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At Swords’ Point: Humor As Weapon
Humor
is a big joke on us all. It’s one huge paradox. While it seems unconditionally
benevolent, stimulating laughter and good feeling, it is often cruel,
destructive, and manipulative. So says Betty Swords. And she should
know. For over twenty-five years, starting in 1955, she was a professional
humorist. She sold her cartoons to the major magazine markets, including Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Good
Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Changing Times. She also produced a
considerable quantity of humorous writing for such publications as McCall’s, Modern Maturity, Christian Science
Monitor, and others. And beginning in 1976, Swords taught college courses
in the power of humor and lectured widely on the subject. (The substance of her
lectures she has incorporated into a book project, Humor Power; excerpts from the precis for the book appear at the
end of this report.)
Swords discovered the hostile side
of humor after she’d been cartooning for a dozen years or so.
“I was reading a book of comic
one-liners,” she reported, “—The
Encyclopedia of Humor by Joey Adams—when I became aware of a growing
discomfort. People usually skim these books, but I had to read them thoroughly
because I reviewed them for The Denver Post. I was growing punchy from the
aptly-named punchlines. And then I realized that the punching bag was always a
woman.
“Marriage is seen as bad,” she went
on, recollecting the experience as we talked on the patio in back of her Denver
home in June 1995. And she cited examples of one-liners to prove her point:
Married
life is great—it’s my wife I can’t stand.
He
was unlucky in both his marriages—his first wife left him. And his second one
won’t.
A
bachelor’s last words—I do.
“Marriage is seen as horrible
because it meant that the man had lost his freedom,” she continued. “Everything
about marriage was very bad for men. I kept going through the books, looking.
Husbands were bachelors who had run out of luck. Then I checked cartoons.
Cartoonists usually have their studios at home, and I thought they’d be more
domesticated than, say, night club comedians with their one-liners. And I found
that in one way cartoonists were worse: I saw how hideously ugly they made the
battle-axe wife. Women were either babes or battle-axes. As babes, they were
always trying to trick a man into marriage, after which they got bigger and
became battle-axes.
“All the jokes were not only against
marriage,” Swords said, “they were against women as well: the fall guy was a
gal.”
More incriminating one-liners:
A
woman’s brain is divided into two parts—dollars and cents.
Women
have a tough life. They have to cook and clean and scrub. That’s hard to do
without getting out of bed.
“Women were dumb about money, dumb
about driving, dumb about anything that happened in the real world,” Swords
said. “And that began my trip into feminism. I began to see how humor treated
women. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Humor did it to blacks, too; they were dumb. Did it to
Jews—not dumb, but sly; not to be trusted. The Irish at one time were the
victims of humor. The Polish. The power of the stereotype. When you made them
the object of humor, you could make them lose their humanity and become objects
of ridicule, and you could even kill them with impunity.”
Suddenly, Swords said, she realized
why there were so few women cartoonists. “Actually,
it’s probably easier for a woman to become a doctor or lawyer than a
cartoonist,” she said. “It’s men who dominate the humor field, especially in
cartoons.”
Women cartoonists are discriminated
against because of their ideas. “Women don’t make jokes,” she said, “because
they are the joke.” What’s funny to a woman doesn’t appeal to male editors, who
tend to want women in the jokes to be the butt of the humor; and women are
likely to be uncomfortable to be always in that roll.
All at once, her “rather Pollyana
view of humor as a kindly contemplation of life’s incongruities” (quoting
Stephen Leacock) changed: she saw humor’s tremendous power “to kill as well as
to amuse. Humor commits countless little murders of its victims’ self esteem. I
saw that too often men used humor as a weapon against the Others of society,
and it was women who marched at the head of this Hit Parade. And since each of
us marches to a different drummer, we all join the humor hit parade at some
time.”
Swords’ journey of discovery began
in an antebellum hotel in a little town in Mississippi in the early 1940s.
She grew up in Oakland, California,
and earned her bachelor of fine arts degree at the University of California at
Berkeley. She did graduate work across the Bay at the San Francisco Academy of
Advertising Art.
“I specialized in fashion
illustration,” Swords told me. “What I had planned to do—from the time I was
four—I wanted to draw the most beautiful paper dolls. And as I grew older, I
was constantly drawing paper dolls, designing clothes for them and so forth. In
high school I studied costume design, and in college they had something called
Household Art, which was hardly very good for cartooning. When I graduated from
college, the only real place for costume designing was New York, and the
designers were in New York—and they were all men anyhow—and it just seemed like
not a very good idea, so I went to that school in San Francisco and did fashion
illustration mainly.”
