Posted on 12/14/2005 8:41:43 PM PST by Lorianne
Is it sub-Saharan African? Russian? Ig-pay atin-lay? Lurking on the funny pages are some hungry crocodiles with bad grammar, poor syntax and one crazy accent.
Hullo, Zeeba Neighba . . .
The characters of the daily comics have distinct voices inside my head. Bucky Katt from Get Fuzzy has a Boston accent. Hagar the Horrible sounds like Ralph Kramden. The Pattersons of For Better or For Worse sound like Canadians, if they lived in Wisconsin.
And then, there are the crocodiles.
The dimwitted, zebracidal crocs from Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine tie me in linguistic knots. What's that accent? Brooklyn? Cajun? Southern?
"Hullo, zeeba neighba . . . Leesten . . . me want say sorry for tings we does and geeve you nice paypahweight as token of newfound frensheep," one of the crocodiles tells his zebra neighbor in a November strip, offering a zebra-cousin's skull as a gift.
When the zebra is appalled at getting a murdered relative's skull as a gift, the croc apologizes: "Sorry. Me no have time to shop."
The crocodiles aren't very bright. They live only to kill and eat zebra and his kin, and even at that, they aren't very good.
But what's that accent?
"You wouldn't believe the speculation," Pastis said, speaking by phone from his North California home. "People are dead sure it's Cajun, Jamaican, Asian, Mexican, Russian, Greek, Yugoslavian, Polish. There are like 12 or 13 ethnicities. Everybody thinks they know. They say it as an aside, they say, "Oh, and by the way, that's not a perfect Polish accent."'
Most of the time, they're wrong, said Pastis. Growing up in California, his own speech is plain old American English. No hint of twang, drawl, valley girl or surfer dude.
The accent he hears for the crocodiles comes from inside his head, Pastis said.
"When I first did their voice, before they got introduced as regular characters, I always heard Russian," he said. "When I say it to myself it's like, "Gooot mornin' neighba.' Kind of like how you would hear a Russian general. Then the rest of it breaks out into a whole bunch of stuff, so now it's just a hodgepodge. What it really is is like the broken syntax of Tarzan, or Frankenstein."
Tarzan and Frankenstein meet Boris and Natasha?
Pearls is still relatively new, developed as an Internet strip in 2000, reaching newspapers in 2002. In the beginning, the zebras were harassed by the dreaded lions, but only in letters from Africa. Pastis figured it would make the zebras more neurotic if their predators lived closer to home. But not to make it too dangerous, he made the crocodiles less than adept at hunting.
The idea came to him in the middle of the night, he said. He woke up and wrote it down.
For the characters, he drew from the old Saturday Night Live skit As World Turn, featuring Tarzan, Frankenstein and Tonto. But there's a little of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, the tale of self-deluding losers, in there as well. Especially Willy Loman's son Biff. Beginning in the spring, a new crocodile, the dimmest of the bunch, will be named Biff, in honor of the play, Pastis said.
Pastis said he gets more letters about the crocodiles than any other character.
"They are pretty much ahead of pig," he said.
T-shirts featuring the crocodiles (officially called Crockydiles in the strip) outsell all the others at the official Pearls Before Swine online store, Pastis said. The holiday collection includes images of a crocodile dressed as Santa going down a chimney, with a fellow croc in antlers nearby.
"Me feel kinda hot," Santa croc complains.
"Peese shut mouf . . . Geet butt een there," the antlered croc instructs.
Ahead, Pastis predicts more crocodile antics. He's developing animated shorts for cell phone users, and he will bring the crocodiles' wives and mothers - all of whom talk normally - to the strip to point out how dumb their menfolk are. They will henpeck the loser crocs, berating them for not bringing home more fresh zebra.
Pastis, a 37-year-old former attorney, said there may be one more piece to the crocodiles' development in his subconscious. Something that may go more to their motives than their accents.
"I've still got my Bar card," he said, recalling his courthouse days before Pearls took off. "I pray I never have to use that Bar card again. I hated being a lawyer. Maybe that's where I got the crocodiles from."
Zebonics raises it's ugly head..
It's a funny strip - and as a plus, it's put one more lawyer out of business.
I LOVE PEARLS BEFORE SWINE BUMP!!!
Meesa like what meesa hear.
The elusive American culture; in the future while anthropologists work alongside archaeologists, the bones of strange birds with four butts, ten wings, one breast and six legs will be wrapped in dusty T-shirts with arcane phrases imprinted on them and handed up to eager students for their desultory appraisal.
I never even thought about the croc's accents not really matching any known cultural stereotype. That almost makes it funnier. Pearls Before Swine has to be the second funniest comic strip currently in production.
Before I read the entire post, I was thinking that Al Baby had written it.
I was stuned. Seriesly.
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