I am not a big fan of the Chuck Jones cartoons featuring Roadrunner (née Beep-Beep the Roadrunner). Too pure and abstract for me. But they are so useful when I need to illustrate a point.
Let's say you showed a friend a Roadrunner cartoon for the first time, and this person was not only unfamiliar with Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, he didn't know about the formal properties of cartoon violence. So when the crate of Acme dynamite goes off in Coyote's face, your friend is seriously upset. Upset at the violence, concerned for the Coyote, and then really annoyed and confused when the Coyote reappears, good as new, in the next scene.
Your friend isn't stupid, he just can't get his mind around an unfamiliar idiom.
I just had this happen with two acquaintances of mine. Both are "older men," though I'm not sure that has anything to do with it.
One of them tried to watch the film Withnail and I, highly recommended by me. He couldn't get through it. The squalor and desperation were too much like real life. The cartoon aspect of it all was beyond him.
The other guy recently read a short one-act I wrote a while back, and took great exception to its style and subject matter. The little play is a madcap farce, pure and utter silliness. One of the characters pretends he has no feet, and spends all his time zipping about in a wheelchair while wearing a fireman's helmet. It was all too much for my acquaintance, who was appalled at the mutilation element. Weirdly, he interpreted my absurd dialogue as an attempt to imitate Harold Pinter.
Mistaking cartoons and farces for depictions of real life, or otherwise failing to grasp a common and obvious idiom: what do you call this condition? Idiocy, you want to say. But let me be serious for once.
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