The Measure of Her Worth

I’ve never accessed porn on my office computer. (It’s blocked, OK?) But I do have a Web secret I hope my bosses never discover. It’s embarrassing. And, yes, stripping is involved.

Every weekday morning, without fail, I check in on Mary Worth.

Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a comics reader of a certain age. Is that moth-eaten serial still around?!

Mary Worth?! you’re exclaiming if you’re a Millennial or even a Gen Xer. (And by the way, how’d you find me?) You’re asking, “What’s Mary Worth? Is there an app for it?”

Well, Mary Worth, if you don’t already know, is an antique comic strip—dating back to 1940—about a widow of indeterminate elder age whose self-appointed role in the world is to nose around in other people’s business, solve their problems to her own satisfaction, then wrap things up by dispensing rosy platitudes while birds sing and the sun beams. It’s a throwback to an earlier era that Washington Post readers voted years ago to throw off the print pages. (The newspaper still links to it online.)

But I personally find Mary Worth to be so bad that it’s great. (Unlike such so-bad-they’re-insufferable comics as The Family Circus, which I’ll get to shortly.) Mary Worth—with her tight ‘do, matronly duds and presumably cold-showering boyfriend, Dr Jeff Cory—strikes me as being a Norman Rockwell character sprung to hideous life. Think, for instance, of that iconic Rockwell man who’s checking his watch, tapping his foot and impatiently waiting for his girlfriend to arrive at the Bijou. Sure, that illustration’s details look dated now, but the situation is timeless: Somebody’s always late, somebody’s always waiting.

Now, what would happen if, after the woman showed up, and after her beau quickly forgave her because she was pretty and smelled nice, a dowdily attired older lady were to step out of the drawing’s shadows and forcefully offer the startled pair her unsolicited counsel that tardiness is rude, that the young woman should apologize immediately, and that young man should show himself a little more respect?

In real life, the couple would tell the wrinkled buttinski to mind her own damn business. If this scene were happening in her comic strip, however, Mary Worth would beam as the grateful guy ‘n’ gal rode her sagacity train all the way to a much greater understanding of each other’s needs.

In a recent Mary Worth storyline, the eponymous biddy succeeded in getting a young couple together by 1) bullying the man into reconciling with his estranged father, thus resolving his longstanding commitment issues, and 2) cowing the woman into patiently waiting for the guy to straighten himself out. Also, 3) the dad conveniently corked off roughly a nanosecond after the reconciliation, leaving the marriage-bound couple free of any financial burden for the aging, sickly older man. It was classic Mary Worth—the melodrama, the setup for Mary’s deus ex machina intercession, the speed of resolution (father-son reconciliation and paternal demise within maybe a week), and the spotless tidiness of it all (matching the doubtless order of Mary’s closet and dresser drawers).

Such enthralling nonsense makes Mary Worth ripe for parody, of course. Wikipedia obliges with a compendium of examples from over the years, ranging from a 1950s lampoon by Mary’s late cartoon neighbor L’il Abner in the 1950s, through a Carol Burnett Show TV sketch in the 1970s titled “Mary Worthless,” to a Family Guy bit in which son Chris flattened the strip, Silly Putty-style, on his obese dad Peter’s belly and boasted, “Look what I can do to Mary Worth’s smug sense of self-satisfaction.”

So, clearly, I’m hardly the first or last reader to delight in the strip’s heavy-handed moralizing and anachronistic stylings and dialogue—not to mention the odd color scheme, in which every other character seems to have blue hair. Still, I’m not chagrined that so many other people are in on the inadvertent joke. To the contrary, I’m quite happy to continue, every workday morning, clicking in on this jihadist Miss Manners’ never-ending crusade to shape the populace of fictitious Santa Royale, California, to her exacting image of how the world should be—nay, must be.

Presumably the same reader polls that excised Mary Worth from the print edition of the Washington Post have kept The Family Circus on those same pages. Which is hard to figure on its face, because where Mary Worth can be campy fun, The Family Circus is unfailingly cloying, precious and vomit-inducing. But when you think about it, it’s really no mystery who comprises the seemingly inexplicable fan base of Bil, Thelma, Billy, Dolly, Jeffy, PJ, Kittycat and Barfy (the revealingly named dog). Who’s giving the love to The Family Circus? Senior citizens are.

In fact, there may be no firmer proof of the ossification of print-subscriber bases than the continuing publication of The Family Circus in well over a thousand newspapers. In many senses it’s a perfect fit for children of the Depression. Like that demographic, the cartoon is frugal—in The Family Circus’s case, as regards originality, imagination, cleverness, even number of panels (just one). Like many a septuagenarian, it’s traditional in its God-and-family sensibilities. And like many a grandpa, the comic’s “humor” breadbasket— Kids Say the Darnedest Things—is pull-my-finger corny. Never mind that most of the darned things uttered by Family Circus kids sound like outtakes rejected from Art Linkletter’s 1960s show for sounding too coached and artificially saccharine.

Other cartoonists have amusingly parodied cartoonist Bil Keane’s Family Circus characters and groan-inducing gimmicks, such as the circuitous dotted-line routes the kids take to get places, the dead grandfather who occasionally hovers benevolently over the proceedings, and the mischievous characters “Ida Know” and “Not Me”—ghostly embodiments of the children’s excuse-making when they bust a vase or sock a baseball through a window. Family Circus characters have been drawn into funny sequences in such comic strips as Pearls Before Swine, Dilbert and Zippy the Pinhead. And just this week came word that Twentieth Century Fox plans to make a live-action Family Circus movie.

Hopefully the movie, too, will be a parody, because 90 minutes of Family Circus characters played straight would induce insulin shock. (And who’d shell out the money to watch an earnest Family Circus movie? My mom, who’s 79, predictably adores the cartoon, but she and my dad probably last paid full price at the cinema when The Sting debuted.)

I can only hope the Family Circus movie will be made in collaboration with the satirists at The Onion. That’s where I first read the news, under the headline “Single-panel comic strip to become single-joke film franchise.” That piece praised the strip as “brilliantly deconstructionist” because it “subverts the notion that comic strips should exist in strip form or be inherently comic.” The article described The Family Circus as “the misadventures of four hydrocephalic children whose abnormal accumulation of cranial fluid causes them to interpret everything an adult says incredibly literally, then repeat their misunderstandings, to the laughter of a cruel world.”

The Onion, too, questioned any film treatment’s potential for box-office success, given that “we’re fairly certain most Family Circus fans exist solely as grim-faced specters hovering over their grandchildren in the clouds, waging silent war for their souls against the itinerant demons Ida Know and Not Me.”

Given its comparative obscurity at this stage of its cartoon life, I can’t see Mary Worth similarly being turned into a movie, even as a parody. Which is just as well, from many standpoints. Not the least of which is the inevitability that any film version made in the next few years would star the dreadfully overexposed Betty White, doing her “sassy senior” thing.

Do I want to see a randy Mary Worth exchanging her sensible dress and pearls for a bustier, intent on rocking Dr Jeff Cory’s world? No thanks! I’d rather just keep visiting my favorite goody-two-shoes in the (online) funny papers.