What Is Art? - A Milt Gross Count Screwloose From 1931 Frames The Question

When you ask yourself questions like "what is art," you are probably setting out on the path that leads to the fruitcake factory. Enuff books and articles have been published on this subject to fill several buildings -- and it would appear that we humans are no closer to an answer we can all agree on than we are to finding a use for screen doors on submarines.

Are comics art? I think so -- some comics, at least. The funny thing is that many comics creators (and I'm talking sequential narratives, here) appear to have been aware that their fellow humans regarded their hard work as innately inferior to the stuff that wound up on the walls in galleries. For many -- even today -- reading comics isn't actually reading -- and comics are associated with illiteracy and simple-mindedness. When someone wants to say something is shallow, they say it's "a comic book treatment." These commentators are only betraying their own ignorance -- for comics are an art form that combines words and image into a highly effective language that may be easy to grasp, but is anything but simple to create.

Many comics creators over the decades have used society's disapproval as grist for their mill. Here's a Rube Goldberg cartoon, circa 1915, in which he suggests the best way to view the new abstract and surreal art appearing in galleries and museums.

Rube Goldberg on modern art - circa 1915
(Photograph of original art)

Milt Gross -- who in many ways is the direct artistic and screwball descendant of Goldberg -- also made sport of the idea of art many times. In a 1931 Count Screwloose Sunday page, Milt Gross dissects for us the mechanics behind the social value of art. In this case, a bum who attempts to get a drink in a bar by reciting a poem receives the comic blow of a pool table on the head. When the same bearded bohemian beggar appears at a society ball clad in his hospital sheet, the wealthy party-goers celebrate his "art." The entire absurd -- but all too true -- situation is witnessed by Count Screwloose:

Count Screwloose by Milt Gross - February 22, 1931

The poem the beggar-poet recites is a very popular poem written in the 1830s entitled Abou Ben Adhem. The author, (James Henry) Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was an English poet, essayist, and critic -- and a contemporary of Shelly's. His poem -- a depiction of a Muslim written by a Christian that expresses, in the opinions of some, basic Jewish values was a popular hit. Here's the entire text:

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Gross' inclusion of Hunt's poem, a chestnut by the 1930s, carries an ironic comment on the actions of his characters in the strip -- neither the pool hall ruffians not the society folks actually show any love at all for the beggar himself. Of course, as Sigmund Freud observed, nothing is less funny than analyses of jokes -- so I'll stop here and encourage my readers to simply dig those great, loose drawings in the strip above.

As to the issue of cartoons, art, and such -- I offer this from the great cartoonist Art Young (1866-1943):

"Some day painting will be glorified cartooning... The painter-cartoonist of the future will be an apostle of big ideas... That he will be an artist of pigment and form is, of course, important; but to be a thinking man of vision, helpfulness and courage, will be more important." (from On My Way by Art Young, 1928)

Artfully Yours,

Screwball Paul

The First Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross - 1931

Here's the very first Dave's Delicatessen Sunday by that inimitable achiever of screwballosity, Milt Gross. 

Dave's Delicatessen ran as a Sunday from June 7, 1931 to January 13, 1935. It was accompanied by the toppers Count Screwloose (an abbreviated version of an earlier full page incarnation) and That's My Pop. The comic also ran as a daily strip from July 13, 1931 to August 5, 1933. Here's three examples of the daily:

The basic idea of the strip was that Dave ran a Jewish deli and each episode featured a different eccentric character or characters coming across Dave's path. It was a toned-down, inverted variation on Milt Gross' theme of insanity in everyday life. Where Papa Feitelbaum in Nize Baby over-reacted in crazy ways, Dave is always grounded in a world of crazy characters. In his previous Sunday pages, Nize Baby (1926-1929) and Count Screwloose of Tooloose (1929-1931), Gross created epics in miniature around the comedy of escalation. You can read some of these operas of comic destruction and frustration  in these postings:

Why Don't He Twitt: An Insane 1928 Milt Gross Nize Baby

The Escalated Hypocrisy of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose

Dave's Delicatessen moved to a different, more subdued rhythm -- but saying a Milt Gross strip is subdued  is a little like saying a half dozen bottle rockets is not as explosive as a roman candle. In his new strip, Gross -- ever the growing artist -- challenged himself with moving from episodic to narrative humor. While each episode of Dave's Delicatessen remains a single unit with very little continuity, Gross often presented entire little compressed stories with a beginning, middle, and end -- all worked into a single Sunday page.

