Everybody is a Star: The Affirmation of Freaks and Schlemiels through Caricature in the Comics of Drew and Josh Friedman

Abstract

What is required ... is to stop courageously at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science (38) When individuals are caricaturized (i.e., cast in odd bodily features and made to appear stupid or brutish), their legitimacy is often undermined in ways that advance racist and anti-Semitic readings. But caricature has also been used to create counter-cultural sensibilities and enclaves, which have had a positive influence on how we look at ourselves and at others. For example, in the 1970s and 1980s, in their comic strips, which appeared in popular and avant-garde magazines such as RA W, Weirdo, MAD, National Lampoon, Heavy Metal, High Times, and Screw, Drew and Josh Friedman used caricature to participate in and contribute to a new counter-cultural American sensibility. Their presentation (or re-presentation) of such characters as the freak and the schlemiel tapped into existing artistic and cultural sensibilities, and led the way towards a new understanding of the parodic subject. More specifically, the Friedman brothers' comic strips used caricature to parody and at the same time affirm the comic pathologies found in the speech, bodies, and faces of known, lesser known, or completely unknown, celebrities and ordinary, although odd, people. These celebrities, B-movie actors, and everyday oddballs (which included elevator attendants, comic book store owners, and carpet salesmen) were parodied, not because they were famous, but simply because they had unusual bodies and faces which reflected odd personalities. But this was not caricature for caricature's sake. Rather, like postmodern physiognomists, the Friedman brothers showed a marked interest in the relationship of the body, its surface, and its representations to pathology (real or imagined). This, in turn, served as the foundation for their affirmation of what physiognomists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would consider abnormal bodies and pathologies. The Friedman brothers' interest in the relationship of pathology to physiognomy, however, is not clinical or negatively slanted; their depictions have an ethical function and welcome rather than exclude odd bodies and pathologies. (1) Like many caricaturists who depict abnormal bodies and psyches, Drew and Josh Friedman's interest in the relationship of the body to pathology draws on the presuppositions of physiognomists who, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, argued that the health or sickness of the body reflects the health or sickness of the psyche. This assumption stemmed from the belief, held by many physiognomists, that pathology was influenced and even caused by physical abnormalities. Such ideas about the body and its relationship to the psyche had a hold on the popular imagination for well over a century. But these notions were not merely the fashion of the masses. According to Sander L. Gilman, the notion that the body mirrored the psyche was taken for granted by the founders of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis, Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud. (2) Given their beliefs in the validity of physiognomy, if the founders of psychoanalysis and modern neuropsychology were to read the Friedman comics, they might see the distorted features and exaggerated expressions of the caricaturized subjects as indicating psychosis, depression, or derangement. But times have changed, and with them our attitudes toward people with odd bodies and personalities. Although the rights of the disabled have, for instance, been advanced in the political sphere, more positive, aesthetic representations which embrace the body of the disabled or the strange have lagged behind. In her book Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination, Rachel Adams argues that one of the only positive representations of freaks in early to late mid-twentieth century America can be found in Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks' (60-61). …