Session from April, 18: The Affair Laerte (1): The Pirates of Tietê

Mutations of Laughter (LLC 591) 

Class of Apr. 18, 2022

The Laerte Affair (1): The Pirates of Tietê

We have ended our last session considering the cases of artists at Circo editorial house as illustrations of a second generation of modernity in Brazilian graphic humor, following the footsteps of the kind of style developed earlier by journals like O Pasquim: in that perspective, although being similar to this previous effort, in terms of a relative – or even more pronounced – independence regarding partisan leftist politics after the process of regaining democratic liberties post-dictatorship, the case of artists under Circo reflected a more radical sense of the social criticism already outlined in the previous generation of cartoonists.  

And as we explored the particular examples of Angeli and Laerte Coutinho, we could finally get at the point in which the appeal of their works resulted in a massive cultural recognition of this sort of social satire – with the resulting factor of allowing a short-lived industry of humorous publications that came with this second wave of artists, during the 1980’s and part of the 1990’s.  

In particular, we started to pinpoint the aspects in which the cultural evaluation of these works implied a sort of analytical approach more grounded in their poetic foundations rather than in considerations about the political circumstances which might inform the power of their satire. In other words, we outlined in Laerte´s and Angeli’s profiles of graphic humor those aspects that allowed us to bring to the fore those aspects of drawing style and narrative techniques employed as parts of their artistic programs.

As a first stance of such a poetics of contemporary Brazilian graphic humor, one might first of all identify the thematic turns characterizing the aim of satire – as something initially less connected with the political particularities of Brazilian realities of post-dictatorship era: it does not mean that one could encounter such engagement with the process of redemocratization, but that it is usually more connected to editorial cartoons in daily newspapers than on the side of gags in daily strips of these same publications.

There is a sort of satirical commentary directed at social issues which is more characteristic of this production, in a more pronounced manner than one already discovered in the previous generations of visual satirists. In the common aspects of these two creators, one encounters those problems correlated to contemporary urban realities and dramas – mostly derived from the experiences of nightlife, in the wake of topics coming from the traditions of North American underground and alternative comics.

What differentiates Angeli and Laerte, we also have seen previously, is the approach under which those thematic choices are properly performed in their respective styles: in terms of a kind of mood underlying their perspectives, we have seen that Angeli imposes an almost documental profile to his portrayals of characters like punks, losers, and wannabes, as these reflect his own experiences of Brazilian urban nightlife – such as his hometown São Paulo – whereas Laerte approaches it from a more allegorical or metaphorical perspective – especially through his most famous Pirates of Tietê.

But also other features make for these differences, to an important degree: most of all, the drawing styles, in which Angeli’s indebt to artists like Robert Crumb are sufficiently pronounced, in contrast to Laerte’ s more personal facture; in more specific description, one might characterize a stronger charge in the plasticity of drawing in Angeli, in difference to the lightness of Laerte’s more linear style.

But the most important contrast between these two figures is certainly related to the aspects of narrativity they employ for their strips: albeit directed towards the same episodic economy of a swift eventfulness for each daily strips (in continuity with the most important canon of the genre), one senses a more nuanced sensibility of Laerte to the range of possible effects derived from his own choices, in comparison to Angeli’s particular sense of humorous storytelling.

In that way, Angeli’s perspective is that of a more straightforward sense of episodic closure, so to speak - somehow derived from the fact that his specific humor is largely structured upon the ways in which he constructs characters as the source of his gags, and the fact that it involves that sense of urban typologies we have previously mentioned as part of his humorous poetics. In that regard, Laerte’s perspective of construction is generally aimed at the same sorts of effects, employing a similar episodic structure of traditional graphic humor of daily strips – with the considerable difference in the source of his strorytelling techniques, again as a result frm the fact that he structures his satire in a more allegorical composition.

Albeit being both narrative universes rooted in the urban realities of São Paulo, these two artists address it differently, as we have already noticed: Angeli’s characters are a product of Brazilian urban nightlife realities, whereas Laerte’s pirates are a figuration of more elusive aspects of these same contexts. In their own testimonies on each other’s work, one notices how these distinctions emerge and result in their respective stylistic traces: this more straightforward type of narrative construction in Angeli results in a sort of dense, almost violent kind of humorous building up, specially in the first period of his works with fictional characters like Rê Bordosa, Bob Cuspe, and the Escrotinhos.