Such is the case with the very first 18-panel episode of Dave's Delicatessen, in which Dave is completely conned by two silly swindlers. It's a brilliant debut, jam-packed with Gross' visual and verbal play, oddballs, and goofy scenes -- such as in panel 8, in which a woman shoplifts a sausage with a expanding grabber thingie protruding from the pocket of her socialite dress.

The first Dave's Delicatessen by Milt Gross
June 7, 1931
(courtesy of Carl Linich)

Look at how, in the last panel, Gross makes the mug shot book unrealistically gigantic -- allowing us, the reader, to see what it is. This sort of freedom to expertly stray from one-on-one representation reveals the true mastery of Gross. While Dave's Delicatessen doesn't provide as many visual pyrotechnics as his earlier strips, it does offer some of the most stuffed comics ever -- and belongs among the greatest of Milt Gross' achievements.

Many thanks to Carl Linich, who provided this beautiful paper scan from his own collection.

All the Best,
Paul Tumey

For Your Ice Only: A Cool 1926 Milt Gross Nize Baby Color Sunday Comic

From my own paper collection, I offer for today's Milt Gross Monday a deliciously screwball 1926 Nize Baby that totally cracked me up (cough cough).

Before the days of electrical refrigeration, people had small, thickly insulated cabinets in their home that stored slowly melting blocks of ice. This is how our grandparents and their parents kept food cool and fresh in America. My Southern mother still called her refrigerator an "ice-box," as do I -- to the amusement of some. Back in the day, you had to replace the ice as it melted -- it must have been quite a strenuous and messy task. Milt Gross, in today's comic, uses what was then a common chore as the basis for one of his terrific 12-panel operas of escalation, as Pop Feitelbaum tries in vain to get "de ice in de ice-box."

I think the comics of Milt Gross are superb in all periods of his career, but my favorite is the 1920s Sunday pages, which I think offer some of his wildest and funniest drawings. Today's 1926 comic is a great example:

The Iceman Cometh in Milt Gross' Oct 24, 1926 Nize Baby
(from the collection of Paul Tumey)

It's interesting to me to note that the energy patterns in this comic are strikingly similar to the 1927 full page Salesman Sam Sunday by George Swanson that I posted yesterday. Tiers one and three are build-ups of conflict and energy, while tiers two and four are comedic explosions of the situation. Or, you could see this as a times-two repeat of a pattern -- a build-up and release, and then a bigger build-up and a larger explosive release. Instead of the physics-defying flip-take in Salesman Sam, here we get Pop's rage as he spanks his older son, Isidore.

Despite this pattern, visually the climax of the page is the wonderful 4th panel of Pop's circular skittering fall with the block of ice. Screwball comics are unpredictable in their movements, which is part of the delight of reading them.

We've seen in previous postings that Milt Gross liked to sometimes include his own version of a Rube Goldberg machine. The last panel once again shows Milt Gross' debt to to Rube Goldberg as he makes reference to Goldberg's popular comic panel, Foolish Questions.

Tomorrow, we'll take a look at Rube Goldberg's Foolish Questions panel. Join me then! And be sure to stop by every Monday for a new Milt Gross comic!

Keeping my ice peeled,
Paul Tumey

The Hilarious Hypocrisy of Banana Oil by Milt Gross (1925)

Today we peel our eyeballs for a potent trio of extremely rare, early Milt Gross Banana Oil dailies from 1925.

The concept of Banana Oil was to show in each episode the difference between what people say and what they actually do. The phrase, "banana oil," is slang for "bulls--t." It was, in many ways, Gross' first success, capturing the many different shades of human dishonesty in a friendly, comically brilliant way. Each episode gave us different characters and different situations.

