The comedy is fairly base, but is as refined and technically honed as slapstick could possibly be.

It’s also – like the most depressing things in our lives like death and cancer and missing a bus – very very funny.Īlthough I wonder if I would’ve actually understood the depressing side of it as a child, I’m sure it would’ve appealed to me regardless. It helps that each of Wile E Coyote’s failures is pretty short, very few of them last longer than a minute, and many of them are around 20 seconds. I watched about three hours of these cartoons on YouTube. E Coyote’s constant pursuit of the Road Runner despite his consistent and brutal failure is a metaphor for the human existence and how we chase after things futilely, knowing that we’ll never get them, or something like that. I have no doubt somebody has written a PhD or five about how Wile. You can go deep into the philosophy and the humanity behind these cartoons, as I’m sure many boring men have in the past. Coyote’s efforts to kill him (her? they? it?) and feast upon his poultry/paltry remains. I ended up hating the Road Runner, so effortlessly smug and blissfully unaware of Wile E. Coyote, the amazingly detailed and animated anthropomorphic dog thing. More importantly, I ended up very depressed and feeling very sympathetic for Wile E. During my bed rest this week, the YouTube algorithm provided me with what my mother did not – this video right here:

And why rot my brain at age six when I could wait until high-speed internet and YouTube to do the trick when I was eighteen, when there’s more brain to rot?īut I digress. I was the kind of child who watched Absolutely Fabulous and Melrose Place and Friends (so a really annoying child) and was discouraged from watching children’s television because it would apparently rot my brain. Straight up: I had never seen a single second of Looney Tunes until this week. Funny slapstick comedy about a wild dog trying to eat a bird or a treatise on the meaningless of all human pursuits? Sam Brooks watches some Wile E.

Wile e coyote