I asked: “Was this an acceptable
career for a woman at that time?”
“Yes,” she said. “Fashion
illustration for women’s clothes, in particular. Women were not supposed to be
able to draw men. And we had one student who did a wonderful job doing men’s
fashion, and she ended up with a job at a men’s store. But I didn’t do any
fashion illustration until after we got married.”
Swords married a doodlebug.
“Leonard’s a geophysicist,” she explained. “Oil exploration. We moved a lot.
For six years, we averaged a move every two months. We were in California the
first year. But after that, it was all over. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi.”
For most of that six years, World War
II was raging, and the home front was plagued with shortages—“certainly in
housing,” Swords said. “Nearly half the time we lived in auto courts; motels
didn’t exist out in the boonies where they usually find oil. I tried freelance
fashion illustration while we were in Sacramento with great success. I got work
right away in three stores—and after three weeks, we were transferred. It was
even worse in two other places: we were transferred before I started work.
Frustrating! Fashion work requires a good-sized town, and staying put, neither
of which is common to the doodlebug (oil exploration) life. I was stuck with
painting scenes—when there was any scenery. And then we arrived at Stafford
Springs, in the wilds of Mississippi—population, two, I think,” Swords said
with a grin.
“It was a health spa, hot springs.
We were there for a week’s work, which lasted almost a month because it rained
and poured and thundered every day, and when that happened, the roads became
impassable. And the electricity went off. The refrigeration went off, and no
water! We carried our little jugs from the wells at the bottom of the road up
to our hotel room to flush the toilet or to wash. Anyhow—there was this book in
the hotel lobby, a beat-up copy of Writer’s
Yearbook. And in it was an article about cartooning, and it said, ‘Now that
so many men are in the service, women are welcome in the cartooning business.’
Not only that but it observed that cartooning was the only form of commercial
art that can be done by mail—from anywhere!
“Both of those things hit me,” she
continued. “If anybody was any place and every place, it was me. I began
drawing. I always loved humor, and I loved drawing people. In fact, I used to
read the Saturday Evening Post from
the back and make scrapbooks of the cartoons and of ‘Postscripts’ [the jokes
and cartoons page]. So eventually, when I got into the Post and then into ‘Postscripts,’ it was quite exciting. But it was
a long ‘eventually’ because I hadn’t met a cartoonist, I hadn’t met an editor,
so I wasn’t sure how to go about it; I just read what was in the Writer’s Yearbook about sending cartoons
to different markets—which I did—in pencil! I sent just the pencil rough. Later
I learned that I should have enclosed a finished inked drawing with the roughs.
And of course I sent them to all the top markets to start with. Gurney Williams
at Collier’s had held a couple of
mine, but I never sold a one. There or anywhere. And we kept moving. I quit
cartooning after awhile. The backs of my cartoons were just covered with
different addresses. The postage was adding up. And the mail took forever to
catch up with us.”
She quit doing cartoons but she
never stopped thinking of cartoon ideas, and when she and her husband finally
settled in Midland, Texas, she joined a writer’s group. And then she took up
gag writing.
“One of the first places I tried was Dennis the Menace [which began in
1951],” Swords said. “I had two boys, one older than Dennis, one younger. So I
had some Dennis ideas. And at one of our writer’s group meetings, we had paper
napkins with Dennis cartoons on them. That’s what prompted me to submit to Hank
Ketcham. I didn’t write first and ask; I just sent about eight gags at the same
time as I asked if he wanted any. And when I met him a few years later, he said
he rarely ever bought gags that way. He had a couple regular gag writers that
he used. But for some reason, the ones I sent hit him. And I worked for him for
some time.”
She also furnished gags to Dave
Gerard, Martha Blanchard, Irvin Caplin, Morrie Brickman, and others.
Eventually, she heard about New York
Cartoon News, a little newsletter for cartoonists and gag writers. She
corresponded with the editor, Don Ulsh, who, when he learned she had a
background in art, urged her to draw up her own gags.
“If you ask, who inspired me,”
Swords said, “the answer is, No one. There weren’t that many women. There
weren’t that many cartoonists I could relate to that way. Plus the fact that I
grew up with the notion that copying was terrible. I wish I hadn’t. I would
have learned a lot faster. What I did was to do a page of facial expressions
that I copied from different cartoonists. I’d make pages of action, copying
from action pictures—stick drawings. All this for my education.”
