Noah’s recent post on Achewood (especially the comments) and Tom’s recent post on Judd Apatow writing a William Shatner sketch for Saturday Night Live, are making me think about a certain kind of humour.

People on the Achewood thread are talking about standup-style humour, at least the kind we hate, and what it is, and why we hate it. A couple of years ago, my husband got satellite radio, and had a phase of listening to the standup channel on long drives. Until that experience, I had thought I liked standup. But during those long drives, I got to thinking, “Man! Standup comedy is just a societal tool for enforcing conformity, isn’t it?”

Outside of comedy geniuses, standup seems to be all “Men are like this. Women are like this!” “Black people are like this. White people are like this!” “Straight men are like this. Straight men better not be like this if they know what’s good for them!”

Which brings us to Apatow having Shatner shit on his fans: both those guys make their living primarily off of people who are nerds, losers, you know, people who escape through fantasy, who at least have the image of themselves as people who fail at romance, or are socially awkward or immature. People who need to “get a life,” because the one they have is not the one they’re supposed to want.

So is it a self-deprecating kind of joke, and we’re supposed to think Shatner and Apatow are also losers who need to get a life (except not because being a geek is fun)? Are they trying to appeal to the cool kids who are not Shatner (or embryonic Apatow) fans, to convince them that Shatner and Apatow are really better than those trekkie losers? Or is it just making sure as many people as possible feel vaguely insecure that they aren’t measuring up to standup comedy stereotypes, and fall in line and/or, you know, buy something?

… I don’t think there’s a book called The Irish Catholic Graphic Novel, do you?

I drew an essay for this book, which came out last month from Rutgers University Press (on amazon here). (I also did the painting for the cover but I did not do the overall design or add the balloons.)

The essay is a much-abbreviated history of American autobio comics and their Jewish influences (Freud is clearly an influence on all of the early stuff, and I argue that creators in the early ’70s, like R. Crumb, Harvey Pekar, & Justin Green, were influenced by Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint), what defines the genre, a theoretical exploration of how confessional comics are an expression of American-Jewish thought, and a bit of “how I got started in comics” as well.

If those sorts of things interest you, and if scholarship about Jewish-themed comic books (which is the rest of the book) interests you, you should check it out. If my essay sounds interesting but not scholarship about Jewish-themed comic books, I’ll be printing just the essay as a zine in the next couple of months. I’ll post when I have them. meanwhile, here is the first page (click to enlarge):

(Disclaimer which I kind of can’t believe I’d ever need to make: No, I don’t believe i’m superior to anybody because i’m Jewish. And I’m not really interested in discussing whether the Jews control all the world’s money or whatever.)

I’m trying to expand some thoughts I expressed in the comments of this old entry. I watch a fair amount of romantic comedies (I wouldn’t be surprised if I watch more than any of my co-utilitarians), especially the male-aimed kind (of the Kevin Smith/Judd Apatow schools) but also the female-aimed kind. A trend that has proliferated in the last several years is what some have termed “the slacker-striver romance,” where the slacker is always the man and the striver is the woman (I don’t know any LGBT instances of this trend, but I’d be fascinated to hear about them). It ranges from ridiculous male-wish-fulfillment (Knocked Up) to preposterous female-wish-fulfillment (in Failure to Launch, the guy lives with his parents, yes, but also just happens to be a wealthy yacht salesman played by Matthew McConaughey). You could even see WALL-E as a version of this (they both have important jobs that they are good at, but which has to learn to loosen up and have fun? Which is more human?).

I guess part of this comes from a real-life North American phenomenon of extended adolescence, but I think the trend’s biggest cultural precursor are nebbish-vindication stories, which many people trace back to Woody Allen. The geeky introvert, with embarrassingly big ethnic features, usually smarter than everyone around him but appreciated by no one, lusts after the perfect, successful, well-adjusted beautiful WASP. He gets her in the end, even though they have nothing in common, usually because he is a “nice guy,” unlike her brutish handsome WASP boyfriend (how exactly he is “nice” can be little more than notional… sometimes being nebbishy is enough to establish him as the one who should win, and he doesn’t ever have to do anything altruistic). In stories where he doesn’t get the girl, she is a symbol of everything that is bad and shallow about the world which constantly dumps on the poor nebbish.

