The concept within the readings that I found the most entertaining in this week’s reading was that by Umberto Eco, “Comic pleasure means enjoying the murder of the father, provided that others, less human than ourselves, commit the crime”(Eco, 2). This made me think about the sadistic nature of many cartoons, how we laugh when Jerry hits Tom over the head with a baseball bat or when the Pink Panther causes the detective to lose his mind. As Eco later goes on to explain, the ‘animalization’ (Eco, 3) of a comic hero is what gives us the ability to laugh at the violations of the rules, and summing up how many children’s comedy films revolve around breaking the rules, in a context where the main character is not human.
After unpacking that, the first group of characters that came to mind were the minions. This group of yellow beings are inherently evil. They feed off of any evil plan given to them by their leader Gru and become more enthused whenever an opportunity to break the rules arises. However, because they are yellow, cute, and speak in gibberish, that is overlooked, and the audience finds them hilarious. In their first solo film Minions (Pierre Coffin, USA, 2015), we see their origin story where throughout history, they are serving the ‘evilest masters’, from Count Dracula to Napoleon. What is even more jarring (and something I had personally forgotten until I reread the synopsis of the film), is that they kill all of their masters! They then go on to attend villain-con and aid in the first female supervillain’s plot to steal the crown jewels. In my opinion, the minions are a perfect example of Eco’s point; their atrocities are consistently ignored because of their inhumanity. Instead, they are remembered as funny and adored by all.
Umberto Eco, “The frames of comic ‘freedom’,” Carnival (Amsterdam: de Gruyter, 1989), 1-9.
Your insight into the Minions’ cuteness hiding their inherent evil makes me consider the comedic role of the goon more generally. Like the Oompa Loompas, these are a species naturally coerced into servitude, and yet their chaotic nature causes laughter – more than cute ruffians, they personify an uprooting of the established order from within its confines.
Your post reminds me of the memes that circulated around saying “never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or the minions what master they served in 1939,” pointing out the horrible undercurrent of their concept that is swept under the rug in service of their palatability as cute little pill-shaped monsters. Sort of puts it into perspective that Facebook moms put these guys on their timelines despite the fact that they are embodiments of evil…
I found your correlation between Eco’s thesis and minions extremely brilliant! I personally think the main reason why we forget about their evilness is because we find them ‘cute’ and adorable: we look at them and think they could never harm anyone! They look like they’re not capable of killing people or even slightly hurting them. My question is: would they look evil if they were human? Or would we just pity them because they always need a leader to follow?
I really enjoyed your connection between the minions and Eco’s reading! I think there is definitely something to be said about the “animalization” of the minions and this perhaps being done internationally in order to let them get away with their crimes. I think if they were more human, or at least looked less alien to us then we would have a harder time accepting their actions.
I believe the “animalization of a comic hero” is best evinced when humans are reduced to animal like creatures especially in horror comedies. This explains why characters having cannibalistic tendencies such as Jennifer in Jennifer’s Body appear so humorous. This also works with the minions or BoJack Horseman’s attempts to replicate human behaviour.
I like your idea of the reduction of comic heros to less than human and the inherent sadistic nature of cartoons. It reminds me of Happy Tree Friends, in which the characters are cute animated anamorphic animals and on the surface it seems like a children’s show but then they get in the most violent and gruesome scenarios. Because it is a cartoon is seems comical but if it were live-action we would react entirely different to it, and not in a positive way.
I think this is a great example of what Eco is saying. There is something of the carnivalesque in the cartoonish masks of both the perpetrators and victims in The Minions. Although the perpetrators are more animalistic, I think that the unreal nature of the victims also contributes to our acceptance of the horrific acts.