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Lazy, lazy, LAZY

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Kudzu, 10/27/04

All right, Kudzu, I went out on a limb for you. I said that I sometimes find you funny, something no other right-thinking comics commentator would do. I even said that I particularly like the Church League strips. And this, this is how you repay me?

Here’s the thing: the Church League is funny because no one else in America, to my knowledge, is doing jokes about differing religions, and because it’s funny to imagine the fairly bland Baptists led by Will B. Dunn playing softball against Buddhist monks or whatever. See, when you create a running gag around some structure, you can’t just jettison that structure if you want to make a joke about, say, reality show rejects (who, for the record, DO NOT THEMSELVES CONSTITUTE A RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATION).

At least when I see the parakeet, I know in advance that it’s not going to be funny. Try to keep things orderly here.

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THIS SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY! BAPTISTS VS. EPISCOPALIANS, -ALIANS, -ALIANS!

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Kudzu, 7/27/04

Kudzu is a good example of why I read all the comics every day. 95 times out of a 100, I find it preachy, smug, reactionary, and generally annoying. The strips where Ida Mae serves as a liberal strawperson to pick on infuriate me; the strips were the Preacher Will B. Dunn reads from a “modern translation” of the Bible are just lazy.

But then you get to stuff like today’s strip. In today’s American religious climate — where most people don’t go to church, and the fastest growing churches are large “nondenominational” generic Protestant churches — where else but in Kudzu can you find jokes about the different religious sensibilities of Baptists and Episcopalians? Where else can you pick on the quirks of the Methodists? The church league baseball/basketball/bowling/whatever installments are even better. I keeping waiting for a “one hand clapping” joke about the crowd whenever Preacher Dunn’s team plays the Zen Buddhists, though it never comes. These strips almost make up for the awful ones where the preacher’s parakeet comments on reality television. Almost.

As a side note, I think the title of this strip is a good example of comic semantic drift. When I first started reading it, I thought it was just a sort of nonsense word title, or maybe a reference to the strip’s overgrown Southern locale. It was only about a year later that I realized that there actually was a character in the strip named Kudzu. Kudzu is an everyman character who was probably intended to be the viewpoint character early in the strip’s history. Presumably the artist quickly realized that, like most everyman characters, he was boring beyond belief.

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