The Disneyland Memorial Orgy Effect

About once a year, I've noticed that a series of commercials Jim Henson made for Wilkins Coffee in the 1950s/60s make the rounds online. They star a duo of early Muppet characters aptly named Wilkins and Wontkins, and typically feature the former inflicting some extreme form of violence on the latter for expressing his dislike of the brand (he's shot him with a gun and out of a cannon, threatened him with a razor blade and a guillotine, and impaled him with an arrow among many other suitable punishments for his beverage preference). Quite often, though, the people sharing these commercials on the various social media channels mistakenly identify the Wilkins character as an early version of Kermit the Frog. It's an understandable error-- Wilkins sort of looks like a primordial Kermit, and Henson performed both characters using a very similar voice. Nevertheless, the fact is that they are not one and the same (one major tell is that Wilkins is orange, whereas Kermit is typically associated with being... some other color). 

That said, I have a theory that this confusion is actually a pretty major factor in why people are so consistently fascinated with these ads: many viewers genuinely believe they are watching Official™ early Jim Henson skits where Kermit the Frog is repeatedly murdering another Muppet. This is completely incongruous with the kind-hearted, family-friendly Kermit we all know and love and people just get a kick out of that kind of dichotomy. This is an area of humor that has fascinates me, and I'm not entirely sure why. I'd like to discuss this style of comedy in the form of some scattered, stray thoughts on why I think it resonates with people. I've deemed it the Disneyland Memorial Orgy effect.

Your first thought might be, what the hell is the "Disneyland Memorial Orgy"? It's this:

Click on the image for a better-resolution look at it. Or don't. I'll understand if you don't.

Does that answer your question? No? Raises several more questions? Fair enough. What you have just looked at was a poster illustrated by Mad Magazine/Marvel Comics legend Wally Wood for a 1967 issue of the satire magazine The Realist. The title and overall bleak tone of the proceedings depicted therein suggest it was inspired by Walt Disney's death the prior year, and Realist founder/editor Paul Krassner's commentary on the piece confirms my suspicions:

After Walt Disney died, there was a rumor that his body had been frozen, but actually it was cremated. Somehow I had expected Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and the whole gang to attend the funeral, with Goofy delivering the eulogy and the Seven Dwarfs serving as pallbearers. Disney’s death occurred a few years after Time magazine’s famous “God Is Dead” cover, and it occurred to me that Disney had served as Intelligent Designer to that whole stable of imaginary characters now mourning in a state of suspended animation.

Disney had been *their* Creator, and he had repressed all their baser instincts, but now that he had departed, they could finally shed their cumulative inhibitions and participate together in an unspeakable Roman binge, to signify the crumbling of an empire. I contacted Wally Wood--who had illustrated the first piece I sold to Mad magazine--“If Comic Strip Characters Answered Those Little Ads in the Back of Comic Books”--and, without mentioning any specific details, I told him my general notion of a memorial orgy at Disneyland to be published in The Realist. He accepted the assignment and presented me with a magnificently degenerate montage.

Not a particularly insightful or thought-provoking piece of satire, but I am only human and have to admit that I think it's sort of funny. Sure, not the funniest thing I've ever seen, but look at Pluto's face as he pisses on that portrait! He knows he's not supposed to be doing that!

This brings me to my overall point: that poster by far became the most well-known thing to come from The Realist, to the point where its infamy seemed to pretty quickly outpace that of its source. It became a very widely-bootlegged piece of art (more often than not rendered in neon day-glo colors and taped to the walls of countless college dorms, particularly in its counter-cultural "screw the system" late-1960s heyday), and I feel reasonably certain in saying its reach at this point has stretched so far and wide that surely a good deal of its admirers have never heard of The Realist, or possibly even Wally Wood. It seems to belong to the world now. It's in the same vein as that unlicensed bumper sticker of Calvin (of "and Hobbes" fame) taking a leak, which may be the best-known example of the Disneyland Memorial Effect. 

What is that effect?

Like I said about Pluto's activities in the piece, "he's not supposed to be doing that". We seem to really enjoy jokes that involve a family-friendly fictional character doing something decidedly un-family-friendly. We recognize, on some level, that this is "wrong", that the characters are not meant to be engaging in such behaviors. I'm not a psychologist, and I don't even have any grand thesis I'd like to make here, I'm merely ruminating. I've always been especially interested in parody as a vehicle for satire, and the fact that this seems to be one of the most enduring forms of it-- despite being parody's equivalent of junk food-- intrigues me. And like I said, I can't lie! I enjoy it too! (Well, sometimes. I have my limits; not so much what offends me but moreso what fails to make me laugh. I'm an easy audience, but I still have a few brain cells that work. You've gotta at least meet their requirements.)

I think it's a part of our childhood that we never fully shed. If a parent or a teacher or any kind of authority figure scolded us not to do something, doing that very thing immediately became all the more attractive... especially if it was considered inappropriate in some way. Perhaps this is why two of the most prime examples of the effect that I've mentioned thus far involve urinating; it fits into that whole "rude" area of our senses of humour that toilet and sex jokes reside in.

