Yes, THAT Betty Boop

April 2, 2020 5:42 AM

Mr. Boop: a new daily comic strip [Alec Robbins] invented about what it’s like being married to Betty Boop (slTwitter); also on Thread reader.

Also: you've been invited to a dinner party at home of Mr. Boop and his wife, Betty Boop. Use the mouse to point-and-click your way through this adventure!

Alec Robbins previously and previously.

posted by minsies (29 comments total)

That is certainly a thing that has occurred on the internet.

Why it is a thing that has occurred on the internet is another question entirely.
posted by prismatic7 at 6:29 AM on April 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

My first reaction was, why does Betty Boop need a husband?

My second reaction, after reading the comics and starting the game, is that he doesn't have much to say about Betty Boop's place in pop culture or women in general.

Maybe because I'm not an insecure white guy? That sounds mean, but insecure white guys have been insecure in media for decades, and this doesn't even tell a story.

ETA: ? after first sentence.
posted by JawnBigboote at 6:33 AM on April 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

I am a little concerned for Alec Robbins.
posted by solotoro at 6:33 AM on April 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

I found out about these comics because Justin McElroy tweeted about them, which lead to a response
posted by JDHarper at 6:35 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Wow, that is disturbing. The amount of emotional labour Betty has to do to mollify her husband!
posted by jacquilynne at 6:41 AM on April 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

I noped out after reading two of them. So, yea, there's that data point for all that it is worth.
posted by RolandOfEld at 6:42 AM on April 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

Poe's Law remains undefeated.
posted by Etrigan at 6:45 AM on April 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Wow. Just. Poe's Law has nothing to do with it. It's not about whether this is meant to be a parody or not. It's that
it's not adding anything new, good or interesting to the conversation about feminism, relationships, sexuality, film, Betty Boop. Simply put: The world doesn't need one more bit of media starring an awful white dude who doesn't deserve the amazing woman who (inexplicably) loves him. We're full up!

The "adventure" game is even worse than the comics. Betty Boop (the "breadwinner" of the household due to her film career) cooks dinner while her husband (he works at Subway) stands around not helping her and talking to their dinner guest — you! — while sinister music plays.

How's it end? Betty Boop leaves her bra (trivia: her husband likes to tear it off and, apparently, it can't be cut by glass) in the foyer for you to find before you head upstairs to join them for a threesome. At least that part isn't illustrated.

As an alternative, check out The Forgotten Black Woman Behind Betty Boop (The Cut). It takes awhile to get to that subject, but the rest of the history is interesting too.
posted by Text TK at 7:39 AM on April 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

"Hi, my name is Mr. Boop and I have a trophy wife."

"No, I can't find any thing funny about it yet, but rubbing my good fortune and Betty's good looks in your face amuses me and some of you may find that amusing."

"No, I never was married to Lara Croft - I tried to be as a kid cartoonist, but I got a cease and desist letter."

"No, I don't really have a wife or a girlfriend. Women are annoying. They keep wanting things."
posted by pyramid termite at 7:47 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

minsies - can you tell us why you chose to share this? Is there a quality to this, or opinion about it, that you saw in it that other posters haven’t shared?
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:04 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Silvery Fish: I thought it was very, very stupid and extremely absurd. For those reasons, it made me laugh.
posted by minsies at 8:15 AM on April 2, 2020 [8 favorites]

minsies - thank you for sharing your reaction to it. Maybe because of my age and personal experience, my reaction was similar to the other responses posted above.

I don’t think I will be able to maneuver to your perspective, but I wanted to understand so I could possibly try. Thank you. :)
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:33 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I read quite a bit of this (although not all of it) and I kept waiting for there to be a joke. Like ... was that the joke? That there was no joke? I also kept waiting for it to lead ... somewhere -- into more absurdity, some kind of commentary on something (anything!) but it didn't and from what I read it didn't seem it was going to.

I don't know if this was meant to be making fun of something or if it was "serious" or ... I really tried to figure out what was happening here (and why!) but I could not. And then I realized I didn't really want to spend any more time with it trying to do so.
posted by darksong at 8:43 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I saw this and enjoyed it. I think there's something in the absurd bit that did it for me. Not worth tons of time explaining why I liked it but one thing is: the absurd part is that the fiction of the comic is inconsistent world-building, but leaning towards the absurd. The implication here is not that Betty Boop is a young woman he just met - she is literally that Betty Boop, a 90 year old comic character. And much like the old school comics where Attractive Woman engenders non-sensical drooling AWOOGA in Dumb Man character, the conceit is that this is happening to the husband but in the real world. So you get scenes like this with her therapist.

There's also clearly the author head-nodding towards some healthy attitudes about sex and relationships but within the absurd fiction, e.g. the erectile dysfunction thread, emotional vulnerability thread, three-way with bugs bunny (and afterwards, betty and husband commenting on how bugs has a nice dick and how it's okay for both of them to say that), emotional manipulation is bad, etc. A lot of the setups are Husband starts in panel 1 with something toxic masculinity-ish and by panel 4 reverses position.

