With the hair of ten ordinary men!
I know, I know: you don’t get it. That’s totally fair, particularly since the punchline is entirely dependent on your familiarity with an obscure 1963 cartoon serial that hasn’t been seen since Captain Kangaroo went off the air in ’92 – and that probably never aired at all outside North America. Even Jamie didn’t get it and he assured me you wouldn’t either, but that’s when I knew we had to do it anyway.
My day job is very much about compromise. I’m frequently instructed to revise copy because somebody with veto power decides the audience couldn’t possibly understand words like “ecstatic”, “octogenarian” or “stigma”. I suspect my insistence on publishing a largely incomprehensible comic only validates my censors, but I hope you’ll understand why I had to do it. More importantly, I hope you’ll understand that no way is my ass hairy. That’s just Jamie’s revenge for being left out of the joke.
On the subject of archaic children’s entertainment, I recently stumbled across this footage of the 1969 U.S. Senate hearing on the future of public broadcasting, which might as well be titled Mr. Rogers Goes to Washington. In this age of cynical detachment, his guileless sincerity should be subject for mockery – particularly when he performs a song for the senators – but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t come off like one of the most decent human beings I’ve ever seen.
I promise next week’s comic will have nothing to do with either Greek mythology or body hair.
-Graham
