Houseguest Of Cartoonish Company, by D. Johannes Bayer

“More things are wrought by Scooby-Doo than this world dreams of.”

— Lord Alfred Tennyson or Somebody

Today, Scooby meets Jonathan Winters… Wherein we first find out something mysterious has been terrorizing the locals.

My parents didn’t really take the time to teach me much in terms of life skills. Fortunately, the television community was willing to fill in.

One week during an extremely hot, muggy summer¹ in Northwest Iowa, some particularly brazen programming executives decided they were going to show the exact same episode at the exact same time, for the entirety of a week², of my favorite cartoon – The New Scooby-Doo Movies (sometimes called The New Scooby-Doo Comedy Movies³). This decision attained very quantifiable success, assuming that the executives’ intention was to disprove the theory that I was a childhood prodigy⁴, as it took me until Wednesday to figure out the concept of the re-run.

Monday, I enjoyed the show⁵. Tuesday, I was alarmed at how remarkably similar this episode was to Monday’s episode, but I assumed it was the continuation, and they were just doing a little bit of recapping to bring us up to speed. But then the show ended. I came up with a theory (or maybe, more accurately, an excuse) that perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention, and that I had merely missed all of the artful differences in a series of episodes that, conceivably, told a larger story. But on Wednesday, the jig was up and my theory was discarded. It was definitely the same episode over and over. Fortunately, for the programming executives in question, I was still receiving little or no parenting come Thursday, and I was back in front of the television again. And although there was a little stinging disappointment that there was no new episode, I was a child with nothing better to do, so I stuck around. Ditto for Friday.

Five formative hours of my youth spent watching the same re-run, knowingly aware for the latter half of the week. Now etched into my psyche as a mental mantra. The episode: The Frickert Fracas. The guest: Jonathan Winters⁶.

Winters and the Frickert Fracas… Wherein we agree to help solve the mystery behind the specter, and consequently get chased and tormented.

Although my introduction to Jonathan Winters was not quite as auspicious as having him dress himself as a gas attendant so that he could fill up my sputtering-for-fuel Mystery Machine, only to invite me to a chicken farm, I still took to the guy like I never had to any comedian before.

After Winters’s appearance on re-runs of The New Scooby-Doo, I spent a fair amount of the formative time I should have been sleeping and developing into a healthy member of society trolling late night cable, searching for any opportunity to see Winters perform standup. Winters seemed like a big kid, what with all the voices and impressions and how he would jump from character to character and create conversations and dialogues with himself. He seemed like someone I’d like to play with. I never would have guessed that he had this whole other dark side.

Of course, the gang wasn’t expecting dark either; they thought they were getting a nice vacation away from monsters when they accepted the invitation to Maude Frickert’s chicken farm. Turns out she needed help finding the secret formula⁷.

As an adult, I kept hearing from comedians that Jonathan Winters was the harbinger for a whole new kind of dark comedy. At first, I wondered if they were talking about the same guy. But then I revisited his material. I was shocked at how much of his comedy came from such a dark, dysfunctional place, and how that had been so invisible to me before. I had completely missed all of the darkness as a kid.

Perhaps because it seemed so familiar to me.

The Phantom Scarecrow… Wherein we find through careful analysis of clues that this monstrous apparition could be a mere mortal in disguise.

My mother is classified as a paranoid schizophrenic. It is often assumed that the sometimes traumatic events of my childhood must have contributed to a dark and dreary upbringing. Nothing could be further from the truth. As a child, you just know what you know. You know the way things are, sometimes you know the way things should be, but you don’t know what is considered normal. Normalcy is something that you learn from experiencing enough of the masks that other people put forward.

Saturdays were seen as fun days for me, because I got to visit my mother in the mental institution. Not that it was as nice as having her at home, but it was still a fun Saturday excursion, in spite of the bars on the windows, the prison-like atmosphere, and the ominously intimidating monolithic structure that made dark, abandoned circus fun-houses look inviting. As a child, I wasn’t the greatest conversationalist, so at a certain point, I would just let my parents talk, and I would go explore.

The Trap… Wherein we capture the monster in a Rube Goldberg-type contraption so the Freds of the world can justify their worth.

The meeting room was something of a contradiction. There were a lot of toys and a lot of guards, orderlies, and wardens. In short there was a contradiction between the freedom of being turned loose on some unfamiliar toys and the oppressiveness of having these supervisors lording over the whole thing with their prison-vibe.

Furthermore, I wasn’t sure if the toys were for the visitors or the patients. I didn’t want to mess with someone else’s toys, but I was assured by a lady doctor, nonetheless, that I could play with whatever I wanted to. It gave me a little shudder when I turned back and she was still stoically observing me put together Lincoln logs with her creepy clipboard and arrogantly objective attitude, like I was going to be her next patient in a few years, but I had been politely taught not to complain about free things.