I said: “Traditionally, that’s exactly
the way most cartoonists learning cartooning—by copying other cartoonists.”
“I think that’s fine,” she said.
“Now. That’s the way they should learn. I saved cartoons and kept them for
scrap when they illustrated things I wanted to draw. Baseball. The theater.”
Swords agonized over her cartoons,
and much of her suffering derived entirely from not knowing cartoonists or
meeting editors and finding out what could be done and what couldn’t be done.
In retrospect, however, she sees this circumstance as a mixed blessing.
“I was unlucky,” she said, “to be
starting cartooning away from New York or any major city where I might have
found help handy—responses and advice, that sort of thing. But I was also
lucky—lucky that I didn’t start in the New York area because it would have been
easy to blame a beginner’s problems on being a woman in a man’s field. When I
finally got to New York, I met about sixty cartoonists; only one was a woman.
But it was too late to quit then since I’d already started selling to the Saturday Evening Post.”
In 1954, she acquired an agent to
sell her cartoons—Alice Heuman.
“Agents certainly aren’t necessary,”
Swords said, “nor is it usually possible to get an agent until you are selling,
but I seemed to need a lot of crutches, and Alice’s biggest advantage to me was
that there was someone waiting every week for a batch of cartoons from me.
Editors at magazines couldn’t care less about whether I produce or not, and it
was easy to get too busy to get out a weekly batch—until I got an agent, who
was always waiting.
“Another reason I wanted an agent
was to save time,” she continued. “That summer, one batch of mine had been gone
six months to only two publications. The seasonal gags were quickly out-dated.
An agent can visit most major markets in a day.”
Heuman sold Swords’ first cartoon
within a few months to King Features’ “Laugh-A-Day.” Shortly after that, the Saturday Evening Post started buying.
She knew she had arrived, she said, when she started all at once to get letters
from gag writers, offering to sell her ideas, most of which were heavy on the
battle-axe wives with rolling pins—“an old and sturdy stereotype,” Swords said.
Soon she was appearing in many other
magazines. Eventually, she made it into The
New Yorker, too--in a noted series of ads about carpet: “A Title on the
Door Rates a Bigelow on the Floor.”
Hank Ketcham urged her to go to New
York to meet editors and others in the business, and later that year, she did.
Ketcham gave her other sound advice, too, Swords said: “He recommended taking a
ream of paper, drawing 500 cartoons—and then start sending them out.”
He also suggested that she regularly
attend community theater. Stage productions provide good examples of how to
compose a scene in a single panel cartoon.
When Swords went to New York, Heuman
took her around and introduced her to cartoonists and to editors. She stayed
five days, and she made the rounds on Look Day, Wednesday.
“I met Gurney Williams,” she
recalled. “And it was strange. After all the time I’d been sending things to
him since the forties, he was strangely stand-offish. He wasn’t helpful, wasn’t
welcoming. I think now that he was just shy, but then he scared me. Later, he
found out through a friend of mine who was selling humor pieces to him, and he
wrote me a note, saying, ‘Kay says I scare you.’ And what he told her was that
he liked my work but my men were too young. I thought that Hank Ketcham had the
right idea: that the father of a small boy should be young. And most of the
cartoons in magazines then had fathers and mothers who looked more like
grandparents.”
“Not realistic at all,” I said.
“No,” she said. “And the majority of
my cartoons were domestic cartoons, dealing with the family—momma, poppa, and
the kids. The main difference between young persons and old you can see in the
neck: older people’s heads come right down to their shoulders; younger people
have necks.”
With a husband and two young
children under foot, Swords quickly realized that she needed the discipline of
a regular daily regimen in order to produce enough cartoons to keep her agent
occupied. Her routine is based upon a simple rule: Never do housework while the
children are at school.
She began the practice when her
youngest son entered nursery school. “The moment he’d leave the house,” she
said, “I’d take my coffee to the work table and get busy.”
She spent the morning writing, then
read a little, then worked on cartoons in the afternoon. Household chores began
after school. “Housework doesn’t take a brain,” she said. “I could do that and
talk to my children at the same time.”
