Letter #147: Imagine Pleasant Nonsense

Waking up on Planet Crazy.

Dadinator,

When I was a kid I read the funny pages for entertainment; now I read them for the news. As you’ve pointed out, satires like the ones you do on your show are often truer to our absurd reality than the headlines. The gap between the Babylon Bee’s gag stories and reality has narrowed to about five minutes. We’re living in a punch line.

But my favorite cartoonist working today isn’t all that political. His name is Nathan W. Pyle, and he makes a comic strip called Strange Planet. It’s just one weird little joke over and over again, but for some reason it always gets me. The characters are aliens who talk in that stilted sort of sci-fi way—“affirmative, initiate nourishment procedure”—except the aliens are us. 

So they do all the normal stuff we do, but the way they talk makes it all sound bizarre. You’ll get a whole strip about a dad playing Super Mario with his son, saying things like “this being is a drainage expert….. I have devoted much of my life to studying this being’s lore.”

At the risk of explaining a joke, the Weimar playwright Bertolt Brecht would have called this Verfremdungseffekt—basically “making things strange” or “alienation.” You take something we’re all so used to that we don’t even notice it, and you torque it just a little to make it seem weird or foreign. It jogs you out of taking normal things for granted and forces you to consider them as if for the first time.

So Strange Planet is alienation with literal aliens, and certain panels from it are weirdly impossible to forget. There’s one in which a parent tucks a kid in to bed and says, sweet dreams—except it’s “imagine pleasant nonsense.”

Imagine pleasant nonsense. At our book signing last week we kept marveling at the preposterous silliness of the things smart people believe now: put a dress on a man, he’s a woman. Virtue is a monkey reflex; we only happen to admire it more than vice. Marriage is just a piece of paper.

We’re so steeped in these ideas that we can take them in stride. But when you pull back for just a second—when you bathe in the cool good sense of old books, for instance—you realize they’re bananas. It’s a little like waking up from a dream to find yourself on Planet Crazy.

And I think that’s what’s happening to us. Our intellectuals have been snoozing away in their groves and palaces of enchanted slumber, imagining pleasant nonsense. As long as we were swaddled in layers of prosperity and security, we could stay wrapped in the dream of a godless world. Now the harsh light of the real world is breaking in—debt, war, disease—and it makes for a bit of a rude awakening.

But if the real world is less pleasant than dreamworld, it’s also less nonsensical—because it’s the world where God lives. He stands at the bedroom door and knocks.

Love,
Spencer