This can be dismissed as obvious wish-fulfillment/power fantasy stuff, but it’s so pervasive that I can’t help but feel it influences real-world human relations in a significant way. I was exposed to probably more than my fair share of it, growing up consuming especially geeky culture (comic books, science fiction), and thinking that if I grew up pretty, I would be some downtrodden nerd’s salvation. Never, of course, that some otherworldly hunk was gonna reward my introversion and self-pity. I got started small, on Charlie Brown and Opus the penguin, and all the cruel, cruel hot girls who apparently had other interests beside them. I knew that if I only went for guys I found attractive, I was shallow and blind (whereas, if a guy only goes for hot chicks, well, that’s just evolution, don’t you know).

The counter-parable that’s been most in my head, as I think about this, is, ironically (and as also noted by Jon Hastings) another Judd Apatow joint. Freaks and Geeks was a one-season mid-nineties (I think. I just watched the season all at once this summer) show about a sister and brother and their respective circles of friends. Their high school experiences (she’s in grade eleven, I think, he’s in grade nine or maybe even eight) are parallel storylines in most episodes. At different times over the course of the season, they each enact nebbish-vindication narratives, but the show stays with each story long enough to see it fall apart. The sister gives in to peer pressure and dates the sweet loser in her circle of friends even though she’s not attracted to him. She ends up dumping him painfully a couple of episodes after, because she’s still not attracted to him, she’s a lot more intelligent than he is, and you know, he’s kind of a loser. He’s hurt badly, she feels guilty, and they unsuccessfully try to stay friends for the rest of the show.

The little brother is an ideal sympathetic nebbish: he is smart, studious, a big sci-fi geek, and actually sensitive and courteous to others. He of course lusts after the head cheerleader, she of course dates brutish jocks and thinks of him as just a friend, and we presumably are supposed to be rooting for her to notice the great guy right in front of her eyes. The unrequited bit carries on for most of the season, until she sees the light about three episodes before the end. Then it quickly goes south because, duh, they have nothing in common. It’s great.

You can see a couple of the seeds of the squickier Judd Apatow tropes in the show, like about how dating girls is totally less fun than hanging out with your buds. But like a lot of other people who half-like Apatow stuff, I’m still waiting for the best parts of Freaks and Geeks to show up in his movies.

So I’m past overdue for an introductory post (and overdue for an actual-content post, but I’ll worry about that later). My name is Miriam Libicki (the beetle part is an old nickname that follows me around Blogger). I write and draw autobiographical comics based on my experiences as the worst secretary in the Israeli army, as well as other short nonfiction pieces that you may or may not call comics, if you’re some sort of a definition-hugger. Here is a link to my most popular, I think, definitely my most controversial piece, marking the first time I got called an anti-Semite on the internet.*

I come out of a hippie-feminist background, an Orthodox-Jewish background, and a wannabe-intellectual-art-school background all at once, so that might give you a bit of an idea of things I’ll posting about. I have never written for the Comics Journal. I’m a self-publisher who works the con circuit (I exhibited at at least a dozen comicons this year, and my schedule for next year is already filling up), so I may do some self-promotion, but I’ll try to keep it tasteful. I also may badmouth the comics of some people I’ll have to apologize to later at a show, and that could be entertaining for everyone.

What I read mostly these days are North American alternative/”literary” type comics. I have ingrained prejudices against manga, but I asked for Nanas vol. 1 and 2 for Winter Holiday**. We will see if I like them, or if I get quickly divested of my utilitarianhood. And finally, I will introduce myself, following Tom, by explaining how reading superhero comics as a child screwed me up for life.

I think the worst lesson I learned from growing up on Marvel comics is not that women are sex objects, but that women can dress in lingerie and not be sexualized by those around them. No one talks down to them, talks to their chests, tries to grope them, or makes winking insinuations (or if they did, in the eighties, it went over my head). Ororo could be a tough, smart team leader in a leather onesie with cut-outs.

This made me want to dress up everywhere in lingerie or bondage gear*** (cause it’s pretty!), and be treated the same as a man. I was cruelly acquainted with reality at age fourteen or so, but aesthetic preferences are a hard thing to shake.

Which leads inevitably to getting in fights with my mother over clothes every week during high school, despite being an introvert who never dated, to nobody believing I was religious when I lived in Israel, to being my own conflicted booth babe at comicons across the nation (see below for my favourite pictorial depiction of same).

* for the record, I did not write the little introductory blurb at the link, just the actual pages.
** I’m Jewish, my in-laws are Christmas-loving Buddhists. It’s a bit complicated, but working out ok so far.
*** yes, our favourite comics were Chris Claremont-penned X-men and New Mutants.