Her routine didn’t leave much time
for fancy cooking on a daily basis, but Swords made up for it with a “cook in”
on most Saturdays. (Swords added “most” to the sentence while this piece was in
its penultimate state, saying, “I sound so darned organized, and I wasn’t that
good at it!”) On Saturday, she’d make six times an average family favorite
recipe and freeze what wasn’t eaten that night. Over a period of weekends, she
accumulated a variety of frozen favorite meals that she’d thaw out on weekdays.
It was a maneuver that made great sense to her: “You go through all the work
and make enough for only one meal, and—whoosh!—it’s all gone at once. My way,
there’s something left for all that effort.”
Even with the discipline of her
workday, Swords’ output was relatively small. She spent as much as two hours
drawing and inking a cartoon; her weekly batches were 5-7 cartoons. She once
described her method as follows:
“First I draw on a tracing pad, a
difficult action shot may find one figure redrawn with additional tracing
papers; a complicated background may be drawn on another sheet of tracing paper
placed over the first. All the principles of good art are basic to cartooning,
and most cartoonists are wonderful artists. In cartoons, the artist must be
selective. The sketches may be detailed, but there is an art in selecting which
details to draw.
“In transferring the sketch via
light table to good quality typing paper, I often push the people closer together.
One of my greatest faults has always been scattering the people too far apart,
hating to overlap them—which is one reason I still work with tracing paper: it
enables me to correct this tendency. I transfer in pencil since I can’t do a
good job this way in ink, and then I do my inking with a No. 1 Winsor Newton
brush. I do not take one cartoon through from start to finish but always work
on the week’s batch at once, first in pencil, then transferring, and finally
inking, the inking being done in the morning when I am freshest.”
Eventually, Swords abandoned the
brush. “Recently, I’ve been using a flair pen—terrible if you want to use
water. I loved the brush—thick and thin. But when it’s reduced a lot, you lose
the thin. And when you haven’t been working a lot, doing it every day, you lose
that perfect touch of thick and thin. So the flair pen is fine. I like it.”
Shortly after selling her first
cartoons, Swords started selling humorous text pieces, too. Some ideas were
simply too complex to be adequately conveyed by cartoons.
“My pieces were like those Erma
Bombeck does—or, before her, Jean Kerr,” Swords said. “A number of them were
sold to the Christian Science Monitor and
to the Denver Post Sunday magazine, Empire. The nice thing about doing short
humor pieces is that I could illustrate them, too. Sometimes I got more money
from the illustrations for my own articles than I did for the writing.”
I asked: “To what extent were you
made conscious of the fact that as a woman you were either doing something you
shouldn’t do or that you were unusual because you were doing it?”
“Constantly,” she said. “Still. One
of the issues of Cartoonist PROfiles that Jud Hurd sent me has an article in which the writer says that only one or
two percent of the cartoonists are women.”
I said, “I think of women
cartoonists in the twenties—like Alice Harvey, for example, who was printed in Life, and Judge and even The New Yorker—”
”And the one with the dog.”
“Oh, yes—Edwina Dumm,” I said. “Who,
by the way, was the first female political cartoonist.”
Swords corrected me: “No, I don’t
believe so. I have a book put out by the University of New Mexico Press by
Alice Sheppard. Called Cartooning for
Suffrage, it traces the political cartooning done by women way back in the
1800s. In abolitionist newspapers, for example. Edwina may have been the first
woman political cartoonist in a regular paper.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Her paper was a
weekly, the Monitor, in Columbus,
Ohio, near where she grew up. And then she went on to do the comic strip, Cap Stubbs and Tippie. And the amazing
thing was that she did her political cartooning even before women could
vote—before 1920. But I’m thinking of people like Alice Harvey, Ethel Hays,
Mary Petty, Dorothy McKay—who appeared in Esquire magazine from the first issue on, I think. And Mary Petty who appeared there
regularly. They were drawing for a male audience, even.”
Swords nodded. “Most of them
employed the male stereotype. And who was the one who did her pictures in
color?”
“Barbara Shermund,” I said.
“Yes, yes. Hers were gold-diggers,
dames—amateur prostitutes.”
“But these women cartoonists were
making a living, even in a male-dominated field,” I said. “They were being
published.”
“Yes, that’s true,” she said. Then
she smiled. “At one time, I sold general cartoons to some of the men’s
magazines, the girlies—until I went into a newsstand one day and looked at
one.”
I laughed: “And then you decided you
didn’t want to be there!”
She laughed, too: “I said this is
not for me.”
Turning to another subject, I asked
about her reception when she and her agent, two women, called on New York
editors. “Did the temperature of the room change?”
