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1 In Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels (1941) John Sullivan, a movie director traversing the United States in an attempt to define the soul of America, finds himself wrongly imprisoned and part of a chain gang. Invited with the other prisoners to attend a screening at an African American church in a southern bayou, Sully discovers what really speaks to the human condition when he notes the spontaneous and heartfelt peals of laughter generated by the film chosen to amuse black parishioner and white jailbird alike. The film in question? A Disney cartoon.1 In asserting that Hollywood entertainment finds its purest expression in the cartoon hijinks of Pluto and Mickey, Sullivan’s Travels confirms what has become a strongly held assumption; namely, studio-era animation, in particular shorts, has been long associated with comedy. At least as far back as E.G. Lutz’s book, Animated Cartoons: How They are Made, Their Origin and Development (1920), a volume that greatly inspired the young Walt Disney, comedy has loomed large in the success of cartoons, evidenced by an entire chapter, “On Humorous Effects and on Plots,” dedicated to the topic. Lutz even begins the chapter with the seemingly obvious statement: “The purpose of the animated cartoon being to amuse, the experienced animator makes it his aim to get, as the saying goes in the trade, a laugh in every foot of film.”2 But if equating the short cartoon with Hollywood humor now strikes us as axiomatic, much as it did Lutz in the early days of the studio era, we should resist accepting the logic of the association at face value, if only to explore how the animator’s pen came to be enlisted consistently as a primary tool for entertaining the masses through cartoon merriment. Of course, studio-era animation need not be funny, nor was it so at all times. Introduction What Makes These Pictures So Funny? Charlie Keil and Daniel Goldmark 2 Introduction But insofar as the studio system assigned prescribed roles to the types of films produced under its control, and inasmuch as that system’s primary goal was to entertain—as the example of Sullivan’s Travels is at pains to demonstrate— cartoons chiefly carried out the task of making audiences laugh. Studio executives believed that cartoons were ideally suited to this mission; audiences reinforced that belief by responding to the studio-era cartoon with appreciative laughter; and animators complied by rolling out dozens upon dozens of mirth machines for the nearly five decades that the studio system held sway in the United States. So entrenched was this equation of cartoons and humor that the assumptions underlying it have gone largely unexamined. Why were cartoons assigned this role? Why did cartoon makers, studio executives, and audiences all subscribe to the idea that animation would be most effective if enlisted to engender laughter? If we try to determine how this connection was made and sustained so effectively, do we find its roots in the nature and lineage of animation, the structure and logic of the studio system, or some combination? Surprisingly, these questions have gone unanswered for the most part. In analyzing the long-standing association of comedy and cartoons forged during the years of the studio system, this volume ultimately points to an unavoidable by-product of that association: our ideas about (American) animation have been shaped by the commercial success and social impact of the Hollywood cartoon. Whether by design or by fiat, the role of the animated short became prescribed to the point where few other competing functions could be entertained or imagined. This predominance of “funny pictures,” both within the production system and the public consciousness, demands a thoroughgoing exploration of the process by which the broader-based term animation became synonymous with the label cartoon. The aim of Funny Pictures, then, is not to drain the humor out of studioera animation by explaining it away but rather to elaborate on the ramifications of comedy finding itself so fully ingrained within the form of the Hollywood cartoon for so long. Acknowledgment of the complex nature of the relationship between humor and animation guides the organization of this anthology, prompting balanced consideration of both the historical dimensions and theoretical implications of their union. Adhering to an arrangement that accounts for both the development of animation’s role during the fifty-year sweep of the studio era and the relevance of numerous conceptual frames—of representation, narratology, and authorship —to our understanding...

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