I Hereby Swear Off That Dreadful Duck

We all have our backward attractions, our things we love to hate, our sad addictions we despise but cannot shake.

My wife, for instance, is perversely attracted to talk show hosts who are so bombastic, self-serving and just plain infuriating that she MUST tune in. She stands there and yells at the radio, and swears she will never listen again. But of course, she does. How else is she going to know the heights of inanity they can achieve?

I am immune to inane talk show hosts, but I have my own cross to bear, my own daily jaw-clencher, my own backward attraction: the comic strip “Mallard Fillmore.”

Yes, this is the comic strip which The Spokesman-Review runs on the letters page every day, as a kind of a balance to “Doonesbury,” which runs to the left of “Mallard” (in every sense).

Now, my objection to “Mallard Fillmore” is generally not political but professional. As a person who makes a living as a humor writer, I have a built-in impatience with humor-providers who employ sledgehammers in lieu of sharper and subtler instruments. In other words, I think “Mallard Fillmore” creator Bruce Tinsley is just about as funny as Sledge-o-Matic comedian Gallagher, which is to say, not at all.

Yet I am fatally attracted to this strip every day, just because I can’t control myself. I MUST see how Tinsley will outdo himself in smugness, obviousness and pettiness.

“Why do you keep reading that?” my wife will say as I howl over another “Mallard” escapade, but not with laughter. “It only makes you angry.”

But don’t you understand? If I don’t read it every day, I might miss Tinsley when he really lets loose with an egregious specimen, like he did in his July 14 strip.

The first panel was titled “Gratuitous Dinosaur Vacation Tip No. 4,” and it said, “If you’re here in Washington this summer, and you can’t make it to the Smithsonian to see the dinosaurs …”

This is what is known in humor-writing as a set-up line, or in “Mallard Fillmore’s” case, a heavy-handed set-up line. Then came the punchline:

“Just take your kids to any federal agency to see the bureaucrats: `Look, Roland, (says a tourist father to his boy) they just eat and sleep all day and have brains the size of a pea!”’

Ha ha! I repeat, ha ha ha! Brains the size of a pea! Pea is such a funny word.

This particular strip was not particularly unusual for “Mallard Fillmore.” When it comes to groups to insult, “federal bureaucrats” are always good for a cheap laugh. But this time, the gag was more hackneyed, the attitude nastier and the stereotype more sweeping.

Sweeping is an understatement. “Any federal agency,” I guess, would include NASA, the FBI, the Federal Reserve, the Forest Service, the Surgeon General, the Peace Corps and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just to name a few. So this strip is only accusing, oh, several million Americans of eating and sleeping all day and having brains the size of a tiny legume (gosh, that cracks me up every time).

Humor doesn’t have to be strictly true, of course, but the only humor I have much respect for is humor based in truth. So let me think if this rings true for me:

I have a friend who happens to work for the Veteran’s Administration, which makes him a dreaded federal bureaucrat. He works harder and is more dedicated than most of us in the private sector. He can’t blow off a summer afternoon and go golfing if he feels like it, like half of the business people I know. He is scrupulous about accounting for his time and delivering a fair week of work for his pay. He doesn’t, as far as I know, sleep all day. He reads X-rays and diagnoses patients. He’s a radiologist.

Then there was my father, who gave the best years of his life to the Postal Service, or the U.S. Post Office as it was known in those days. His job, which he worked hard at, was to go around to small towns and help build post offices. These buildings meant a great deal to many of these small towns and served as de facto community centers. However, I guess he was just a federal bureaucrat and thus deserving of our contempt.

And then there was a local group of federal executives I spoke to recently, who struck me in general as intelligent, diligent, industrious and …

Oh, for crying out loud. This is what my sick fascination with “Mallard Fillmore” has reduced me to: Passionately defending federal bureaucrats.

I’m finished with that worthless comic strip - and I mean it this time.