I countered the oddness of the playroom by exploring the interior recesses of my imagination. I could sit there politely under the watchful eyes, and no one could stop me from exploring whatever I wanted to in complete freedom. When I first realized this, I had just gotten a very cool treasure map from a McDonald’s happy meal. It quickly became my favorite toy, as I owned no other toy that could invoke such a rich fantasy world as that simple map with its far-away lands, strange people/creatures/hamburglers, and, best of all, buried treasure⁸.

The other way to ignore the self-consciousness of scrutiny was by making new friends.

The Inmates… Wherein the villain’s true identity is revealed, and we unfold the details of the dastardly plot.

I thought, at the time, that most of my mother’s fellow inmates were the most interesting people I had ever met. And contrary to how the doctors treated me, most of the patients would talk to me like I was a human being. They didn’t speak down to me just because I was a child, they didn’t act like they were in charge of me just because of my age. We spoke as peers.

I found one guy, Tim, particularly interesting. He was probably going to be locked up in a mental institution for the rest of his life. He was called a ‘pyromaniac’, which immediately took a prominent position on my list of favorite words⁹.

After burning down his own house, Tim had been charged with manslaughter. I was so confused about why he would want to do that. He could only tell me that he just would get so overcome by the sight of fire that even a candle could make him feel this irresistible urge to burn things down.

On the ride home, I asked my father what manslaughter was. He proceeded to give me a precise definition which involved the legalities of killing another human.

ME:

Does that make Tim a murderer?

DAD:

Manslaughter is not considered as bad as murder-

ME:

Oh, so when it’s manslaughter, someone dies, but it’s not your fault?

DAD:

No, that’s usually an accident. Manslaughter is usually when it is your fault… but without the forethought or malice of a murder.

(I didn’t understand ‘forethought’ or ‘malice’.)

ME:

So what if you just kill a woman, but no man?

(Here my father became the perplexed one. He was about to launch into some attempt at correcting some bit of chauvinism I must have picked up from the neighbors.. Then it dawned upon him-)

DAD:

Right. There is no ‘womanslaughter’.

ME:

Because it’s all just as bad?

DAD:

Right.

ME:

Sounds like Tim is sort of a murderer!

DAD:

I think Tim would be very hurt if he heard you say that, because he is probably very sorry that he killed his brother.

ME:

I thought he manslaughtered him?

Tim was as sweet as any kid that I knew, plus he was like fifty, and he got into more trouble than I ever did. I couldn’t wait to play with Tim each week. Over time, I came to the conclusion that Tim might need to be kept away from matches and lighters no matter how sorry he might be. However, talking to him regularly, I eventually got some insight into his problem.

Tim’s family never came to visit him, and I can now look back and realize that they never forgave him, despite the fact that Tim had been a remarkable student of certain family teachings. As a child himself, Tim saw his mother’s love as the most beautiful thing he had every witnessed. During the most significant scenes of Tim’s memories, he was always being out-shined by his mother’s incendiary blow-ups, where she would figuratively set herself ablaze. Tim was far too meek to ever blow up like that, but he always seemed to retain that image as a model for imitation. He couldn’t flame up himself, like his mother; but he could set other things ablaze and achieve the same state of mind.

Almost anything crazy that has ever happened to anyone in any family is a war on a state of mind. Tim carried the banner forward for his family, but no one at the institution ever talked with him about any of that. They kept him locked up, doped up, and that was that.

Tim once bought me a soda. After digging through his pockets, trying to scrape up two quarters for an A&W from the machine, I had such a difficult time getting the thing open that, after bending the tab back and forth, I dropped the metal tab into the root beer. When my father saw what happened, he made me throw it away.

I was mortified at the thought that Tim was going to find that filled up soda¹⁰ can in the trash and was going to think that I wasn’t as grateful as I was. I couldn’t communicate to my father how important it was to me to get that tab out of the can and finish the drink. Here was this man, locked up with no children, no prospects of ever having any, and with no hope of release. This guy had just given up his last coins up to give me this gift, the least I could do was risk injury so he wouldn’t be hurt by my gesture. I had empathy for Tim.

As I got older, I lost all empathy for the inmates, and for my mother. I learned to see things from a much more “normal” perspective, and I believed experts’ opinions on the mentally ill. I just assumed my mother was completely crazy, Tim was unredeemable, and the other inmates were lost causes, as well.

Winters Locked Up!?… But it was just a Mask, Folks.