In this respect, Gross was extending the "concept strip" form that Rube Goldberg, his artistic and spiritual mentor, primarily developed in the United States with such popular series as Foolish Questions and I'm The Guy. In fact, Rube Goldberg had several series about human hypocrisy, including Telephonies, Phoney Films, and No Matter How Thin You Slide It, It's Still Baloney.

Banana Oil ran for roughly 7 years, first as a daily ( Dec. 31, 1923- Oct.30, 1925) and then as a topper (Sept. 12, 1926-Sept. 28, 1930)* to the Sunday Nize Baby and later Count Screwloose. You can see a 1928 example of the color Banana Oil topper here.

In 1926, Milt Gross said in an interview that:

1926 Milt Gross portrait by fellow
cartoonist Herb Roth
(who mainly ghosted for H.T. Webster)

 "Banana Oil was more myself than anything else I've ever done. It contained all that I feel about life and the bunk that the world is so full of. I poured out my heart in it -- strange though that may sound." - Milt Gross, 1926

The 1926 article from Success magazine by David Balch describes Gross as "a very energetic young man possessed of a withering contempt for four-flushers."

Gross' daily set the pattern for his work to come, with a crazy kaleidoscope of ever-shifting characters and situations, all drawn with an appealing screwball energy. Here's three selected Banana Oil dailies for your henjoyment.

First up is a great example of hypocrisy through self-delusion:

May 23, 1925

Next is an example of someone who is well-aware they are being deceitful, but comically tries to cover-up. It's also a nice chance to see Gross draw pin-up girls.

July 21, 1925

Lastly, here is an example of "the public" calling BS -- in a comic that graphically anticipates the extraordinary, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type panels of unrestrained screwball chaos, as can be seen in  his April 5, 1931 Count Screwloose Sunday (you can read that comic here)

May 7, 1925

That's all for today. I need to go count the piles of money rolling, get  my morning massage, and have Hives, my butler serve me lunch.**

Inhaling Pickle Smoke,
Paul Tumey
_________________________________________________________________________

*Information from American Newspaper Comics: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide by Allan Holtz (2012, University of Michigan Press)

**That's a lotta banana oil!

A Guffaw-Inducing Milt Gross Sunday Featuring J.R., the Speckled Wonder

Here's a Milt Gross screwball special. I laugh out loud every time I read this Dave's Delicatessen. The timing is perfect on this sequence, and the drawings are extraordinarily funny, even for Gross. I love his shadowy panels of J.R. on the trail of something supposedly amiss at "the art museum." The comic centers around the antics of bloodhound extraordinaire, J.R. I don't know what that stands for, or when J.R. first appears in the Milt Gross Universe, but I can say that he's one of Gross' funniest characters.

The topper features the henpecked pixelated penguins, Otto and Blotto, who are always trying, in Laurel and Hardy fashion, to sneak away from the wives for a quick tip of the elbow (or fin, in this case) at the local bar.

As an extra added bonus, we also get a That's My Pop! panel, which is based on a man's son always catching him in some ignoble action, and proudly proclaiming to the world in thickly brushed letters, "That's MY Pop!"

Your Honorary Screwballist,
Paul Tumey

Some Nize Milt Gross Rarities

MILT GROSS MONDAY! MILT GROSS MONDAY! MONT GRISS MILDAY!

Presenting a small basket of miscellaneous Milt Gross goodies this week.

First up is a terrific inscription, supplied by Screwball scholar Carl Linich,by Milt to what appears to be a fellow co-worker, a female that he refers to seeing around in the newspaper offices. The inscription is totally charming. It's fun to see Milt using his genius for comic structure and details to woo a lady. As far as I know Gross was a devoted femily man, so his flirting here is all in fun -- or perhaps to butter up the lady who might be of some help to him? I really have no idea. In any case, it's way cool to see Milt's own scrawling handwriting -- his line in forming these words is identical to the bold squiggles of his comics in which we find so much delight and screwball magic.