 

 

Angeli, Os Skrotinhos

 

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Angeli, Rê Bordosa

Angeli, Bob Cuspe
 

Laerte’s sense of funniness, on the other hand, derives from the fact that the Pirates of Tietê are constituted as vessels for the expression of all sorts of repressed social perversions, only allowable by their disruptive conducts, but eventually affecting the normal people around these characters. And this aspect of his allegorical foundations for producing visual humor will be at the foundation of the ways in which he will later produce some major turns in his sense of satirical commentary about contemporary costumes.

For the moment, let us take a deeper look at the ways in which Laerte’s work is particularly structured, from a standpoint of its humorous poetics: for even when departing from this relative distancing from any sense of a more realistic character composition, his more typical episodic characteristics do not evade from the canons of graphic humor, in the sense we have already discussed in previous sessions of the course.

As we have already seen with the example of the episode of the chief of the Pirates ordering a shot of rum at the bar, most of the gags are structured, first and foremost to the result of some sort of incongruence – either through the ways in which words spoken are understood or not, or in terms of the physicality of the characters’ conduct, in the ways they express their psychological, moral, or merely volitive behaviour. Let us consider a similar example of this universe, in a rather similar situation:

 

Laerte, Piratas do Tietê, 1999

From the outset, we can apprehend the global meaning of this episode, in its abbreviated and self-conclusive dimension, as a characteristic of the spatio-temporal schemes of the narrativity proper to gag: there is an almost telegraphic aspect of its sequential construction, given by a minimum interval that we suppose to exist between its presentation and its conclusion; the episodic modification that characterizes it goes almost unnoticed, due to the way in which several of its elements are presented in the sequence (for example, the permanently invariable unity of the scenario and the objects of the scene); in the sense that the temporal passage instructs the effects proper to the comic of the narration, we can see the bartender's arm serving the drink to the pirate in the first frame, the discreet mobility of the latter when asking for something in the second frame and the unexpected reaction of one of the objects scene, which ends the story.

This short narrative also illustrates an aspect specific to the genre of graphic humor and which is defined as a topical structure of the stories narrated there: it is about an “any situation”, an ordinary action within which the elements that will invest it erupt. of this grace proper to the comic: its “dramaturgy”, if we can define it that way, is characterized by the exhibition of a universe of living actions, but guided by an excessive sensorimotor mechanics (or here, by the equally mechanical character of permanence), suddenly shaken in its full continuity. This feature is an article of the genre and can be found in several other specimens, among which we highlight one of the best known:

 Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes (1985)

Another aspect of Laerte’s particular approach to a poetics of humor in comics is the mobilization of cultural universes of a vaster range, as a sort of leitmotiv for the production of incongruous episodes: in the case of this cartoonist, it reflects the complexities of his personal upbringing in music and literature – something that sets him apart in regards to his contemporaries, in the same measure of his alignment with longer artistic traditions, not only those ascribing him to the genres of laughter. In those cases, one might hint at how this allegorical use of character bringing in humorous narratives result in a somehow freer style for addressing satirical comments on social habits and behaviour.

 Laerte, Piratas do Tietê (2003)

Even so, it is worth questioning whether such an episodic structure of the visual gag justifies – just because of its periodic iterative aspect – the considerations I make about its admission as an “episodic unit” of graphic humor: on the one hand, it would be the case to consider whether the The reproductive periodicity of this elementary structure that we described above would be enough to characterize this assimilation of each episode to the status of a model of replications and of thematic dependence between each joke and its successive reiterations.

In this way, the strategy of identifying the gag with an “episodic unit” would require further supplements on our part: from the point of view of its semiotic constitution (or even, by reference to the textual procedures that configure its “poetics”), we could add a element of the articulation between such an episodic unit of the gag and certain conditions of its understanding that would imply a more extensive follow-up of the sequential evolution of comic situations, in certain stylistic and authorial universes of graphic humor.

Therefore, we would try to transcend the experience of laughter in the daily strips as something determined by the understanding of the episodes taken in isolation, but also as a variable of what the continued monitoring of this narrative universe would allow us to form as a condition of understanding about certain variables associated with characters, scenarios, motivations and types of actions represented in this fictional world. Moving from the gag to the series, I imagine that I can increase a little more the demand for aspects that make this episodic unit the functional correlate of the more extensive textual structure of graphic humor in the comic strips.