In fact, the earliest example of this effect that I can recall encountering really illustrates this point. If you were born in the 1990s or early-2000s like I was, there is a good chance you might recall hearing dirty parodies of the Barney The Dinosaur theme song being chanted on the elementary school playground. There is one I can still quote in full, despite probably not having heard it since I was about six years old:

Barney is a dinosaur from our imagination,

Big, fat, and filled with crap

And full of constipation

This barely even makes sense! Have you ever heard the phrase "full of constipation" outside of this song? I certainly haven't. But in grade one, this was religiously quoted by me and my classmates as though it was Who's on First. 

Part of this phenomena, I think, comes with the need to feel as though we are "above" whatever we are mocking. Family-friendly entertainment falls into a juvenile and typically innocent category, and we are too cynical and jaded to let that fly. That was certainly the case back in grade one; me and my friends had just become too old for Barney and his "I love you, you love me" crapola. We were moving into darker, more radical territories with our entertainment. By which I mean SpongeBob SquarePants, but it might as well have been William S. Burroughs the way we were carrying on. I think we wanted to demonstrate that we were no longer babies who would give Barney the time of day, thus we proved our maturity by singing about his bowel movements.

(Truth be told, though, even when I was in the target audience for Barney I remember being bored by it. Was always more of a Sesame Street kid. Oscar the Grouch was singing songs about how much he enjoyed wallowing in garbage, which I guess seemed more stimulating than "I love you, you love me".)

Theoretically this sort of mindset would stop around that age, but the whole reason I feel this is
noteworthy and merits writing about is that it very much does not. No, the adult world has plenty of room for the Disneyland Memorial Orgy effect. How many Family Guy cutaway gags can you think of that entail some children's cartoon character doing something "adult"? What about SNL sketches, South Park bits, Mad Magazine and National Lampoon articles, viral videos online? Hell, shows like Robot Chicken and Drawn Together essentially built their entire empires (the former admittedly much more successfully) on more or less this one idea. Not only does the world like this kind of comedy, it can be incredibly profitable!

Lastly, when you think about all this, have you noticed something? That one specific target tends to bear the brunt of the effect's wrath? You might have already guessed what I'm talking about, but if not I'll give you a hint: what did I call this effect?

The Walt Disney Company far and away seems to be the biggest magnet for this type of humor. There's the aforementioned poster, there's the notorious case of the Air Pirates, there are tons of short films created to lampoon the House of Mouse such as Uncle Walt or Short Subject (neither of which are particularly good, alas), there's been an entire Bansky exhibition... just to name a few and get the ball rolling. Think of the usual suspects for the effect that I mentioned two paragraphs ago; it's quite likely that off the top of your head you can name several instances of each of them having a go at Disney. Why is that?

There are two answers, in my opinion. The first is one I've already mentioned, the need to feel "above" something. The conventional wisdom is that Disney deals in fantasy and escapism. They're known for presenting idealized fantasy worlds that are friendly and squeaky-clean and profitable. This is perhaps a reductive viewpoint to take, but I think most of us can agree this is the image the word "Disney" conjures in the average person's mind. Disney presents us with stories that sometimes ring false tonally, of happily-ever-after. Out here in the real world, we are depressed and bitter and don't have squirrels and birds helping us with our household chores. I think many of us tend to feel that we are spitting in the eye of all this and bringing Mickey Mouse and co. back to cold, harsh reality when we laugh at a gag about him and Minnie having sex or what-have-you.

The other aspect of it is that Disney is everywhere and is everything. They run the western world and have a vested interest in just about everywhere else. It is a billion-dollar enterprise that owns so much of what we see. A number of the parodies I've mentioned emerged from some aspect of the counter-culture (Air Pirates, Realist, the short films) and this is no coincidence. If you want to stick it to The Man, there are few men who make a better Man that Walter Elias Disney. Speaking truth to power is one of the core ideals of satire, and wearing a t-shirt with Jimmy Cricket smoking a bong is sort of like the unseemly slacker bastard child of that concept. It doesn't really accomplish anything or move anybody the same way a well-constructed piece of satire might, but the odd indulgence can feel good. Perhaps we like to imagine the ghost of Walt Disney seeing said t-shirt and doing an enraged double take, shaking his fist at us mere mortals from Cartoonist Heaven. 

For the record, I have many positive feelings towards Disney, per se. As a cartoonist and a fan of film in general, they have made several contributions to the world that I appreciate. Walt Disney himself is possibly the most fascinating historical figure to me, personally. He was deeply flawed (and no, he wasn't a nazi sympathizer, quite the opposite actually... his flaws laid elsewhere) but still managed to do lots of good in his lifetime, both from the standpoint of innovation and of art. That said, Disney the company is something that I feel no particular affection for, and why would I? It's a business, not a person or a piece of art. In fact, it's a very sleazy business that has engaged in tons of practices I detest. Walt Disney himself was directly responsible for some of this, notably his backwards view on unions. It would be pointless to deny this, and even more pointless to defend the honor of something as intangible as a corporation. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is my favorite movie, but I don't feel any inclination to cheer on the company that owns it as it gobbles up smaller companies on its path to media monopoly-hood and lays off swarms of workers in favor of trying to push Gen-AI bullcrap on the world.