A charming and flirtatious inscription from Milt Gross,
in his own gracefully screwy handwriting -
written on the flyleaf of his book Hiawatta
(from the collection of Carl Linich)

Next up is a Gross Exaggerations column by Milt Gross from 1926, with some great prose humor. Milt had an ongoing column all about various tenants in a multi-story tenement building in New York. This column begins with tales from the fourth floor, where the "nize baby" episodes take place:

June 16, 1926

One of the things I love about Milt Gross is that he was equally talented with words and pictures. Gross Exaggerations was also a daily comic strip. Here's a beautiful wordless example.

Gross Exaggeration by Milt Gross - November 23, 1925

That is all for this time around. I hope you enjoyed these rarities and be sure to tune in every Monday for more Milt Gross screwball madness!

Till the next time we may say hello,

Paul Tumey

A Spectacular Milt Gross Back to School Screwball Comic (Count Screwloose 1931)

Here's a terrific Milt Gross screwball comic from 1931, scanned from my collection, and featuring a classic panoramic panel of college craziness.

As my son Reid and my girlfriend's daughter, Olivia, are among the millions gearing up to return to school in a few daze, this Count Screwloose about college lept out and grabbed me by the textbooks. As I'm sure readers are aware, American university fraternities have long been a rich vein of wild and wacky behavior. The big joke in the strip below is that the town planners feel a college would add dignity to their community, only to find the antics of college frat boys are anything but dignified!

The topper comic on this page is Babbling Brooks, which refers to the main character - a well-meaning goofus who always manages to say the wrong thing. Even the topper on this page ends with a mad crowd-scene spectacle -- Gross must have been feeling ambitious when he drew this page. Gross did a Babbling Brooks daily early in his career, from October,  1922 to February 1923, and then returned to the character nine years later in his Sunday topper version, from October, 1930 to May, 1931.

Milt Gross' ode to college craziness from April 5, 1931

The structure of this comic is slightly different than many of the Milt Gross Sunday pages from the late 20s and early 30s we've been studying. Instead of a steady escalation of a situation beyond all reasonable expectations, today's comic offers two tiers of a calm, quiet set-up, followed by an abrupt explosion of zaniness. The structure in this comic is not escalation so much as it is an explosion. The first 5 panels are the slow hissing burn of a fuse, and the final, spectacular panel offers a fireworks display of screwball comedy.

Here's the panel, in a large format, so you can appreciate it in all its screwball glory!

In appropriately reverse fashion, let's now take a closer look at the first panel of the Count Screwloose above. Gross has created a vastly over-complex and downright silly mechanism that allows The Count his escape from Nuttycrest. This is undoubtedly a tribute to the great Rube Goldberg, who is famous for his chain-reaction invention cartoons.

Even the final panel of Gross' Count Screwloose cleverly echoes Goldberg's dailies of the time, which were sometimes panoramic one-panels with a tiny panel inset in the lower right (usually a Benny Sent Me).

I don't know yet the exact nature of the connection between Milt Gross and Rube Goldberg. The only mention of Gross in Peter Marzio's excellent 1973 biography, Rube Goldberg His Life and Work, occurs on page 103, where he describes the fantastic 500-guest-large New Year's Eve parties Rube and his wife Irma hosted in 1925-30. Gross was among the many cartoonists there, including Winsor McCay, George McManus, Peter Arno, Billy DeBeck, and many others who all drew cartoons on huge sheets of paper hung on the walls of Rube's home near Central Park. (Oh, to have those sheets!)

Whatever their personal connection might have been, it's clear from studying the work of both cartoonists that Milt Gross was Rube Goldberg's cartoon heir. He carried on Goldberg's approach to comics and humor in cartoon form, right down to building entire series around human foibles such as the difference between what we say and do. The other major screwball cartoonists to notably further this tradition -- including the grand panoramic Hogarthian-style spectacle as seen in the above Count Screwloose -- are Mad's Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder (who mostly worked together as a team), in the generation after Gross. In this sense, you could say that Milt Gross -- most active in the 1920s and 30s -- is the artistic/screwball link between the work of Rube Goldberg (active 1904-1962) and Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder (active 1940s-early 1990s).