There's also clearly a good bit of commentary on how Amazon sucks, and more...idk. There are certainly a lot of valid criticisms here, but having nothing to say / no commentary isn't one of them imo.

this is way too many bizarre words for this silly comic but i do think there's more here than just some throwaway thing.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:02 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Well, I'll ignore the whooshing sound and take a whack at explaining the joke: This comic is a deconstruction of the male-dominated comic industry that first and foremost aimed to distract people from their dreary lives without offending them to the degree where they would write in to complain to the newspaper about the content.

Second to that was the obvious-in-hindsight notion that the main female characters of these comics served as a masturbatory fantasy for the male creator - a Galatea to their Pygmalion. Whores when they need to be whores, nuns when they need to be nuns, these cyphers ruled to landscape of the quotidian newspaper funnies.

This comic takes the subtext obvious.

Some people find that funny.
posted by Dmenet at 9:48 AM on April 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

I saw this the other day when someone I follow retweeted it (might've been Matt Bors from The Nib?) and enjoyed it, and, yeah, I think the thing you need to bring to it is a willingness to accept that the guy making it is aware that its absurdist deconstructive metahumor rather than trying to analyze it as some sort of failed straightfaced attempt at comedy.

Which, I get the Poe's Law thing! There's a lot of genuinely unselfaware bad comic art out there. But I have a hard time getting into the headspace of taking this particular series of strips, which seems so aggressively, deliberately subverting standard comedy beats and tropes and just flying 0-60 into wildly uncomfortable character arcs, as something other than really intentional. But at the same time I'm putting a lot of my own enjoyment of absurdist humor and Very Online metacommentary into it and I recognize that's not a default position anymore than a straightfaced read of it as just bad and weird is.
posted by cortex at 9:57 AM on April 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

It's hard for me to read long-form stuff on Twitter, but I tried, I really tried, and after many panels I still found nothing redeeming. Maybe I'm the butt of the joke? In that case, ha ha.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:21 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

If Woody Allen forgot how to draw, this would be the result.
posted by slagheap at 10:44 AM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

this post violates the geneva conventions
posted by poffin boffin at 10:57 AM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Previously

Mr. Boop is a Wife Guy.
posted by airmail at 12:02 PM on April 2, 2020

LAUGH, YOU DUMB DONGS

I'M FUCKING HILARIOUS
posted by phooky at 2:07 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think many of us got the joke. Homer Simpson skewered those 'quotidian newspaper funnies' better and more succinctly ("Oh Andy Capp, you wife-beating drunk, you") ... in the 90s.
posted by Text TK at 3:31 PM on April 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

My second reaction, after reading the comics and starting the game, is that he doesn't have much to say about Betty Boop's place in pop culture or women in general.

what it must be like to hope that a man has Something to Say, Jerri Blank style, about women in general. if it is any consolation, and it really shouldn't be any consolation, most men do.

taking a meek & unassuming joke to this place is like casting pigs before pearls. carrying coals to someplace that gets real mad at coal it doesn't understand. you know. one of those. I have advised against it many a time, but no one ever listens
posted by queenofbithynia at 5:10 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

It's more that it's kind of funny if you know that it's a joke, but if you don't know it's a joke it just looks like a kind of horrible person with a lot of mental problems he doesn't realize he has. Like there are 100% dudes out there who are self-involved and problematic enough to write a self-insert comic about how much famous characters love them and in which they respond to praise by making their love-puppets offer to have sex with the praiser. Without additional context, it's hard to tell whether this is sincere or not, and if it's sincere, it's super unfunny. Thus, the very mixed reactions.
posted by Scattercat at 5:21 PM on April 2, 2020

Etrigan: I was going to phrase it as, "And the Law of Poe held illimitable dominion over all."
posted by BiggerJ at 5:25 PM on April 2, 2020

I don't know how you can see the live-action interview segments (1, 2), complete with a cast and crew, and still assume that this is entirely unironic.

The fact that this guy was apparently involved with The Eric Andre Show doesn't surprise me, it was either that or Tim & Eric.

These are pretty much The Onion's Stan Kelly political cartoons, for a different genre.
posted by Wandering Idiot at 7:37 PM on April 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

But those live-action bits weren't linked directly in the main post. It was just the beginning of the comic. If the context is helpful or necessary, then it should be provided up front.
posted by Scattercat at 9:22 PM on April 2, 2020

The fact that this is meant to be ironic and self - aware didn't escape me. But I read a few at the beginning and thought "ugh, really, this is just going to be her being treated horribly forget over and over again so that he can learn lessons?" and then the comment before mine linked to one that suggests that in order to get rid of the problem of jealous Bugs wanting to kill him to get to her, they all had a threesome, and I was done with it. Men being taught a moral lesson through the emotional and sexual labour of women isn't ironic misogyny, it is actual misogyny even if you think you are winking at the audience while you do it.
posted by jacquilynne at 5:50 AM on April 3, 2020 [4 favorites]

IMHO it's less a parody of bad newspaper comics and more a parody of godawful homemade self-insert webcomics, with their weird mix of leering objectification, desperate wish-fulfillment, and stunted 1950s wholesomeness. As a former DeviantArt user, I can promise you that comics this terrible posted completely unironically are legion.
posted by Rhaomi at 12:42 PM on April 4, 2020 [1 favorite]