Blenanas
Storyboarded by: Sam Alden and Patrick McHale
Original Airdate: March 18, 2018
Review by: CedricTheOwl
What is a joke? Why do we laugh? Comedy seems so reflexive to the human condition, to the point that lacking a sense of humor is almost always perceived as a negative trait, and yet humor is incredibly subjective and difficult to quantify. Children can instinctively recognize something funny, but tastes in humor can grow and be cultivated with time and experience. Yet explaining why something is funny is notoriously difficult; E. B. White and his wife Katherine S. White originated the famous quote “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind” to describe that exact phenomenon. If this sounds like a heady introduction to an episode about Finn and Ice King working at not-MAD Magazine, I assure you I’m going somewhere with this.
The key to understanding this episode for me lay in the book PB recommended to Finn, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten. That’s not just PB flexing her German skills for no reason. It’s an actual study of the psychological roots of humor published in 1905 by Sigmund Freud, yet another bizarrely specific pull of real-world culture into the Adventure Time universe. I was unaware the text was real until I started researching this episode, but even reading a summary of it helped me understand this episode a lot more.
The very basic elements of Freud’s theories on comedy state that in telling a joke, the humorist gives the audience subconscious permission to bypass societal conventions and expel repressed emotions in the form of laughter. That permission acts as a conduit to a more child-like subconsciousness within the audience, allowing them to access joy more freely than they could under normal circumstances. In his view, everything from love to aggression to grief to (of course) lust can be safely expressed through laughter, and the brain not having to expend the energy to regulate those emotions through inhibitions or societal presentation results in a restful, rejuvenating effect on the audience’s consciousness.
Like many of Freud’s findings, the statements in Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious have been challenged over the years, but it still gives us a good framework to understand how this episode approaches its discussion of humor. Finn is obviously worried about Jake’s unexplained disappearance, to the point where he’s blanking out of very obvious knowledge. Namely, he can’t remem the abbrev for BRB (as an aside, Freud seems very fond of wordplay and portmanteau in his construction of humor). His attempts to create a humorous caption in an old edition of Ble magazine results in something only he finds funny. Our boy has a long history of repressing his emotions to maintain an unfailingly cheerful and confident facade, but here he acknowledges his worry over Jake while also recognizing that there isn’t really anything he can do about it.
On the subject of the cartoon Finn is captioning, it gives us yet another connection to the text that inspired this episode. Finn’s interpretation of the cartoon reads it as the depicted caveman complaining that the Freud-looking psychoanalyst is of no help in treating the very obvious physical wound currently being inflicted upon him. Everyone else who views the comic interprets it differently: BMO questions whether the sabertooth bit the caveman after he came into the office, PB assumes the bearded man is a medical doctor instead of a psychiatrist, while Ice King assigns the dialog to the sabertooth instead of the caveman. Every character interprets the cartoon a slightly different way, and in Finn’s case the presumption of the bearded man being a psychiatrist reveals his underlying stress and anxiety over Jake’s disappearance.
Finn’s journey to prove his caption is funny brings him to the headquarters of Ble, with fellow rejected humorist Ice King along for the adventure. Finding the writers of their favorite humor rag dead at their desks, Finn and Simon decide to publish their own edition of Ble, calling in the Gunters for their supply of freelance writers. Through their montage, they learn just how harrowing creating comedy for mass distribution can be, including a scene where Finn literally puts a hat on a hat during a character design session. This reads like a metaphor for the Adventure Time creators, especially the newer boarders like Sam Alden brought in to replace departed talent, struggling with how to maintain the same level of quality Adventure Time has enjoyed through its run while also finding their own comedic voice.
These arguments may seem like a lot to extrapolate from a silly episode about Finn and the Ice King fighting a pudding troll and briefly resurrecting a zine, but this entire rewatch project has convinced me that the Adventure Time crew takes jokes very seriously. I recall the commentary track for “Marceline’s Closet” where Jesse Moynihan related a story about a three hour argument he had with Penn Ward over whether or not it was funny that Finn and Jake were hiding in a coat in that episode. Each of the boarders have their own approach to constructing jokes: Penn champions fart humor, Somvilay Xayaphone likes his intentionally awkward dialog, and Ako Castuera likes gross-out humor. There are so many ways to approach constructing a joke, making it easy to get lost in your own head second-guessing whether a joke will land and why it is or isn’t funny. Which makes the vaudeville slapstick ending of this episode all the funnier when it tosses all that complex theory out and just hits with a simple, over-the-top pratfall. Finn may think he has low comedy stats, but he can still bring joy to BMO and NEPTR. With only minor damage to his dignity.
Spoiler Level: Snail –
Notable Quotes –
- “If we want them to touch our goods, we need to go down there and confront them face to face”
- “I’ve been guarding dead people for 500 years. Wow, I need to sit with that.”
Stray Observations –
- I like the sly wave Finn and BMO give to each other after their argument as Finn leaves the treehouse. Despite the raised emotions, this is all in good fun.
- Between the end of this episode and “The Wild Hunt” gag with PB, I think it’s fair to say that Sam Alden’s comedic voice is lavishly animated banana peel falls
Jake the Starchild
Directed by Cole Sanchez
Written and Storyboarded by Hanna K. Nystrom and Aleks Sennwald from a story by Kent Osborn, Jack Pendarvis, Julia Pott, and Adam Muto | Original airdate March 18, 2018.
So… uh.
This is literally just Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2, right?
And I’m pretty sure it’s a coincidence, given the production timelines on this show. This episode came out almost exactly a year after the second Guardians film, but of course this was the era of Adventure Time (and Steven Universe) when CN were happy to hold onto an episode for months or years on end after it was ready to go and then just throw it on in a bomb during a random week.
Other than that I don’t think there’s much to say about this episode. It’s exactly the main plot of Guardians vol. 2 trimmed down to eleven minutes, right down to Jake being a pretty good match for Star-Lord in terms of personality. What a bizarre turn of events. If I had a nickel for every time a starfaring alien conqueror created a fake world to lure the latest of his lazy but good-hearted biological sons in to devour his essence under the guise of making him into a superhero only to be thwarted by the thieving but good-hearted ways of his dead adoptive dad, I would have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird it happened twice.
Warren Ampersand is no Kurt Russel, though, and he’s especially no Kurt Russel pretending to be David Hasselhoff. And Jake is, frankly, a somewhat better guy than Peter Quill, so he twigs to Warren’s betrayal a little sooner and is more willing to sacrifice himself to stop him. That’s just where the episode leaves him, trapped on a planetoid after diverting Warren’s rocket to a black hole rather than allowing him to try to pull the same stunt on the Rainipups.
