It's a funny subversion, personally it tickle my brain to recast everything I know about Charlie and the Chocolate factory in a turnip twist with a Wanky being as flamboyant as always and the kids being WAY less into it. i like to picture the parent being there and being enamored with it.
It says a lot about society.
"Subverting expectations" is like jazz.
A good jazz musician knows the rules of music. They choose which ones to bend and which ones to break. When a couple of rules are broken here and there it's pleasurable and exciting.
When too many rules are broken, it's Yoko Ono.
The core of humor is doing something unexpected. "Willy Wonka makes turnips" is unexpected. The same is true with "Charlie doesn't like what Willy Wonka makes".
The problem is that both of those things are telegraphed really early, thus defusing any surprise they could have delivered. By the last frame we expect Charlie to have a bad time at Willy Wonka's factory, and he does.
This comic is making animal noises into a microphone and Chuck Berry wants to slap the shit out of it.
Have you ever seen like anything from Monty Python? i'm genuinely curious I know comedy is, obviously, subjective, but this comic has a distinctive quality and it's hard for me to see it labeled as "shitty".
In the second subversion, it’s still a chocolate factory but Charlie is allergic to chocolate
It's just funny (to me) thinking about if it wasn't chocolate but instead something undesirable. Now if it was beetroot...
Love love Hark! A Vagrant. And a lot of the other comics are way funnier, especially the historical ones. The comics about "marauding women on bicycles" (like this one) crack me up. I still think the "strong female characters" series is one of the funniest things ever.
I wish Beaton would keep doing Hark! A Vagrant, but given what her family went through and her sister's misdiagnosis and death from cancer, I understand why she finished it up. Her graphic novel/memoir, Ducks, was one of the best books I read last year.
Yeah Ducks was incredible. It gave me a completely different persepctive on available post-secondary options that resonated as my eldest step-son is navigating college. But I love going back to my Hark! A Vagrant books for some historical sillies.
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I think that turnips were kind of more filling the place that potatoes did.
Then the Columbian exchange happened and suddenly Europe had potatoes and turnips got kind of displaced.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2018/10/08/christopher-columbus-potato-that-changed-world/
Before Columbus landed on Hispaniola, the European diet was a bland affair. In many northern climes, crops were largely limited to turnips, wheat, buckwheat and barley. Even so, when potatoes began arriving from America, it took a while for locals to realize that the strange lumps were, comparatively speaking, little nutritional grenades loaded with complex carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins.
“When [Sir Walter] Raleigh brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the leaves,” Qian said.
Eventually, starting with a group of monks on Spain’s Canary Islands in the 1600s, Europeans figured out how to cultivate potatoes, which form a nutritionally complete — albeit monotonous — diet when combined with milk to provide vitamins A and D. The effects were dramatic, boosting populations in Ireland, Scandinavia, Ukraine and other cold-weather regions by up to 30 percent, according to Qian’s research. The need to hunt declined and, as more land became productive, so did conflicts over land.
Frederick the Great ordered Prussian farmers to grow them, and the potato moved to the center of European cultures from Gibraltar to Kiev. "Let the sky rain potatoes,” Shakespeare wrote in "The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Their portability made them ideal to transport into the growing cities, feeding the swelling population that would be needed for a factory labor force.
“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said.
“It’s hard to imagine a food having a greater impact than the potato,” Qian said.
I'm thinking coconut. Definitely hurts more
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Oh, that's a good thought.
Hmm.
I guess it depends on how you measure "impact". I think that coconut would probably win if you talk impact on specific societies -- I mean, there's less of a replaceable staple food -- but the potato has had larger impact in terms of scale; more people in the world rely on the potato.
My in-laws live in a rural area. They made a salad. It's the best fucking salad I've ever tasted. That's because the vegetables are the same strains the local families have been growing for more than a century. They were brought from garden to table in two days.
Once upon a time all your vegetables were about half the size with double the flavor. Then, capitalism exploited GMO tech for profit.
