Cartoon news.

I won’t keep you long. This is just a quick update to announce:

I just finished a new promotional cartoon for my employers. Ordinarily I don’t use this blog to talk about work-related stuff, but I happen to be fairly proud of this cartoon. Maybe it’s just cos I like the music (by Louis Armstrong, with a little Bix Beiderbecke over the closing credits).

MyFrontSteps presents “Goin’ Viral”

Meanwhile, a nice Aussie fella named Derek recently interviewed me for his crossword / Scrabble website Word-Buff.com. Why would a site for word nerds want to interview me? Because last year I brought an unsung genius named Garson Hampfield to the attention of the crossword community. You can read more, and watch the cartoon, here:

Michael A. Charles interviewed on Word-Buff.com

M.

On being offensive.

To the long, long list of Newfangled Things Whose Popularity I Don’t Understand must be added another: Twitter. I signed up a couple days ago because my company, to promote its new online reputation management service, recently created a Twitter account, and it may soon be my responsibility to “tweet” our “followers”.

It’s not a responsibility I look forward to assuming. But anyhow. On Twitter the other day I noticed a tweet from a friend of a co-worker concerning the Spokesmonster cartoons. I can’t find it now, but it said something like, “That’s the funniest, most offensive ad campaign ever!”

What does it mean, this word “offensive”? What does this person mean when he writes that the cartoons are both funny and offensive? Is he actually offended by them? I doubt it, or he probably wouldn’t find them funny. I assume he means that some other unenlightened clown out there probably finds them offensive.

But where are these unenlightened clowns and exactly how are they offended? This is a question I’ve asked before, and I’ve never gotten a satisfactory answer. When the first Spokesmonster cartoon, for a brief moment, in an obscure corner of the internet, stirred up a tiny flurry of controversy, it was alleged that the cartoon was offensive. But except for one commenter who declared that he or she, as a proud hillbilly, took objection to the reference to inbred “hill folk”, no-one actually said they were offended. They were outraged on behalf of somebody else.

Then there was the almost-controversy, narrowly averted, that I didn’t quite provoke with a recent blog post. In regard to the third Spokesmonster cartoon, a friend had written to tell me that he found the tone off-putting:

The word “Skankmaster” comes up, which might raise some eyebrows with investors. Annie Anklebiter slithers and hisses at the camera in a threatening way. The Reichschancellor is funny except his voice sounds like a dangerous pedophile. And then Shelby, our main character, snaps at the girl’s finger and bites yours, and you say the F-word.

The next day, alongside a sketch of the Reichschancellor, I posted to the Spokesmonster blog:

I got my co-worker Dave to record the Reichschancellor’s voice. But apparently Dave’s too nice a guy, because his delivery lacked the necessary tone of quiet menace. So I re-recorded the voice myself. A friend said the Reichschancellor “sounds like a dangerous pedophile”. I choose to take that as a compliment.

In my innocence, I thought my meaning would be obvious. I only meant that I took my friend’s comment as a compliment on my voice acting: I was trying to sound creepy, and apparently I had been successful. It has since been pointed out to me that hasty readers might misinterpret “I take that as a compliment” to mean A) that the Reichschancellor was meant to be a pedophile, and that I was flattered that my friend had picked up the reference, or even B) that I was endorsing pedophilia.

I got an email from my boss telling me to take down the pedophilia reference tout de suite; I complied; and that was that. I have no problem with my employers determining what is and isn’t appropriate on a company website. Still, in an email thread with some friends of mine, I argued about the definition of offensive. Some of my friends thought my comment was a mistake because it could be misinterpreted. Others thought that the mere mention of pedophilia violated a taboo, and even if it had been more clearly written, my comment would still have been unacceptable on a promotional blog. One friend suggested that, even if he wasn’t meant to be a pedophile, the character of the Reichschancellor was a bit touchy, because when people think “Reichschancellor” they think “Hitler”, and you shouldn’t crack jokes about Hitler.

Someone else mentioned the message that pops up in StepRep when a search comes back empty: “No results yet! But don’t worry, our worker monkeys are slaving to get you relevant results.” The topic of slavery is a little sensitive, my friend said. Aargh, I replied.

What was missing from all this discussion of offensive subjects was a single person who actually claimed to be offended. Everyone was worried about what someone else might think. Everyone was trying to read the minds of people whose existence they couldn’t be certain of.

An analogy. A record executive gets a tape from a hot new band. (My analogy is set in the distant past, like the 1980s.) He clunks the tape into his stereo and gives it a listen. He hates it. He buzzes his secretary. “This band is fucking terrible,” he says. “Make up a contract. They’re going to be huge.”

If he’s good at his job, the record executive doesn’t need to actually like the acts he signs; he just needs to have an ear for what the chumps will buy. But wouldn’t you put more faith in a record executive who shares his audience’s tastes – someone who actually likes the records he sells?

Like musical taste, offense is a highly personal thing. It’s perfectly good business to worry about what other people are going to think. But I wish people would be more explicit when they say this is offensive.

Do they mean, I am offended?

Or do they mean, The chumps aren’t going to buy this?

M.

On negativity.

[Y]our thoughts on the sex of your drawings are boring and naïve, take a first year psychology class and leave the hard thinking to someone else.