However, Harvey Kurtzman grew up with the comics of Rube Goldberg, too. His fiorst comics were chalk drawing son New York city streets titled Ikey and Mike (after Goldberg's Mike and Ike They Look Alike).

That's all for now. I have to go steal the Big Boy statue and place him on top of the Space Needle to get my frat pin...

Creator of blogs nice 'n' roomy,
I'm the guy - Paul Tumey

The Escalated Hypocrisy of Milt Gross' Count Screwloose

Milt Gross had several dynamics in his humor. One was the comedy of escalation, in which he kept increasing the conditions of a situation to ridiculous extremes. Another dynamic Gross employed is the humor of hypocrisy, in which he draws laughter from the difference between what people say and what they actually do. Gross built an entire strip, Banana Oil (daily 1923-25, Sunday 1926-30) on the latter dynamic In today's comic, a large, cleaned up 300 dpi paper scan from my own archives, Milt puts both of these dynamics into play.

Escalation occurs when the protagonist of this episode, as observed by the Count, has to deal with one crazy interruption after another. Neckties and insurance are silly enough, but a picture on a pony is pretty screwy!

The hypocrisy sets in when we see that our guy was very patient and allowing of the interruptions at the office, but when his son asks him a simple question at home, he explodes with comic rage, destroying his home and spanking his child. Gross -- a dedicated and loving father -- shows us how NOT to be a Dad. At the end, the Count and Iggy play pool at Nuttycrest with veggies and a broom. Along the way, we meet a host of odd and entertaining characters. I ask you, does it get any better?

The comedy of escalation and the humor of hypocrisy are the foundations for a superb Milt Gross screwball comic
January 18, 1931 (from the collection of Paul Tumey)

The first panel is Milt Gross' version of the classic Rube Goldberg chain-reaction invention cartoon. Gross did a few of these in 1931.

I don't know if he and Rube were friends, but I do know that Gross looked up to Rube and was heavily influenced by him. The doctor in this comic is straight outta Rube Goldberg casting...

And, just for fun, here's a couple of close ups of cartoons from today's Milt Gross Monday comic that show Milt's endless inspiration for drawing funny people. What makes these work is that these aren't just drawings... these characters have their own agendas and motivations -- they think they are real!

Well gang, sadly I must inform you that this will probably be the only post I can manage this week and next. I am still eyebrows-deep in a screwball comics related project that is claiming most of my time. In a week or so, I am flying from Seattle to New York City to work lend a hand on an exciting new  Rube Goldberg book by Jennifer George -- Rube Goldberg's grand-daughter and Director of Rube Goldberg, Inc. My fellow screwball scholar, Carl Linich will also be helping out on this book, and I'm looking forward to meeting him in person! There is much prep work to be done this week, including a mountain of scanning and so I have to give my usual "blog time" to this new project for a couple of weeks. Around all this, I am still running Presentation Tree and being a single father during summer vacation - phew! I hope you'll kindly forgive the infrequent August postings, knowing that my energies are contributing in a very small way to help create a cool new book on a screwball master!

Please browse around the older articles you may have missed -- there is already a lot of good reading material on this blog.

A lot more Milt Gross comics you can only find on this blog (new scans from my archive of paper originals) are posted here.

And please spread the word about this blog -- Screwball Comics, Now More Than Ever!

Flip-takingly Yours,
Paul Tumey

Three Magnificent Milt Gross Messterpieces

On vacation till August 13

I am eyeballs-deep in an exciting screwball-related project  which I hope someday to share with you. Because of that, I will be taking a week off from my daily posting.

If you are jonesing to read more screwball comics, I suggest you troll through the artist pages I've put up. There's links at the top and right hand side of this page. I have stuffed many of these pages with additional items of interest, including many rare comics. Most recently I completely overhauled the Ving Fuller page . You'll find a lot of interesting material unavailable anywhere else.

