B E A R I N G S 

Be Vewwy Quiet …

by Jimmy Dean Smith

The cartoon animator Chuck Jones died Friday, Feb. 22, at the age of 89. We did not hear about it till Saturday morning when the news channels picked up the story. The timing, you might say, was perfect. Or perhaps it was cruelly ironic: Most of us who grew up with television first got to know Charles M. Jones on Saturday mornings when an hourlong package of Warner Bros. shorts played on CBS or ABC.

Now television is a 24/7 smorgasbord, offering us cartoons whenever we’d like. But when we were young, we got Chuck’s glorious, hilarious cartoons on Saturday mornings, and thereby learned long ago that Saturday is the proper time for perfection and cruel ironies, for rigorously unrandom violence and Pronoun Trouble.

Chuck Jones was one of the great artists of the 20th century. He deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Tex Avery and Michael Maltese, of course, whose work like Jones’s outstripped the assembly-line blandness of the Disney crew. But Jones also deserves comparison with such modernists as Joyce and Eliot and such postmodernists as Borges and Pynchon. His work is that funny, that terrifying.

“What’s Opera, Doc?” and “Duck Amuck” belong in any reasonable survey of 20th-century narrative and post-narrative art, and not only because they make such concepts as the Mythical Method and Reflexivity easy and fun to approach. These seven-minute masterpieces are classics themselves, resonating in our cultural memory. We hear Wagner and think “Kill the wabbit, ki-ILL the WAB-bit,” read The Crying of Lot 49 and feel that the systematic mystification of Oedipa Maas, so strongly metaphoric of 20th-century paranoia, is nicely done and all, but only a faint echo of Daffy’s theodicy in “Duck Amuck.”

But Jones was more than a Major Artist. He made the universally acknowledged masterpieces, the ones we can approach through theory, but also the fall-on-your-ass-funny shorts that pop up now and then on television and constantly in our cultural memory. After all the elegies have urged us to watch, to study, to revere “What’s Opera, Doc?,” “Duck Amuck,” “Some Froggy Evening,” “The Dot and the Line,” and “How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ among other Chuck classics — a virtual Norton Anthology of unkillably classic cartoons — we will still have all those Road Runners, all those Pepe Le Pews, all those Mornin”-Ralph-Mornin”-Sams.

We will also have, I’m afraid, Bad Chuck: Those winsome, wide-eyed Tom And Jerry shorts that make you cringe and want that damned mouse dead, and those late-appearing Road Runners that suspend Wile E. Coyote in mid-air above a deep canyon while he (a) cutely waves bye-bye, (b) cutely holds up a “help!” sign, and (c) cutely looks stricken. But we will also have the early, perfect Road Runners, where Wile E. Coyote, Genius was so far from cute that he was beautiful, like those other American geniuses Buster Keaton and Ted Williams.

If you have ever had to bury someone you love, you understand the process. First the elegist recollects your dead mom’s Great Deeds, how she saved a kid from drowning or chaired the United Way three years running. But in the family’s quiet moments, you recall how all the kids in the neighborhood trusted her to oil their bike chains. Marvin the Martian and Taz are Chuck in a relatively minor key, but they’re just as much his work as the classics. And, in a way akin to your old lady’s everyday perfection, they’re what you’ll remember when griefmaking’s over.

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Jimmy Dean Smith is an associate professor of English and communications at Union College in Kentucky and a contributing editor to PopPolitics.

Related Sites
Chuck Jones’ Web site features his bio and artwork.
From PBS’ Great Performances: "The self-effacing subject of Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens — A Life in Animation is famous for directing Bugs Bunny cartoons, but he says he identifies with another member of the Warner Bros. clan. ‘Of all that motley crew, there is one with whom I most clearly associate … and for whom I have the greatest affinity and understanding. That, of course, is Daffy Duck,’ Jones writes in his biography, Chuck Amuck. ‘He believes everybody’s out to do him in, which is a perfectly legitimate supposition. They are out there to do him in.’"