“Very, very, very much so,” she
said. “I remember one editor who shuffled through my cartoons then tossed them
on the desk and said, ‘You gal cartoonists are all alike—you don’t attack and
hit hard enough!’ In the same vein, I met cartoonist-publisher Roger Price in
Denver one time, and after looking at my work, he said, ‘Isn’t there anything
you hate?’
“Aside from stereotypes,” she went
on, “—or perhaps along with them—men seem to prefer more aggression, hostility.
I wouldn’t come up with very sexist or hostile humor. I don’t really like hate
humor. Yet my work would not seem funny to many male editors, and I wouldn’t
know the main reason. So how come, as a woman, I sold at all? Never hugely, but
some.
“For one thing, I often avoided the
stereotype problem because my cartoons were usually about kids,” she said. “But
not always. I hate to admit it—even to myself—but I followed some of the same
sexist stereotypes. I used gags sent to me by a gag writer, and I chose them
because they looked like the kind of cartoon gag I often saw published. Things
like the parasite wife who surprises her husband—‘I got you something for your
birthday that I’ve been wanting for a long time.’ Or the dumb bride who burbles
to her husband, ‘Do you like the steak? I boiled it myself.’
“Would it be funny if the new bride
and groom are looking at their apartment for the first time and when he sees
the kitchen, he says, ‘What’s this?’”
I said: “The image of women in
cartoons seems to me to be a terribly knotty problem just on the face of it.
But as you were talking about cartoon women—as soon as they get married they
became three feet taller and a hundred pounds heavier—I was thinking about
‘Father Knows Best’ on television, whose wife was very attractive. The father
may have known best, but it was really the wife who ran the family. Dagwood
Bumstead isn’t the head of that household; Blondie is the only sensible one in
the house. She is occasionally portrayed as being a little empty-headed, but
there’s a common sense streak there, too.”
“I’d like to say something about
Dagwood,” Swords interrupted. “I think he’s a good example of why we should
look for a cartoon’s secondary target. First, of course,
he’s the butt, tricked by Blondie—poor, dumb, Dagwood, the epitome of the
thirties loser, but he comes out as always the good guy. And what about
Blondie, who ‘wins’? It’s usually money, not to buy groceries or clothes for a
growing family, but hats—for herself. She is still the gold-digger she was before
she trapped that ‘wealthy playboy’ Dagwood. Pretty, but a conniving cheat, as
well as an airhead who can talk two hours to a wrong number. She is not a
likable person—the source of the Japanese stereotype of overbearing American
women who run everything. Now that she has a job—cooking! —she has stopped
tricking Dagwood out of money.”
“But, still,” I flailed on, “Blondie
isn’t stupid. Nor is the mother in ‘Father Knows Best.’ So women aren’t always
the victims or the butt of the joke in marriage. These examples may be the
exceptions that prove the rule, of course, but what I’m trying to do here is
not to defend the status quo but to explore the idea that in a visual humorous
medium like this, we’re employing stereotypical images all the time,
perpetuating whatever the culture is committed to. How do we get out of that?”
“It takes somebody to start
changing,” Swords said. “Something like ‘Grace Under Fire.’ Do you like that tv
show? I am impressed with the fact that she does not do easy answers; she does
not do the stereotypical thing. She’s far more real. ‘Frasier’ is different,
too; so is ‘Seinfeld.’ I suppose it will have to be things like this that will
make the changes.”
“But,” I said, “how do you
communicate in a culture like this, which is rife with stereotypes, without
using stereotypes? Let me give you an example. I was talking to Sergio
Aragones, who does pantomime cartoons—no words. That’s his specialty. He said
if he did a cartoon in which there was a female doctor, he would dress her like
a doctor—in white uniform—and she would automatically be taken to be the nurse.
Our culture predetermines that response. Women are nurses. Not doctors. That’s
the stereotype. We are limited by the stereotypical vehicle that cartoonists
must use under certain circumstances in order to convey fully the idea. So how
do we escape that?”
“It’s slow,” Swords said, “but you
know, it is changing. I remember an announcer on TV once saying, This is just
the thing—every man and woman should have one. And I let out a yell—Hooray!
Finally, they’re including us. We’re part of the world.”
