Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 30, 2020

According to Wikipedia, the short story is about a prince that tries to avoid the plaque by hiding in an abbey. How does that look like a zombie?

I was thinking Lon Chaney’s version from “Phantom of the Opera”. His was a skull mask, a red robe and matching hat

Daredevil wears a red mask. And he’s blind to the criticism.

How about Quasimodo? No plague necessarily, but the townspeople feared him as a monster!

But really, Caulfield, would you ever want to dress up as Mr. Hyde?

All over the place, Jef is today… (bad Yoda impression)

I looked it up, and found it at the Poe Museum website:

https://www.poemuseum.org/the-masque-of-the-red-death

Given the absolute flood of Zombie films and shows, it is natural for moderns to relate Caulfield’s costume to the movie characters and miss the literary reference. Especially if they have not read Poe, Hawthorne, Walpole, Mary Shelley, and other early writers of horror.

In The Masque of The Red Death, the ‘guest’ dressed to display the effects of the plague, actually was death itself. When confronted, the costume proved to be empty and the guests died. It demonstrated that even the richest and most pampered levels of society would become victims of the plague. Death was seen as the great leveler. No one escaped it.

As if the Masque of the Red Death isn’t some kind of political allusion?

I like these cartoons with the “My costume might have been…” scenarios. It’s great to hear additional costume ideas.

well, there goes my idea

Just go as a plage doctor. Or would that be too much on the nose?

Mr. Hyde is shorter than Henry Jekyll and has an oddity about him that isn’t classifiable in the story.

Jef Mallett’s Blog Posts

Frazz15 hrs · I remember the columnist David Brooks mentioning that you shouldn’t be in politics if you can’t stand the sight of your own blood. I would add the corollary: You shouldn’t be discussing politics if you can’t stand the smell of your own bile.

I don’t know if it’s possible for politics to be bloodless. I’d like it if it were, but I’m just as flawed as anybody else, the strength of my commitment to that preference a little too closely dependent on who’s doing the bleeding.

I’m a little more confident that the rest of us can discuss politics without bile. I’ve seen it done. Indeed, that’s why I like David Brooks so much. I don’t agree with everything he says. I disagree with him a lot, in fact. But he writes so well, so gently while he writes firmly. He does his homework and he commits actual thinking, and when I read his work I usually finish it feeling smarter, if not persuaded, and I have never felt angry with him. He’s hardly alone. There are a lot of good writers and thinkers out there. All you have to do is look. Actually, that’s incomplete. All you have to do is keep looking after you find someone you’re comfortable with. If I’d stopped with, say, E.J. Dionne, I wouldn’t have found Brooks.

Maybe I should alter my my corollary to say that perhaps you should stop talking politics once you detect the smell of your own bile. I confess I can’t remember how The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ends, but I doubt it’s with Mr. Hyde’s thoughtful, enlightening discussion with the townspeople.

(And, why yes, I am an expert. I am in the humor business, after all. And two of the four humors are biles.)

I wore a mask of the red death costume back in law school, but I had long hair at the time, and the costume was somewhat androgynous and I got cat calls from dudes driving down the street.