Banjo 'toons

It was quite a year.

Now it's another year.  

Consider yourself lucky to experience new years.  Get as many of them under your belt as possible.  Add them together.  Eventually they will create your lifetime.

I'm posting now just to announce that Mixed Meters is still here at the beginning of 2022.  (Imagine a short flourish of banjo sound now.)  It's been almost a year since I added anything new.  Quite a year.

One of the advantages of collecting a lot of years is that you can remember and compare them.  If you want.  Years are big, big enough that you can both celebrate and regret them at the same time.   

I'm thinking of one particular year long ago: the very first year of MM.   I posted an average 3.7 times per week; 31 times in December 2005 alone (that's daily!)   I spent a lot of time on this blog.

Skipping closer to the present, in the most recent four years I posted on average once every six months.

 

Back in those early years I was always on the lookout for good blog post ideas.  I would save online pictures if I thought that I could later turn them into something bloggable. 

When I needed to create a new post I would scroll through my saved pictures looking for inspiration.  Finding a handful of related pictures might turn out to be enough to suggest a topic.

Many of those pictures I saved were pictures of tubas.  

For example,  pictures of tubas transformed into art, or, maybe, into plumbing.  Pictures of people doing strange things with their tuba.  Cartoons about tubas.  Lots of cartoons.

Mixed Meters has no less than three posts devoted to tubas, tubas and more tubas.   Google helpfully collects all Mixed Meters Tuba Pictures.

While tubas have basked in Mixed Meters' glow over the years, banjos have been ignored.  I don't exactly know why.  I enjoy banjo music as much as I enjoy tuba music.  Maybe more.

Anyway, a long time ago I started collecting pictures of banjos for a future blog post, the one you are reading now.  Seeing this recent cartoon by Will McPhail of the New Yorker was the push that got me to dig them out and look for more.

Surprisingly, banjos seem to inspire cartoonists even more than tubas do.  Bizarro and The Far Side lead the pack.  Matthew Diffee of the New Yorker has done quite a few.   

If you hover your mousing unit over the cartoons you should see the title text which includes the cartoonist or strip name if I know it.  My apologies to those artists whose work I couldn't identify.  

Also, click on pictures to make them bigger.

"Ahem," I hear some of you say, "these 'toons are not particularly complimentary to the banjo."   You're right, some are downright insulting.  I guess it's still socially permissible these days to write humor by making fun of banjo players or suggesting ways to use a banjo violently.

Apparently banjos have a bad reputation.  If you haven't had enough banjo humor, there's this list of nearly 300 Banjo Jokes.  (To be fair, many of these have been/can be re-purposed from other instrument jokes.)  (To be unfair, many are the same joke with infinitesimal variations.)

Another instrument with a bad reputation is the accordion.  The next 'toon, the tied-up wife pleading with the burglar to "take the banjo", has been altered by person or persons unknown.  It originally said "take the accordion" and showed an accordion case instead of a banjo.  

And now, for my grand finale, here are two cartoons pairing a banjo with a tuba.

Just can't get away from those tubas.