“Still,” I said, “the problem with
stereotypical images is very complex. It’s difficult to avoid stereotypes—and
it’s just as difficult, actually, to do certain kinds of cartoons without
working in stereotypes. If you’re going to show a woman whose essential work is
in the home, where are you going to show her doing that? It’s probably going to
be in the kitchen. If you are going to show a tyrant of a boss, what does he
look like and where is he going to be? He’s going to be behind his desk,
towering over somebody else—probably standing up and blowing off steam.”
“Why not have a woman executive?”
Swords asked.
“Yes, a good question,” I said. “But
my point is that there are stereotypical images that are part of the visual
language of our society.”
“Okay,” Swords said, “the woman in
the kitchen should be dressed in street clothes, office clothes, because more
than half of all wives and women work outside the home. So she comes home and
she cooks dinner. She may still be wearing her hat.”
I shifted the subject somewhat: “Are
there cartoons or comic strips that are doing a creditable job these days of
steering clear of stereotypes?”
“Sally
Forth by Greg Howard is wonderful,” she said. “I think that’s terrific.
Lynn Johnston—hers is a different kind entirely. I think her natural humor is
very good. But Sally Forth is funny,
and it certainly presents everybody’s point of view but more closely the women.
I sent Howard a fan letter, saying how much I enjoyed it. To have the best
feminist cartoon being done by a man is impressive. He said, ‘I’ve got a wife
and two teenage girls who keep me honest.’”
Some don’t have that kind of
support, though, Swords told me. “I’ve had conversations by mail with Cathy
Guisewite, and she said she cannot make wise cracks in her strip Cathy. She cannot have Cathy answer
back, be clever, be funny—do any put-downs—because the syndicate says that’s
not like Cathy. So Cathy comes out looking like the teenage cartoon girls they
used to have who want nothing but dates and dresses and diets. The only
difference is that the character holds a responsible job. She couldn’t possibly
hold if she were really that nutty. And they phased out her feminist friend—who
was a member of NOW. And the two often did things together. But her friend has
got married and had a child and changed entirely. No more feminist material
there at all.”
Swords is a charter member of the
Denver NOW chapter, which started in the summer of 1970.
“When they were getting it started,”
she said, “I knew I had to stand up for what I believed in. I was a traditional
married woman with children, and I wrote and did cartoons, but I was not a
rabble-rouser—until I got into it.”
I laughed: “And then you became a
rabble-rouser!”
She laughed, too: “We worked within
the system. We were trying to change the system and bring about equality for
women. My sister thinks what I do is fine, but it’s difficult for her to see
it. Sometimes. Sometimes not. We were at a jumping frog contest in a little
town near here, one of those things that the junior chamber of commerce puts
on. And these young fellows were out there—‘C’mon, get yourself a frog and name
it after your mother-in-law and jump the old bat.’ And my sister turned to me
indignantly, ‘Well—say something; you’re the feminist—say something!’”
Swords laughed. “Well, if I said
something then, it wouldn’t have done me a bit of good, and I’d have been
hooted down by all those men. But whenever something like that happens, I try
to reverse it. In this case, I waited and then went up to the young man when no
one was within earshot and said, ‘You know, I was interested in how you did
that, but wouldn’t it have been just as funny if you’d said, ‘Name it after
your father-in-law and jump the old goat.’ And he understood right away. ‘Oh,’
he said, ‘I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it.’ And he didn’t.”
“There’s a whole lot of unmeaning
meaning that goes on,” I said.
“Right, and I think it’s a good idea
to speak up.”
Swords objects to the idea that
women have no sense of humor. Without a sense of humor, she says, the average
wife and mother simply wouldn’t make it. “Women have to have a good sense of
humor, or they couldn’t live with men. Or with children!”
But the way to test the
proposition—and at the same time to see if men have a sense of humor when they
are the butt of the joke—is to practice reversal. And Swords had one great
success with the old switcheroo.
She’d sold several cartoons to
Robert Marshall at Changing Times,
including a series on back-to-school-night. “Then I came up with a new notion
for the changing times that the magazine was chronicling,” she said, “—a woman
political candidate. I proposed the idea to him, and he wrote back, saying,
‘The board talked it over and didn’t think it sounded very good, but if you
think it can work, send me some ideas.’
“I liked that,” she said. “He was
giving me credit for having a sense of humor. And he also was giving me credit
for knowing what I was doing, for thinking that I had something—and obviously,
as it turned out, I did—but the men on his board hadn’t thought it could be
funny.
