing-on-the-wrong-thing with regards to accents when I rewatched a James Burke Connections episode recently, and it was something about New York in the (then recent) late 70s, and they had all these voice reenactments, and the sheer array of accents you don’t hear anymore blew me away.
I remember Margot Kidder mostly for De Palma’s Sisters. Where she was definitely hot.
Absurdly late to comment, but on the subject of old movies being slow moving – I watched several early James Bond movies with a youngster who knew of James Bond only from Skyfall, and I was struck by how slow moving they were compared to my memory (and how amazingly sexist, which I expected).