Word: comical
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...world could be expected to know where the U.S. stood on Palestine. Harry Truman's comic-opera performance had done little credit to the greatest power in the world...
These are typical scenes from the so-called "comic books." What is such stuff doing to the minds of U.S. children? Determined to find out, the Association for the Advancement of Psychotherapy last week held a symposium in Manhattan on "The Psychopathology of Comic...
Manhattan Folklorist Gershon Legman, author of a historical treatise on comic books, showed the psychiatrists some grisly samples and presented some shuddery statistics. Every year 500,000,000 comic books are printed; the average city child reads ten to a dozen a month. If there is only one scene of violence a page, this gives him a diet of "300 scenes of beating, shooting, strangling, torture and blood per month." Every city child who was six years old in 1938 has by now, Legman figured, "absorbed an absolute minimum of 18,000 pictorial beatings, shootings, stranglings, blood puddles and torturings...
...diagnosis was offered by Dr. Frederic Wertham, Manhattan psychiatrist and founder of Harlem's Lafargue Clinic (TIME, Dec. i). The increase of violence in juvenile delinquency, he said, goes hand in hand with the increase of comic books. Said Dr. Wertham: "We are getting to the roots of one of the contributing causes of juvenile delinquency. . . . You cannot understand present-day juvenile delinquency if you do not take into account the pathogenic and pathoplastic influence of the comic books." In plainer language: comic books not only inspire evil but suggest a form for the evil to take...
Everything is grist for his mill: comic strips, eating habits, dates, company picnics, pet names, bull sessions, charity drives, the State Department, foreigners, middle-aged women, vitamins, public opinion polls, antiSemitism, poker games, investment capital, psychoanalysis, the Senate and the Statue of Liberty. Much of the book is funny, some of it is brilliant; all of it would be improved if the author had left out the high-toned language and one-way-glass point of view of anthropology...