Godzilla in the NY Times (11/27)

[Robert Saint John]

(bleh, but I'll let everyone make up their own mind as to whether this was worth reading... it does seem like G will never get respect in the west! The article is about Robert Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker, who finds inspiration from the Imperial Godzilla toy on his desk).

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/fashi ... 7POSS.html

November 27, 2005


By DAVID COLMAN

WHO knows why, lo those millions of years ago, some wretched lower form of intelligence got thoroughly fed up with his customary responses to the even lower forms of intelligence on his block, and dared to double over and laugh. To hell with fight or flight.

It's no joke. At this moment, give or take a coffee break, researchers at the University of Michigan are working against time, or at least budget, to figure out how and why that most delightful of adaptive responses, laughter, took its place in the evolutionary pantheon alongside the appendix, opposable thumbs and lip gloss.

And if you think splitting the atom was hard, try cracking a joke and then isolating it into discrete psycholinguistic components. After all, levity, not gravity, holds it together, a reality Robert Mankoff is only too aware of. Mr. Mankoff, the cartoon editor of The New Yorker (its annual cartoon issue is on the newsstands now), fled a doctoral program in psychology in 1977 to become a cartoonist. Now he is an adviser to the Michigan study, which is scrutinizing minute facets of people's reactions to the magazine's cartoons from the last 79 years.

As befits his profoundly comic, comically profound mind-set, Mr. Mankoff has on his desk a statue of comedic inspiration. It is not a plaster bust of Groucho Marx or Shecky Greene but a plastic 12-inch likeness of that evergreen king of comedy, Godzilla. "He reminds me that I'm silly," Mr. Mankoff said.

"The essence of humor is incongruity," he said. That explains why Godzilla looks funny rampaging over the papers on his desk; and why Godzilla is so funny rampaging through a pitifully modeled Tokyo in myriad English-dubbed Japanese films with special effects that are barely a patch on the first monster movie: the 1925 dino-epic "The Lost World." Even the fleeing hordes look like they are laughing.

"Sometimes I put him down on the street just to see how he looks," Mr. Mankoff said. "Right now I am looking at a Harvard personality test to give to the cartoonists, but I was giving it to Godzilla. Like, No. 25: I have a clear set of goals and work toward them in an orderly fashion. Would he strongly agree or disagree? I think he'd agree. Or No. 36: I often get angry at the way people treat me. I'd say yes."

Many moviegoers who saw last year's restored version of "Gojira," the 1954 movie that started it all, were surprised to find an air of menace, a touching back story and a complex political message about atomic weapons. Even so, years of English dubbing, bad effects and improbable adversaries - Mothra, Megalon and the Smog Monster, among them - have reduced the irate, 150-foot T. rex to a veritable stand-up act, a fate sealed with the 1969 short "Bambi Meets Godzilla."

"Humor is our sword that cuts people down to size," Mr. Mankoff said. "It's a type of cheerful pessimism. When things are going wrong, they can be funny. Humor is a kind of courage."

For all its grim absurdity, humor inspires optimism and camaraderie when anger and fear break down, suggesting that its development might have something to do with social organization. More important, it also suggests that funny people are the most evolved on the planet, which seems to make perfect sense.

The lesson for Godzilla: laugh and the world laughs with you; kill and you laugh alone. Which is fun too, but not as fun.

[Kaiju Nexus]

[Danny B]

[Gfan54]

[Danny B]

[TerranigmaFreak]

[Andrew Nguyen]

[kpa]

[Danny B]

[Robert Saint John]

[The Shadow]

[Danny B]

Well done, Ken Belson. He wrote a well thought out article which treated the subject matter with respect. Amazing what a little research into a subject will yield.

[ultrazilla2000]

That first article had no point, and made no sense! The guy was just rambling, lol. And he's an editor? Oh wait, he's a CARTOON editor. He's obviously better with pictures than words...well, I hope.

[Gfan54]

[briizilla]