This is also a great time to browse the 60+ articles on screwball masters that I have posted on this blog so far. Here's some articles I'm especially proud about that you may have missed:

The Elements of Screwball Comics

The Snoremonica: They Laughed When I Went to Bed

Comic Strips Are Frozen Words: A Full Page of 1937 Ahern Screwball Goodness

Stuck on the Enchanted Flypaper - Snapshots of Foozland

From Little Aherns Grow Mighty Jokes - The Nut Brothers

The Compression of Smokey Stover Comics

Doc Syke by Ving Fuller: A Prescription For Surreal Silliness

A Daily Dose of Ving Fuller's Crazy Doc Syke

Dinky Dinkerton by Art Huhta

Early Screwball: Amazing Jerry On The Job Sunday Comic (1919)

In the meantime, here's not one, but TREE spectacular Milt Gross screwball comics to tide you over! Enjoy!

November 30, 1930

December 7, 1930

December 14, 1930

Announcement! Last night, my talented pal Frank Young (curator of the amazing Stanley Stories blog) dropped by with a copy of the brand new graphic novel - The Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song. Frank co-authored this stunning book with the super-gifted David Lasky. The folks at Abrams ComicArts have done a stellar job of making this book a beautiful hardcover treasure, complete with a CD of music! Being an author, Frank got his copy early. The book will be out in October, and can be pre-ordered on Amazon. I think this will be one of the outstanding graphic novels to date -- a meticulously researched and impeccably crafted telling of the story of the first family of country music that is historically and emotionally authentic -- and fun to read!

See ya next week, Iggy!

-~ Paul Tumey

Milt Gross Original Art (1931)

Milt Gross Monday

Presenting a large scan of the stunning original art to a loony 1931 Count Screwloose by Milt Gross!

Yesterday, I posted some swell scans of original art by Walter Hoban. I've decided to make every post this week a look at scans of originals I've collected -- stay tuned and spread the word!

Today's offering is a "topper" strip that ran above the larger Dave's Delicatessen. In earlier posts ( to see these, just click the Milt Gross Monday link at the top right of this web page), I've shared examples of full page versions of Count Screwloose from 1928 - 30. When Milt started his new feature, Dave's Delicatessen, he made Count Screwloose into a topper. Gross also abandoned the frame of the longer version of the strip, in which the Count escapes Nuttycrest asylum, sees "normal" folks acting crazy, and runs back to the relative safety and sanity of the laughing academy. As we see in this topper, Gross changed the Count  into a trouble-causing protagonist instead of a passive observer. The Count is joined in this mischief by his dog pal in the Napoleon hat, Iggy.

Count Screwloose by Milt Gross - circa Nov. 11, 1931 (date unconfirmed)

Meaning well, the Count (who seems to be living with the "Colonel") puts a hair-growing tonic on his pillow. Of course, the pillow becomes glued to the Colonel's head and the comic escalates from this situation into an even more absurd scenario where the Count tortures and humliates the Colonel. The Colonel feebly protests "This is outrageous," but nonetheless winds up smashing through the wall of his house with a pillow glued to his head, much to the delight of preying paparazzi photographers. In the last -- dialogue-free -- panel, the Count and Iggy are taking passport photos, suggesting they are going to leave the country to escape the Colonel's rage.

The last panel reminds me of the way Carl Barks would sometimes end his Donald Duck Walt Disney Comics and Stories 10-page distaster stories. Donald would turn an entire town into an vast omelet, or a valley filled with syrup, or some such disaster --  and in the last panel we'd see his silhouetted figure slinking off into the night, totally defeated. That is, until the next issue, when it would happen all over again.

Gross's visual layout is as well-constructed as his story. Notice how he uses the pattern of the Colonel's pajamas to make his panels more visually busy and dense as the action escalates. In the climactic next-to-last panel, the pj pattern becomes a blur scribbles as all heck breaks loose.

You can see a few non-repro blue marks in this scan, but not many. Gross appears to have very loosely penciled the strip and then boldly inked with the confidence of a master. His line is loose and spontaneous within the well-crafted vessel of his solid story structure and visual layout -- this solidity of form and looseness of execution is the essence (and beauty) of his style.

