On screwdrivers and curling irons.
May. 31st, 2015 01:18 amAs we saw in a recent strip, Elly really doesn't seem to be all that good at detective work. Most people who encounter the phenomenon of things coming off in their hands because they've been unscrewed would remember that they have small children who don't quite understand what they should and shouldn't do and come to the conclusion that some little person is running around with a screwdriver messing with things. Elly seems to have been made unequal to the task for the sake of a joke despite the fact that she comes across as being somewhat slow-witted. A casual look at history shows us another occasion in which Elly was made stupid for fun and profit: the one with the curling iron where Lizzie wrecks her doll by melting its hair.
That earlier strip was also predicated on the idea that Elly had a few screws loose. As I said when I described it, she seemed to have a tunnel vision of the mind's eye that made her forget both Lizzie and the hot-ass curling iron the minute she stopped paying attention to them. Making a joke of Elly being so dumb that she couldn't foresee the outcome "Lizzie will grab this thing if I give her half a chance so I'd better keep it from happening" doesn't make me much happier than the more modern "Elly is too dumb to understand that someone's just messing with her" because it isn't any more humorous than "Elly turns into a shrieking moron at Lizzie because she did something Mommy was too stupid to allow for."
The question that is left is why is it funny and cute that Elly is angry all the time and as dumb as a sack of hair? Surely Lynn could have arranged things so that Elly doesn't have to look like a short-tempered imbecile all the time.
That earlier strip was also predicated on the idea that Elly had a few screws loose. As I said when I described it, she seemed to have a tunnel vision of the mind's eye that made her forget both Lizzie and the hot-ass curling iron the minute she stopped paying attention to them. Making a joke of Elly being so dumb that she couldn't foresee the outcome "Lizzie will grab this thing if I give her half a chance so I'd better keep it from happening" doesn't make me much happier than the more modern "Elly is too dumb to understand that someone's just messing with her" because it isn't any more humorous than "Elly turns into a shrieking moron at Lizzie because she did something Mommy was too stupid to allow for."
The question that is left is why is it funny and cute that Elly is angry all the time and as dumb as a sack of hair? Surely Lynn could have arranged things so that Elly doesn't have to look like a short-tempered imbecile all the time.