Sunday, 8 December 2024

Dec 06, 2024 00:33


The one that fails to be ironic.

Synopsis: Liz throws a theatrical tantrum because theatre teachers expect her to retain knowledge.

Summary: It's not actually a good look being an adult toddler like Lynn.

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howtheduck December 6 2024, 05:41:36 UTC

Another opportunity to compare the colouring of 2024:



With the colouring of 1995:



The main difference is Elizabeth shirt colour and frankly the deep purple is a better contrast with all those lightly coloured backgrounds. I give it to 2024. I guess the joke is supposed to be that Elizabeth's screaming and shrieking is supposed to be theatrical. However, given that virtually every Patterson has this reaction to doing schoolwork of any sort, I would define it as Pattersonian.

As for the questions.

First up, the Romans' theater design:

The structural designs-including the scaenae frons, the orchestra, and the auditorium-optimized the spectator’s experience of the performance. Roman theaters were multifunctional spaces deeply integrated into ancient Roman culture.

The personalities:

Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254 - 184 BC) was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period.

Aeschylus (c. 525/524 - c. 456/455 BC) was an ancient Greek tragedian often described as the father of tragedy

Konstantin Stanislavsky (born January 5 [January 17, New Style], 1863, Moscow, Russia-died August 7, 1938, Moscow) was a Russian actor, director, and producer, founder of the Moscow Art Theatre (opened 1898).

I think the idea that Stanislavsky was from the same time period as Plautus and Aeschylus was supposed to be a joke. Hilarious.

The theater terms seem to be taken from Greek and Latin:

Catharsis and cathartic both trace to the Greek word kathairein, meaning “to cleanse, purge.” Catharsis entered English as a medical term having to do with purging the body-and especially the bowels-of unwanted material. Catharsis is a concept from Greek theatre, referring to the emotional release experienced by the audience of a tragedy

The term histrionic developed from histrio, Latin for "actor."

The protagonist or hero of a play, novel, or film is involved in a struggle of some kind, either against someone or something else or even against his or her own emotions. So the hero is the "first struggler", which is the literal meaning of the Greek word prōtagōnistēs.

English picked up both the concept of hubris and the term for that particular brand of cockiness from the ancient Greeks, who considered hubris a dangerous character flaw capable of provoking the wrath of the gods. In classical Greek tragedy, hubris was often a fatal shortcoming that brought about the fall of the tragic hero.

Frankly if I was taking a high school theatre and all that stuff was on the test, I would be wondering about it too. I am not sure I would be able to find a better way to turn the kids off to theatre.

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dreadedcandiru2 December 6 2024, 06:20:50 UTC
There is a bad habit that we might call Johnstonian: exaggeration to the point that the reader can no longer suspend disbelief. We see it here, eh?

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jjamele December 6 2024, 13:32:52 UTC
So often Lynn has characters thought-bubble what needs to be said out loud. This is an example of the reverse; it's reasonable to imagine Liz thinking about this, but not ranting out loud. She comes off as an unhinged loon desperate for attention.

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dreadedcandiru2 December 6 2024, 14:24:08 UTC

Which is entirely the point. What we have is hypocrisy at its most rank: someone howling about being persecuted because she was expected to do things she didn't see herself liking is hectoring children for modeling her own lousy work habits.

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howtheduck December 6 2024, 20:33:45 UTC
That we do. One of those categories would be enough to put the point across, but all those study categories on one high school theatre class takes away from the humor.

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dreadedcandiru2 December 6 2024, 22:38:14 UTC

It's what I think of as a fat weekly. As a four panel strip,



it would be believable but the padding makes it ludicrous.

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howtheduck December 7 2024, 02:06:55 UTC

Wow! What a difference 4 panels makes. There is enough hysteria in the first 3 panels to put the point across cleanly. Looking at the 4 panels by themselves I had this odd sensation come over that was "realizing 4 panels made this joke funny".

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dreadedcandiru2 December 7 2024, 08:24:14 UTC

Lynn doesn't know how to quit when she's ahead. That's a tell indicating that she's the sort of fabulist who says Aaron bitching about not using footage of a suicide felt true so was true.

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howtheduck December 7 2024, 16:25:27 UTC

She often talked about the joys of writing for the Sundays where she had more freedom, but so many Sundays are just extended dailies. There are few times when she actually filled the space with something that was not repetition.

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dreadedcandiru2 December 6 2024, 10:51:10 UTC

What interested me about the load of bollocks about teachers are trying to publicly humiliate them by asking them things they do not know is that Lynn didn't care to know what teachers did to children their own mother called ignorant and clueless malingerers.

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aprilp_katje December 7 2024, 00:32:33 UTC

Do any high-school students actually say "no fair" unironically?

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howtheduck December 7 2024, 02:03:55 UTC

Probably only if they went to a county or state fair on the wrong day and found nothing was there. Even then, it would probably still be ironic.

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aprilp_katje December 7 2024, 13:46:00 UTC

In case anyone has the nagging feeling that Lynn has done this "joke" before....



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howtheduck December 7 2024, 16:21:28 UTC

Another indication that 4 panels is a lot better for this joke than taking up an entire Sunday. Lynn is definitely in the "repeat her own jokes" phase. She has stepped away from stealing material from other cartoonists so much by this point.

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dreadedcandiru2 December 7 2024, 16:25:23 UTC

Garbage like this reminds us that she never left the "not really caring what her strip did to her children's public image if they were upset about it" phase.

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chocolate_frapp December 9 2024, 05:13:29 UTC

panel 4: more weird hand shit

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