Make With the Funny Comics: Pearls Before Swine By Luke Foster
Eh, what the heck. Let’s talk about another newspaper strip. This week: “Pearls Before Swine.”
“Pearls Before Swine” is a daily strip by writer/artist Stephan Pastis about a rat, pig, goat, and zebra named, um, Rat, Pig, Goat, and Zebra. “Pearls” is a cynic’s delight, a borderline-nihilistic strip that gleefully making jokes about death, marriage, and employment – among many other subjects – while unrepentantly mocking the stupid people of the world. And it is one of the best things on the newspaper page every day.
Rat is the voice of contempt towards society. He makes no secret his disdain for other people, especially those who act particularly stupid. Pig, for example, is sweet-natured but incredibly stupid, and is the “swine” referenced in the title. (If you don’t know what the title means, you should do some research. Here’s a hint: you can find it in the Bible).
Goat is the strip’s straight man. He’s smarter than either Rat or Pig, and finds himself annoyed by both at times. Zebra is the quintessential victim, always trying to find ways to keep his herd from being eaten by lions or crocodiles, usually without success.
The Crocodiles, a later addition to the strip, moved next door to Zebra with the hopes of eating him. In keeping with the theme, they are incredibly moronic and their attempts to eat him meet with failure and laughter each and every time. Their stupidity is emphasized by their bizarre accent, which you will either find amusing or annoying as hell. There’s really no middle ground.
Other characters have come and gone as the humor has demanded, including Pig's girlfriend Pigita, his sister Farina the germaphobe, Pig's crazy guard duck, and Alphonse, an emotionally needy, passive-aggressive porcupine. You certainly can't cite Pastis for having a lack of imagination.
“Pearls” is a strip not terribly fettered by the conventional. It's a strip where Rat offered to French-kiss CNN's Paula Zahn and talked to a dead Abraham Lincoln, and where Pig has made both Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat cry and has carried on an affair with a “Ms. Bootyworth” syrup bottle. Trust me, it all makes sense in context.
While Pastis is clearly well versed in the art and literary worlds, he's not afraid to make his strip silly, or fun just for the sake of fun, even if that means doing a strip where Pig shoves peas up his nose just because he feels like it.
Rat, being the cynical mouthpiece of the comic, is often found committing an act of fraud, insulting stupid people, trying to isolate stupid people in a box or doghouse or some other enclosed structure, or in some mad grasp for money or power. He's not too sneaky when it comes to admitting his plans to kill his friends in an insurance scam, and any job interview he goes on usually ends up in him asking a question about whether he can do something that would probably get him arrested and the company sued.
And then you've got Zebra vs. the Crocs. I've said it before but I'll say it again: their pathetic attempts to eat him are comedy gold. I'm sure Zebra wouldn't find it as funny, but he's fictional, so he doesn't count.
A number of jokes also come from Pig being involved in some gross misunderstanding, whether it's a word he hears wrong or a phrase he uses incorrectly. Many times it ends with someone getting angry at or insulting him, and sometimes he even gets beat up. And he doesn't always understand why. But he still keeps on truckin'.
Along those same lines, Pastis has been unafraid to use puns, and even though he phased them out a bit after the first few years, he still goes back to them from time to time. Sometimes they're silly puns, and sometimes they're a little more elaborate, like when Rat told Pig to let his girlfriend know he didn't like her changing the color of his lamps, he told him to “rage against the dyeing of the light.” Another favorite of mine was one of the early Sunday strips, where a setup with Pig and Rat talking to some people in a restaurant lead to a rather elaborate play-on-words of Neil Armstrong's famous speech. It's complicated to go into here, but trust me it's a good one.
While Pastis generally sticks to his fairly apolitical topics of mockery, he's been unafraid to, at times, take on more taboo topics, like politics, religion, or the state of the comic strip business today. The latter of the two is actually probably the riskier one for him to do, since he voices a lot of divisive opinions about the archaic state of newspaper strips usually only uttered behind closed doors. But let's be honest, who doesn't want to know all the juicy secrets of the scandal-ridden comic strip world?
And when he's not getting all metaphysical about the comics business, Pastis isn't afraid to just flat-out jab at other strips. “Cathy” is a particular favorite, and so is “The Family Circus.” He makes jokes about other comics, too, like “Dilbert,” “Get Fuzzy,” and “Mutts,” but being friends with their creators he's a little friendlier about the whole thing.
Pastis has also put himself in the strip several times, including the time he had to negotiate with Rat when the latter took the strip hostage, when he's showing what the process of creating a “Pearls” strip is like, or when he's getting insulted by his neighbors.
In case you haven't guessed by now, the fourth wall gets broken a lot in this strip.
You can see “Pearls Before Swine” in your newspaper every day (if it's a newspaper worth a crap, that is), or in the following print collections: “BLTs Taste So Darn Good,” “This Little Piggy Stayed Home,” “Nighthogs,” “The Ratvolution Will Not be Televised,” “Da Brudderhood of Zeeba Zeeba Eata,” and “The Sopratos.” There are also three treasury editions, collecting two books each, called “Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic,” “Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My!” and “The Crass Menagerie.” I really like the treasury editions not only because they're big, thick books that can double as weapons in case of home invasion, but Pastis put in numerous annotations about the strips as well as a good deal of behind-the-scenes details. And those annotations are just as funny as some of the strips.
Okay, that’s it for newspaper comics. Setting aside the fact I didn’t plan to do another theme series so soon after the foreign comics series, the sad truth of the matter is there aren’t all that many more funny newspaper strips. Well, I can think of at least one more, but I don’t know if the collected edition has been released yet. Maybe we’ll do that strip some day. Until then, I’m leaving you with the mystery of just what that strip might be.
Don't you hate when people do that? I do.
Luke Foster is a stand-up comedian and writer who's going to give you a hint about what strip he was talking about in that last paragraph: it's not “Judge Parker.”
His column is moving to biweekly so the funny man can work on his act and conquer the world through laughs ... or something like that!Posts: 21380 | From: PA | Registered: Aug 2002
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"Soup" isn't bad, but it's not what I was thinking of. But if you read the Courant, you can probably guess the strip I'm thinking about.
Posts: 73 | Registered: Jul 2007
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I forgot- It'd be great if some cartoonists attended comic book shows.
Luke- I can't. Tastes are subjective and when I stumble across a paper I usually only read 4 strips. PBS, GF, S2N and classic Peanuts (but they're working on 1968ish and that year was just reprinted in the books. )
Posts: 395 | From: Simsbury CT USA | Registered: Aug 1999
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