–commenter on the Spokesmonster blog

I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that people who may be perfectly polite to strangers they meet at a party or in a bar will say outlandishly hostile things to strangers online. It’s not that they feel like they’re protected by some kind of Cloak of Invisibility; the commenter above left his or her email address. It’s just that the internet is a coarse environment. It doesn’t require a first-year psychology class to realise that if you hang out with smart, well-spoken people, you will become smarter and better-spoken, while if you hang out with the commenters on fark.com, you will become a snarky negative bastard. I can lament this coarsening effect, but if I want to keep my sanity and still participate in the modern world, I had better get used to it.

But there’s a difference between insults that are merely moronic (my favourite comment on Garson Hampfield: “Typical Jewish bullshit!”) and the ones that hint at some kind of withheld intelligence. What’s aggravating about the “boring and naïve” comment is that there may be some truth to it. I never studied psychology – never went to university at all – and there’s probably a lot I could have learned from it that would have given my rambling speculations on the gender of stickmen greater dimension. I would be happy to be taught something new. It’s possible the commenter really has some insight to share. But he doesn’t share it – just says, “Your ignorance is too obvious to bother explaining. Seeya!” Very unhelpful.

Similary unhelpful (I apologise for going back to this yet again) were most of the comments on AgentGenius about the first Spokesmonster cartoon. After a round of monster-bashing, Benn, the originator of the thread, finally intervened to say,

What I find interesting is no one is being specific as to why it should or shouldn’t be changed. Are we being polite, or do we just not like it because it isn’t pretty?

(But Benn, what do you mean, “it isn’t pretty”?)

I don’t quite see how comments like “This is really really bad. Really bad. Nothing good about it at all so nothing salvagable. Scrap scrap scrap” qualify as polite, but I was interested, too, to see what, specifically, the complainers were complaining about. Some of them were obviously offended by the “hillfolk” reference. Others seemed to be irritated by the lack of specific information about the service (it not having been made clear that the cartoon was a teaser for a product that was still early in development). But still, I was baffled by the intensity of the negative reaction. It just seemed disproportionate. Was there, as Benn implied, something the critics were holding back, something that was obvious to everyone but completely mysterious to me?

I worry about this kind of thing a lot, and here’s why: I sometimes think that I might be a little autistic. My interpersonal skills are, to put it mildly, underdeveloped; my tastes are a little obscure; I’m far more comfortable with a book than I am with most humans; when people speak of common sense I often think, maybe so, but it’s not common to me.

People who are at ease with other people, I think, must be more certain of their shared sense of normality, of what is held in common. They can disregard a critic who says, “It’s obviously bad”, because they feel they already have a grip on what’s obvious and what’s not. I can’t really do that. What is and isn’t obvious is not obvious to me.

It’s tough to be a critic, though. Most of the things we feel strongly enough about to bother criticising, we do so precisely because our objections are so immediate that they can’t even be articulated. Do I need to tell you why a line of dialogue like this one (from Dan Simmons’ The Terror) is badly written?

“Cook is preparing roast beef tonight, my darling. Your favorite. Since she’s new – I am certain that the Irish woman was padding our accounts, stealing is as natural as drinking to the Irish – I reminded her that you insist that it must be rare enough to bleed at the touch of the carving knife.”

It’s just – bad. Unrealistic. That little aside about the Irish – forget about whether the character would really say it, just look at the way it’s phrased. People don’t talk like that. Isn’t it obvious?

Well, no, it’s not. If people don’t talk like that, how do they talk? If they don’t talk like that now, isn’t it possible they did talk that way back in the 1840s, when the novel is set? Even if they never did talk like that, what about all those movies and books I love where the dialogue is even less realistic? How do I account for those?

All those questions can be answered, but only with a lot of hard work. And as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a pretty lazy guy. Speaking to other lazy people, all I’d ask is that if you’re going to go negative, put in that extra bit of effort. Reason, argue, explain. You might think you’ve already made your superior intelligence apparent to all. I’m sorry to inform you – you haven’t.

***

As an example of criticism whose vehemence is all out of proportion to its subject, here’s Andrew Orlowski ranting in The Register about Malcolm Gladwell:

He’s better known for his Afro than any big idea, or bold conclusion – and his insights have all the depth and originality of Readers Digest or a Hallmark greeting card.

On one of Gladwell’s speeches:

Gladwell blathers at great length about an obscure market researcher called Howard Moskowitz. Who? On his own website, Howie calls himself “a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics”. Yet Gladwell describes Moskowitz’ market testing of varieties of soup as if he was an unsung genius of the 20th century.

All this takes up 15 minutes, but it’s so repetitious and predictable, it seems to take about three times as long. (So much for the dazzling oratory Guardian leader writers admire.)

That “so much for the dazzling oratory” sums up the “my point is too obvious to waste time explaining” school of criticism that I so dislike. For those of us who enjoy watching Gladwell speak, his gift is precisely that he can make fifteen minutes on market testing varieties of soup seem compelling. Obviously it’s not as compelling to Orlowski. But the words “repetitious and predictable” – let alone the contemptuous “Who?” with which Orlowski dismisses the soup-tester – don’t triumphantly prove the critic’s point; they barely begin to make it.

I happen to agree with Orlowski’s larger argument, that Gladwell’s driblets of scientific wisdom often seem meagre in comparison with the vast apparatus of anecdote and digression required to render them down. But one doesn’t read Gladwell for the science, any more than one reads Dickens for his political platform or Chesterton for his religious conclusions. I’d put them into the category of writers for whom the journey is the destination.

M.

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Why can’t I let this subject go? I wrote more on the Spokesmonster mini-controversy here.