“Well, in two days,” she continued,
“I had a hundred and forty-nine wonderful ideas—every one of them a beautiful
switch. I sent them in, and Marshall wrote back, ‘You really did it.’ And in
the October 1972 issue, they gave me a two-page spread—my first; and three
colors, another first for them also. I made more on that, but to me it was
important because it was where my feelings and my cartooning came together. I
felt I was making a difference by forcing people to recognize the
ridiculousness of the objections to women candidates, helping the great
increase in women elected that year. I saw Pat Schroeder the night the magazine
came out. She told me she spoke at a Kiwanis Club that noon, where one of the
men told her, ‘You’ll never believe what’s in Changing Times today!’ After the election, I wrote Marshall to tell
him my woman candidate won, too—‘and for a bigger job than just the city
council!’”
“We made a story out of the
cartoons,” she said. “I was having her run for the state legislature. But they
wanted her to run for something not quite so big—city council. And I said,
‘Okay—but she’s going to win!’ Almost every cartoon is a complete reversal. One
of them is a man and his wife watching tv, and the man says, ‘I suppose you’ll
vote for her just because she’s a woman, when we know she’s running against a
Brother Elk.’”
A year or so later, Swords participated in another overtly feminist project. This was the Male Chauvinist Pig calendar for 1974. She worked with two other Denver residents, Robert and Peggy Hurley, who had produced a similar calendar the year before. The idea for the calendar was born in Robert’s classroom at a local community college: in discussing the discrimination faced by blacks and chicanos, he found his students didn’t understand that women are also discriminated against until he asked them to list instances of discrimination in their own lives. Their examples were so telling, he felt, that he decided to use them on a calendar as a daily reminder.
In developing the calendar for 1974,
Robert worked with his wife and Swords, and they initially came up with about
150 ideas, which they struggled to trim to the desired dozen. Sold throughout
Denver, the calendar attracted considerable attention in both broadcast and
print media. The Women’s Political Caucus used it as a fund-raiser, and also
sold it through an ad in MS magazine.
The originals were auctioned off at a New York fund raiser.
“Not all the cartoons are directed
at men,” Swords observed at the time the calendar was published. “We are also
against women who are destructive in some sense. We don’t like men or women who
exploit the liberation movement or idiot women who allow themselves to be
exploited.
“Humor is a personal thing,” she
said, “and some people won’t like all of the cartoons. Some people don’t want
to be presented with reality. This is a very personal thing for us. We made a
statement and we stood behind it, and we didn’t just follow the stereotypes.”
It’s pretty clear that Swords was
never a stereotype. Even her cartoon sales didn’t produce a typical response.
“When I was a gag writer,” she
recalled, “I thought the greatest thrill would be to have a gag of mine in the Saturday Evening Post—written and drawn
by me. But when it happened, it was nothing. Oh, I was thrilled, but there was
no great clamoring at my door, brass bands and crowds yelling, Author, author!
In fact, when I would casually drag my published cartoonist status into the
conversation, the listener usually responded by saying, ‘Oh? That’s nice. Say,
my little boy Donald can trace Mickey Mouse just perfectly—you should see.’”
She chuckled. “People who knew that
I had a cartoon in a particular magazine would phone and ask what page it was
on and what name I used to sign my work. But people don’t ever really look at
the names of the cartoonists. You can sign your cartoons, but nobody reads
those names. Except for Vip. He was the one. Everyone knew him. And so when
someone asked me how I signed my cartoons, I said, ‘Vip.’”
--oo0oo--
Excerpts from the precis for Betty
Swords’ Humor Power
*
The male images of women created by cartoonists were accepted as the truth
about women. For example: The woman driver is the safest driver, according to
the National Safety Council—but not to the National Cartoonists Society. To
them, she’s the quintessential “dumb driver,” an idea so set in the concrete of
comic tradition that it’s become a humor shorthand: when we see a cartoon of a
woman driver, we know automatically that she’s a dumb driver. Just ask a man
which he believes—the Cartoonists Society or the Safety Council?
*
Humor’s Role in History. Man creates society in his own image. Our unique
culture, and our early tall tale humor, grew from feelings of inferiority—to
the British and to the awesome wilderness. The British called the colonists
“uncouth savages.” America’s first settlers couldn’t claim culture, so they
made fun of it. We still ridicule the “eggheads” and the “absent-minded
professors” who, supposedly, lack the “gumption.” Glasses remain the humor
symbol for a wimp: he reads! The arts remain suspect as a haven for wimps—or
worse. Early Americans chose for the hero of their early tall tale humor that
boozing, brawling, boasting, wenching, anti-book-larnin’ son-of-a-gun, the Frontiersman.
