Growing up, one of the things that was a regular ritual for me was to read the micky mouse magazine, and to play with whatever little knickknack they came with that week until it was thoroughly destroyed.
I’d often skip to the pages with the jokes, right around the middle of the magazine- I was terrible at telling jokes. My own attempts at jokes would often be completely abstract- I did understand, on some level, that part of humor was a subversion of expectation. I remember, in particular, thinking up a joke I thought was totally hilarious. It went something like… “Imagine if you were in a haunted mansion…* and then you fell through a trapdoor! but then… it started raining McDonalds** coupons on you!”
It absolutely crushed me that my older sister didn’t think this was even a little bit funny. She did laugh, but it was at how funny I thought it was.
My jokes did get better, with time, and careful study. When it came to the comics themselves, I had little interest in the ones that featured Mickey, or… most of the cast, really. Donald was the one who really caught my eye. In almost every story, he’d end up being the one who catches the short end of the (slap)stick, with his misery being the thing that is funny. That’s not what I read those stories for, though.
Every now and then, one of the comics would have Donald being triumphant, cool, and competent- especially when he’d don his secondary identity as- huh. Just discovered that the english name for that identity is “The Duck Avenger.” What a downgrade. Over here, his name was Phantomias, which I hope we can all agree is objectively cooler.
My shelf must’ve had… hundreds, if not thousands of those slim magazines at some point… precariously bending the wood they were placed on near the top, where I could reach them from my bunk bed, a steadily growing repository to pick from. It reminds me of how I now listen to podcasts or comfortably familiar youtube videos to fall asleep- (not that I didn’t usually finish settling in for night with one audiobook or another. Der Liebe Herr Teufel my beloved…)
I do realize that this might seem like pointless rambling, and like the image up there was placed by mistake- but, if I’ve learned anything about humor and people in the time since my childhood, it’s that everyone loves an underduck story.***
