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.Yet animation is given far moreliberty by the viewer to portray rapid and violent activity or overwroughtemotional reactions that might be frightening or distasteful if presented inlive-action film.On The Simpsons, for example, Homer s guzzling of beer andgorging on food, the accidents that occur at home or in the schoolyard, the Tueth's 103-216 9/28/04 11:28 AM Page 197Back to the Drawing Board 197|larger disasters of death and destruction of property, even Homer and Marge sefforts at lovemaking, to name just a few, would tend to offend viewers if pre-sented in graphic realism.But by their very exaggeration in animation they be-come ludicrous and beyond offense.Such grotesquerie, while more acceptable in animated form, still has the ca-pacity to provide a powerful alternative to commonly accepted viewpoints.Inmodern criticism the notion of the grotesque in literature and the performingarts has been given new importance by Mikhail Bakhtin s development of theconcept of the carnivalesque, which he explored in the work of François Rab-elais. Carnival is a general term for the sort of wild, sometimes orgiastic, andeven lawbreaking activity that is currently most easily observed on BourbonStreet at the Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans or the carnival celebra-tions in Rio de Janiero.The observance of Carnival, as a pre-Lenten revelrywith roots in the Dionysian festivities of the Greeks and the Saturnalia of theRomans, according to Bakhtin:represented an alternative cosmovision characterized by the ludic underminingof all norms.The carnivalesque principle abolishes hierarchies, levels socialclasses, and creates another life free from conventional rules and restrictions.Incarnival, all that is marginalized and excluded the mad, the scandalous, thealeator takes over the center in a liberating explosion of otherness.The princi-ple of material body hunger, thirst, defecation, copulation becomes a posi-tively corrosive force, and festive laughter enjoys a symbolic victory over death,over all that is held sacred, over all that oppresses and restricts.4Early in his essay Film, Literature, and the Carnivalesque, Robert Stamclaims that contemporary mass media offer only the simulacra of carnival-style festivity. 5 Nevertheless, he procceeds to apply elements of Bakhtiniancarnival to the works of the European filmmakers Luis Bunuel, Federico Fel-lini, and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as the films of Monty Python, Mel Brooks,the Marx Brothers, and many others, explaining that in some cases, the car-nivalesque tradition is deployed in a purely ludic or even a commercializedmanner, while elsewhere it becomes aggressive and positively subversive. 6 Ingeneral, Stam finds a certain ambivalence in the political effectiveness of car-nival, wondering whether such transgressive behavior genuinely underminesor only reinforces the hegemonic structures.At one point he comments onUmberto Eco s view that such carnival activity is an authorized transgressiondeeply dependent on a law that it only apparently violates. 7 In other words,the carnival festivities are usually understood as only a temporary cessation ofthe status-quo, and once the holiday respite has run its course, the populacereturns to ordinary life, with its recognition of the legitimate authorities and Tueth's 103-216 9/28/04 11:28 AM Page 198198 Laughter in the Living Room|structures of civilized life.Stam s response to Eco captures the same ambiva-lence as Fiske s text of contestation :While it is true that official power has at times used carnival to channel energiesthat might otherwise have funneled popular revolt, it has just as often been thecase that carnival itself has been the object of official repression.Carnival.is the oppositional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural produc-tion and desire.a symbolic, anticipatory overthrow of oppressive social struc-tures.All carnivals must be seen as complex crisscrosssings of ideological ma-nipulation and utopian desire.8Stam suggests that the carnival may indeed have a more lasting effect, as theoppressed see in their renegade revelry a ludic undermining of the establishedorder and begin to imagine and plan for alternative social orders.Hence the car-nivalesque can be considerably subversive, especially if the countermodel it pro-poses looks like a lot of fun.The attitudes and behaviors exhibited in the newanimated comedies are perhaps best understood as television s version of thecarnivalesque: a countermodel that is fun.The Simpsons and other successful an-imated domestic comedies have been able to explore darker, subversive aspectsof family life thanks mainly to the possibilities of the cartoon esthetic.But, likecarnival, they offer their critique in a familiar and culturally acceptable environ-ment: the traditional sitcom format.It is precisely this mixture of shock and re-assurance that distinguishes the new animated television comedy
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