Complex Numbers

Sproing!

It could be argued that everything I own fits this prompt.

PROMPT November 9th

Write about something you own that is weird, wacky, or downright silly. Where did you get it and what significance does it hold for you?

Everything... or nothing, since a collection of weird things becomes, by definition, normal.

When I was a kid, I loved Mad Magazine. I owe that era a debt of gratitude for my taste (well, actually, lack thereof) in comedy and parody.

Many of the features seem childish today, even for me, but Preteen Me couldn't get enough of that dreck. Various artists, known collectively as "The Usual Gang of Idiots," as I recall, each had his own idiosyncratic style, much as a lot of the funny comic strips and cartoons you find on the internet today do.

Mad's chief rival in the adolescent-boy market was Cracked, a magazine that just couldn't measure up to Mad's high standards, which is, of course, saying something. Nowadays, of course, Mad is but a pale shadow of its former self, and Cracked , in a completely different format, is one of the funniest things on the internet... sometimes.

It's notable that Mad, for all of its juvenile humor, was primarily written and illustrated by grown-ass men, which either says something about boys or something about men -- or, possibly, about anyone who possesses a Y chromosome of any age. When I got a bit older and graduated to Playboy, I remember they once had an interview with Jay Leno (yes, I did indeed read the articles). This was before he took over the Tonight Show, if my memory serves me (which it often doesn't). In the interview, they asked Leno, "What do you think is the primary difference between men and women?"

And Jay replied with something like, "The primary difference between men and women is that all men love the Three Stooges, and all women think they're shitheads."

That stuck with me in the way that all profound philosophy does.

One of the weirdest, most elegantly and inherently funny cartoonists for Mad was Don Martin.

He was active at the magazine between 1956 and 1987, which meant I got to see his work at its peak. If it's possible to put physical comedy (in the vein of The Three Stooges) into the form of drawings, Martin was the guy who did it. His style appeared simple, and was often accompanied by brilliantly inked and perfectly onomatopoeic sound effects, much like the campy 1960s Batman TV show. These sound effects made me laugh. Every. Damn. Time.

Martin died in 2000, and after, someone collected his Mad works into a two-volume hardcover collection, which I display proudly near my three-volume Complete Calvin and Hobbes. While the latter has the distinction of almost killing me from bouts of laughter at times -- the C&H snowmen strips in particular have never been, are never, and will never be not funny -- Martin's consistent, if puerile, genius spanned a much longer period of time, reflecting the evolution of comedy and pop culture over three entire decades.

No, I don't remember how I acquired the collection. I probably ordered it on the Internet, though a search through my nearly 25 years of Amazon purchases came up as empty as the collection of fucks I have left to give. I only mention this because "where did you get it" is part of the prompt, but my memory for that sort of thing isn't nearly as good as my memory for Don Martin's irreverent comic drawings.

Now, I have zero talent for drawing, myself, and whether or not I have any ability in comedy is as open a question now as it was when I first tried my hand at it as a teen. But this Don Martin collection is one of my most prized possessions not only for its nostalgic value, but because it's just so damn timelessly funny. And it's good to know that, in times of stress or our impending descent into irreversible chaos, there's one thing (okay, two things if you count the C&H collection) that will never fail to make me laugh.

And I gotta laugh.

Some samples of Martin's work:

https://i0.wp.com/www.dailycartoonist.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/sounds-don-...
https://www.lambiek.net/artists/image/m/martin_don/martin_don_ono.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/37/44/0c/37440ce89af164301766ed44a3a5fc39.jpg
https://www.madmagazine.com/sites/default/files/MAD-Magazine-Don-Martin-Evening-...