The Elder Statesman

By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman

I am a great fan of the cartoon, Frank & Earnest. The antics of Frank & Earnest are more true to life than perhaps we’d like to admit. However, I think I enjoy the word play in the cartoon more than anything else about these two unlikely characters.

Frank & Earnest, if you seriously study them, depict every walk of life. Their very names are a play on words, Frank meaning outspoken and Earnest, a homophone for the word earnest, which is a synonym for serious. The duo can appear in any setting, past, present or future and anywhere in the universe. Sometimes, a bolt of lightning comes down from above to give the two characters a message from on high.

I like the cartoon where Frank is a spokesman for the U.S. Post Office stamp design department and says to Earnest: “The Department decided to have a religious message on our next stamp.” Earnest’s quick comeback is, “How about, ‘Lord, deliver us?’”

Another one of my favorites is a library setting and Frank says to the librarian: “You’re the only one lending right now.”

Like many readers, I have clipped certain favorites to share with others, mostly because of the superior play on words, such as the one where Frank has just fashioned a new wig for the king and instructs Earnest to “run it over to the castle.” Earnest quips: “Ah, the hair to the throne.”

Today, the cartoon is drawn by Tom Thaves, who had worked many years with his father, Bob Thaves who created the strip. Bob, who died Aug. 1, 2006, first created the two characters for individual cartoons that appeared in True magazine, a publication no longer in print. The daily newspaper strip began on Nov. 6, 1972 and went to the Sunday funnies April 1, 1973. The daily is done as a single panel. On Sunday it is a full blown comic strip.

It is interesting to study the two characters. Frank is the taller of the two and the one doing most of the talking. In the early strips, Frank was the only one with a speaking role. Earnest, on the other hand, is more of a straight man, but occasionally gets off his own zingers.

If you are a true follower of these two punsters, you know neither of them are pretentious and both are skeptical of people and institutions that make the world what it is. That is why we often find ourselves in those comic situations.

Thaves, the senior, was an innovator and brought new technology to the comic strip world and won many prizes for his work. The strip today is carried by 1,200 newspapers worldwide and is read by 25 million people daily. In the late 1990s, Bob Thaves went into semi-retirement and turned the strip over to his son, Tom, who continues the strip today.

My nephew, William Duncan McQuagge, who lives in Florida is as outspoken as Frank on any subject you can name. Recently he shared a Frank & Earnest comeuppance he received from his mother, my sister, Marjorie, after he had spent the night before expounding on the state of the world. She clipped a Frank & Earnest cartoon and left it on his desk.

It said it all, he said in sharing the humbling moment on his blog, The Contrary Scotsman. The Frank & Earnest cartoon caption said:

“One guy in a million understands what’s going on nowadays, yet I wind up sitting next to him every time!”

Touché, nephew William.

(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 17th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Column. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.