I didn’t regain any of that empathy until I became reacquainted with Jonathan Winters. In a recent interview with Mark Maron, the now-85-year-old comedian laments the time he was put into the loony bin. The newspapers claimed he was so deranged that he climbed halfway up the mast of a ship in San Francisco. Winters said that he has always regretted that. He admits that he was going through a nervous breakdown at the time, but that on that day he was simply messing with some guy, putting on one of his characters to treat the guy like he was an aspiring pirate. As it happened, the guy called the cops, and they came and promptly arrested him. They probably didn’t even know who he was. That is all that happened.

Say the wrong thing to the wrong person and you might find your sanity under examination. Or to paraphrase Jonathan Winters, “‘Nice day! Sky is full of dirigibles… wonder where they came from?’ say that to the wrong person and you could get locked up for good.”

We are all trying to find our inner child – the way that Jonathan Winters has. Perhaps he has done so more out of a necessity of dealing with his past, but nonetheless, it is still something that we all have to work with. How do we take the adult versions of our childhood dreams and fulfill them?

If we had locked up Winters and thrown away the key, we not only wouldn’t have had Jonathan Winters, but we might not have had as developed versions of Cosby, Conan, Carlin, Oswalt, and everyone else influenced by Winters.

It’s not just artists that live on the wire between sanity and insanity. I had never considered the idea that maybe there was very little that separates all of the normal Freds of the world from the homeless Shaggys muttering to themselves on the street. After watching stressful situations turn high achievers into children, I now wonder how close they are or could be or we all could be from that line of no return. People get stressed, people go through hard times, people have problems, but as a society we don’t have the built-in safety nets to empathize with their situations in any way that can fundamentally help.

And I would’ve gotten away with it, too… if it wasn’t for this meddling internal integrity.

As a child, I believed in science. Growing up, it was my religion. But Scooby-Doo skepticism can never account for those actual supernatural creatures that aren’t wearing masks. There is so much that we don’t know that the only metric we have for what we do know is predictability. Just because science wants to link certain brain patterns to certain symptoms doesn’t mean that the brain is the cause. It could just as easily be that the neurological evidence is merely the effect, or by-product of the mental condition which could have its cause in some entirely different domain¹¹.

One thing that I can predict with very high certainty is that practitioners of mental health will continue with their lackluster track record regarding bringing their patients to health. And until they are able to reverse a patient’s condition, they don’t have much of an art. And they may not be able to achieve that without really listening to their patients.

In my exposure to so-called crazy people over the years, it has struck me that there can sometimes be something very poetic about the way the mentally ill express themselves. What they say might not be literally true, but it might express a truth in a more true way.

Whenever a blanket epithet gets thrown onto an archetypal problem, it’s pretty clear there are individual problems underneath those so-called diseases. They might manifest themselves as ADHD, but that is really just a hundred million people with different reasons and problems for why they can’t focus and pay attention. We all have problems, and it seems hard to discern where we should draw the line.

The nature of problems is that they are unique and individual. In my experience, human beings have enough internal integrity that they can’t help but reveal what their problem is. Most of the time people will surreptitiously tell you their problem in the first sentence or two. With the mentally ill, the problems tend to reveal themselves in a more overt or poetic statement.

In the Frickert Fracas, Jonathan Winters invited the gang back to a chicken farm where Maude Frickert needed their help finding the Secret Formula. Of course, someone else wanted it for themselves and they decided that the best way to steal it would be to dress up like a Phantom Scarecrow. On first viewing, Winters appeared to me as having all of the characteristics of someone that might dress up as the Phantom Scarecrow himself. (i.e. he had shown a propensity to costume himself, had used multiple voices, seemed odd just randomly inviting the Mystery, Inc. gang to the chicken farm etc.) However, as with all the special guests, he really was a help. For me he was a help too, this kind of red-herring of what I feel we as a society have to get past. We are all creating these images of what everyone thinks everyone else is like. So much so that “normalcy” has replaced the notion of true health. At least in Scooby-Doo there was only one person that was wearing the mask. In our society, nearly all of us are hiding behind masks. Over time, my thoughts have shifted between who I’ve thought are the culprits, or the truly crazy ones of society. But now that I’ve gotten to a point in my life where I’ve seen the Jonathan Winters of the world peel off their own masks, I’m not sure any of us are any different from any others. Maybe that is the Secret Formula that Maude Frickert has been keeping in the Winters’ family.

Maybe if we started listening to people half as carefully as I listened to the Frickert Fracas re-run as a child, we wouldn’t be wasting our time and resources arguing with the monster in the mask.

This is D. Johannes Bayer’s first contribution to FlipCollective. Stay tuned for more.

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