TheCropsey

Woah, that would be an honor! I know I’m really late with this response (I’ve been inactive on here for years), but I’m on the adjunct teaching circuit now, so even the possibility of having my work discussed in a classroom means a lot to me. Do you remember if it got discussed at all?

It’s good to see discussions of represented disabilities include both physical and cognitive ailments. They’re so often polarized and separated in criticism– and don’t get me wrong, they are fundamentally different– but the tropes they fall into are more like a vehn diagram than two separate lists.

This is a great article. On a personal note, I read it with a cat on either side of me, and my main interests are scholarship and the arts. It’s a pretty fun stereotype to live up to imo; cats are compatible with the sedentary academic lifestyle, since they’re willing to just sort of chill with you adjacently and let you do your thing. Reminds me of the Medieval Irish poem “Pangur Bán,” in which the speaker, who is some type of scholar, compares the practice of logic to his pet cat’s skill at hunting mice.

I also feel like the duality of feline representation in art and history (their association with holiness/skill versus devilry/sloth, like you mentioned) relates pretty easily to small cats’ status as both hunters and prey in their natural habitats. It’s part of why their behavior seems so bizarre to us; they’re at the center of the food chain, so they have to be good at both hunting and hiding.

I adore this show. Although, I disagree that “‘The Gang’s’ treatment of Rickety Cricket [is not] so aggressive or malicious as to be […] socially unacceptable,” as The Gang’s behavior towards Cricket, each other, and everyone they come into contact will pushes depravity to its logical extreme, in my opinion. I always thought the nugget of comedy at the show’s center was 1) absurdism and exaggeration (parodying the acceptable foibles of classic sitcom characters from shows like The Honeymooners or Taxi) and 2) radical acceptance of everyone’s capacity to be terrible people. The Gang are almost analogous to cardinal sins personified in Early Modern morality plays: we can recognize their “bad” traits in ourselves and identify which gang member (e.g.: which variety of human weakness) we find in ourselves the most. We can then use that information to look inward, see that we ourselves aren’t so bad after all and understand the potential fallout of letting those proclivities get the best of us. I think that’s where the quazi-social acceptability of Sunny really comes in: we can confront ourselves– and ne’er-do-wells that range between the store brand hypocrites we meet every day to famous reprobates like Ted Bundy and Bernie Madoff– in a safe manner through The Gang.