He lives on in John Wayne and Rambo, and in a president who admires them both.
In Funnyland, no Real Man attends a concert or ballet. And President Reagan
felt it necessary to note that his ballet-dancing son was really “all man.”
*
Humor helped establish stereotypes. Humor perpetuates these always derogatory
images once they are set in the concrete of comic tradition. Even social
scientists accepted the black stereotype of the lazy, thieving, stupid “coon”
set by minstrel show jokes. Stereotypes are wonderfully useful in a pluralistic
society: you don’t have to actually know a black or a Jew to know what they’re
really like. What stereotypes are, of course, are lies, invented to keep
certain people “in their place.” Ideas, as well as people, are the victims of
stereotypes when their advocates are ridiculed as “kooks” or “crazies.”
Stereotypical jokelore becomes folklore and affects our attitudes and even our
laws.
*
Our history helps explain why women are the chief target of American humor:
women represented culture and civilization to our tall tale hero—the enemy of
his freedom—while allowing every insecure male to feel superior to someone.
*
Men are victims, too, of the stereotype they chose for themselves: that
brawling, boozing, wenching, anti-intellectual frontiersman. ... No other
stereotype is so rigorously policed by jokes and ridicule--and it’s a killer,
inflicting tremendous emotional and physical damage on the men who can’t live
up to this rough-tough image, and on those who try to rise above it.
*
It’s humor which perpetuates the myths that deny minorities dignity and
self-respect. So it was vital that minorities develop a private coping humor to
stand the pain, to put down their persecutors—and so to raise themselves.
*
Feminist humor hopes to make changes by bonding with people, instead of
laughing at them: the pick-up instead of the put-down.
*
When you’re the victim of jokes, don’t just die there. Do something. Responses
range from simple assertiveness to aikido, a kind of verbal karate which turns
the thrust of the humor weapon back on the wielder.
*
The larger the audience, the more conservative the humor, so newspaper funnies
also reflect a static status quo made up of stereotypical humor myths—as does
the press in general, newspapers and mass market magazines. Humorists are
mostly merchandisers of the status quo; they must uphold the values of their
audiences, especially if they’re large ones. (Political cartoonists and
columnists are allowed more freedom). And yet, humorists are usually
dissenters, who see the world slightly askew and ask us to share their laughter
at its oddities.
*
If humor has the power to help shape society—and given that our society is one
of growing violence and alienation—can we not alter and improve society, at
least our corner of it, by changing our humor? Only when we recognize humor’s power—for good as well as for evil—can we
control that power for positive purposes in both our personal and professional
lives.
Too
late to make the published article, Swords me this note:
It
suddenly occurred to me that I’d left out something of great importance tome:
the validation of my theories on humor. A professor Browning read a precis of
mine on humor power while in Denver on a speaking engagement and asked me to
come to Washington, D.C. and deliver a paper on it the next year. He was
presiding over the International Conference on Humor in D.C. in 1983. Another
paper of mine was accepted for delivery in 1986 at the ICH at the University of
Arizona in Tempe. My subject was the damage man-made humor can do to men, too,
by establishing such a tough-rough stereotype that’s hard to live up to.
I was asked to speak about humor’s
role in so many areas—marriage, violence, minorities, plus examining each
minorities’ humor—that I felt I had enough material for a college course. I
applied to three colleges and was accepted by all three! Later, a fourth. Two
were credit courses; two, adult courses. That was more validation, that helped
make up for a book that didn’t get published. I had a good agent who was
gung-ho about it, but it was a ‘mid-market’ type book when the publishers were
only buying Best Sellers. I did interest a textbook publisher, but he required
an incredible amount of work: pages of questions, including all the courses
that might use the book, and what
publications did their professors subscribe to? Maybe clowns always want to
be taken seriously.
In
her last communique to me, dated April 21, 1996, Swords wrote: Presently I’m writing a book about our wild and crazy
Siamese-type cat we got from the Animal Shelter, called What a Difference a Stray Makes. I plan to illustrate it when I get
the Siamese right. It’s too bad he’s not a Persian—I did some good ones
once—but that would be a very different story. After six years in Midland, and
one-and-a-half years in Amarillo, the Swords are comfortably settled in Denver
since 1957. And I hope I never have to move again!
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