Moving towards the end of this argument about a more valuable heuristics of narrative poetics in Brazilian contemporary graphic humor, I suggest we turn up toa particular aspect of these simple pictorial storytelling pieces – in the ways they provide crucial insights on the rhythm patterns governing this sort of synthetic modes of graphic storytelling. This issue of the proper cadence of specific, characteristic episodes of narrative exposition in comics already motivated me on considering the discursive economies of humor - for instance typical of Hergé’s style.

In most of The Adventures of Tintin, the opening episodes present situations that are marked by a certain regularity of oppositions between iterations and strong accentuations of narrative eventfulness – something that defines the dynamics of an elementary episodic structure of daily newspaper strips (this being indeed the original media environment of the adventures of this young Belgian reporter).

Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin - The Land of Black Gold

Let us consider the opening sequence of Land of Black Gold: here we see the Thom(p)sons arriving at a gas station in their car. After refueling they continue their journey, singing along with a song on the radio. At the end of the sequence, they disappear in the white smoke of a sudden explosion. Considering the graphic structure of this first page of Land of Black Gold, we might analyze how these typical moments of an ordinary action (arriving at a gas station, refueling a car, and resuming a trip) are functionalized as preparatory moments for a further disjunction, by means of a purely mechanical connection between these segments.

The overall organization of this first page is guided by the narrative significance of this normality (which is precisely represented in the terms by which Barthes defines the function of catalysis). In the first tier of this page, this is exemplified by a metonymical presentation of the general setting of these actions (a gas pump taken as a partial sign of a gas station), immediately followed by a picture of the very gas station attendant who approaches to meet a client (whose arrival is indicated under the graphic signs representing the sound of a car horn). The three elements of the situation (the pump, the attendant, and the car with the detectives) are integrated only in the third frame of this tier, as a kind of completion of this first segment of the entire episode.

Given the seeming normalcy of these opening three panels, it is worth considering how exactly humor is extracted from departures from the everyday quality of these narrative representations of anodyne situations. Once presented in the routine of their lives, moving along right after having fueled their car, the Thom(p)sons are listening to a song on the car radio, a parody of “Boum!” by the French singer Charles Trenet. When they start improvising verses of the song, introducing further paraphrastic associations (they sing, “Boom,” when the car goes boom!”), a sudden explosion occurs, disrupting the normal development of the whole action. The graphic presentation of the sequence is presented by means of a feature proper to the tier, in the visual decomposition of movement for producing the very comedic effect of a gag.

Now, let us consider these very brief scenes by Laerte, representing situations that are structured upon the pace that governs the temporal measures between questions and answers: as the pirate demands his partners to wear ties as they enter the theatre, what we see are the decapitated heads of their victims with their ties on. The absence of any background in both panels, serving for the indication of the spatial unity of the action, transfers to the contents of the characters’ speech the force under which a sense of rhythmic succession will be developed for the episode. This redundancy between the swift dialogue between the leader and his colleagues, on one side, and the incongruous literalization of their obedience to his orders are the sources for the way in which it results in laughter.

 

Ilustração- Piratas (gravata)

In conclusion, these discursive and plastic matrices of rhythmic organization of visual gags are essential elements of a sort of ‘syntactic cell’, which structures the coherent episodic organization of these very segments: such rhythmic qualities of narrative eventfulness in visual jokes could also be expanded, in order to allow for the understanding of elementary episodic structures of comic art, in general. Moreover, it would represent an addition to its mere identification with particular genres of narrative discourse, such as graphic humour. In this last aspect, the textual brevity of narrative sequencing in comic strips could be a productive platform for exploring other functionalities of discursive narrativity in comics, way beyond the poetics of laughter and incongruity.

References:

PICADO, Benjamim e ARAÚJO, Jônathas Miranda de. “Actions, Disjunctions, and Passions in Graphic Narratives: narrative virtualities in The Adventures of Tintin”. In: The Comics of Hergé : when the lines are not so clear. (Joe Suttlif Sanders, ed.). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2016: pp 33-46

SILVA, Nadilson Manoel da. “Brazilian Adult Comics: the age of market. In: Cartooning in Latin America (John A. Lent, ed.). Creeksill, N.J.: Hampton Press, 2005: pp. 101-118;