Tune in Every Monday for a New Milt Gross Comic!


That is all,
Screwball Paul

Milt Gross Teaches Us How to Learn - The Screwloose Way (1930)

Milt Gross Monday

A New Milt Gross Comic Every Monday!

We don't usually associate Milt Gross, the master of screwball comics, with moral lessons and parables. As today's example shows Gross' work is actually filled with trenchant observations of humanity's craziness that could be seen as a sort of textbook on how not to live. This wisdom aspect of screwball comics is actually a fairly common element. Starting with Rube Goldberg's Lunatics I Have Met in the early 1900s, screwball comics embraced insanity in a way that actually shows the reader the logical and expected result to expect from certain choices and attitudes. I sometimes think that screwball comics at their finest are sublime depictions of people tossing and turning as they sleepwalk through life. They are delightful because they are -- in essence -- saying something about the dream state most of us are often in, whether we realize it or not.

Curiously, Milt decorates his canoe in this
comic with a swastika - a very old symbol that was
adopted by the Nazi party in 1920

Today's Milt Gross Monday comic is another in his Count Screwloose series. In this episode, Gross explores the idea of book learning versus acquired experience. As usual, he presents us with a character that takes things to the absurd extreme. The gag is yet another variation on Gross' comedy of escalation, as the self-made man, a skeptic of academia, journeys with great expense and bother to the far corners of the world to learn the exact  knowledge that was first offered to him in a classroom.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes it's not possible to teach someone something simply by telling them? We often must go through our own elaborate Milt Gross style comedies to be able to see what was in front of us the whole time.

Count Screwloose by Milt Gross - Nov 2, 1930

The strip is framed with the usual Count Screwloose structure - the Count escapes from Nuttycrest, leaving his pal Iggy (a dog with a Napoleon complex) in tears at the separation. The Count then becomes our surrogate in the "sane" world as he quietly observes. At the end, overwhelmed by the nuttiness he has silently witnessed, the tiny Count (who is stranded in a distant foreign land) rides on the back of a fish back towards Nuttycrest, dreaming of reuniting with his pal, Iggy.

The art on this page reminds me very much of Sergio Aragones.

Note: I'm not sure if anyone noticed, but we skipped the last two days due to technical difficulties. We have now resumed our normally scheduled broadcast.

That is all,
Screwball Paul

Milt Gross Meets Rudy Megaphone (1930)

Milt Gross Monday

A new Milt Gross comic every Monday!

Ah, celebrities. We love 'em.

It's said that Albert Einstein read and adored Milt Gross. Paul Picasso, James Joyce, and Gertude Stein were avid fans. Robert Frost wrote an (unpublished) ode to Count Screwloose. It's well known that meetings between FDR and Churchill often broke down into laugh-fests over Gross's books. Years later, JFK and Kruschev discovered peace-promoting common ground over a mutual regard for the comics of Milt Gross (Nixon never liked them - he said didn't get them). More than one scientist has credited Gross' fractal-driven images as the primary inspiration for the discovery of the DNA double-helix model.  Even the great film comedian Charlie Chaplin loved the humor of Milt Gross so much that he hired him to help write one of his greatest films, "The Circus."


Eau Kaye, so I might be elaborating just a tad. I actually made up all of the above, just for fun. Wouldn't it be wonderful if any it were true? Waitaminnit! One part of all that nonsense IS true, wonderfully true: Milt Gross really did co-concoct with Charlie Chaplin (also his pal) -- that much is true. Here's a sweet little newspaper item from 1926:

Hartford Courant, May 5, 1926

The above article was found on the wonderful website, Silent Comedians, which will interest many readers of this blog.

Here's today's Milt Gross offering, a full Sunday page meditation on  celebrities, in this case the immortal Rudy Megaphone:

That's all for me today! I'm leaving this booby-hatch for a saner world and smarter people!

Sincerely Not,
Count Tumeyloose