Morty tries to wriggle free, but the stranger’s grip tightens. Growling into his ear to “let this happen”, the stranger thrusts Morty against the bathroom sink and then into a bathroom cubicle. Morty’s cries for help go unheard — it is only when he throws a lucky punch that the stranger is caught off-guard, and ends up head-first in the toilet, unconscious.

If this scene makes for difficult reading, viewing it is not much easier. But it is also extremely funny — principally because the assailant is an oversized, anthropomorphic jellybean. Still, this is quite heavy stuff for a cartoon show — a far cry from the light-heartedness of The Simpsons— and yet it is becoming the new norm in animated comedy. Edgy content including substance abuse, sexual impropriety and depression have all come to define the latest wave of adult cartoons, which are flourishing in an industry that, ironically, can no longer take a joke.

Suggested reading

Who called the fun police?

By Richard Godwin

Save for a few small but ultimately inconsequential acts of insurrection, a culture of conformity has quietly swept through comedy. The fear of losing one’s career to a bad joke or a past transgression has left comedians afraid to take on risky material, and forced directors to leave the genre altogether. Just look at Will Ferrell’s career, an actor who went from Blades of Glory and Anchorman to films like Daddy’s Home and Holmes & Watson, to track comedy’s precipitous decline. With a few exceptions, Hollywood hasn’t made a genuinely funny film in the last 10 years.

Adult cartoons are filling this comedic vacuum, thanks to shows such as F is For Family, which centres on a dysfunctional 1970s Irish-American suburban family; Bojack Horseman, a talking horse dealing from the fallout of his TV career; and Rick and Morty (which returns to screens on Thursday), whose eponymous characters travel to different galaxies for a series of zany adventures. By refusing to subscribe to the narrowing confines of ‘acceptable’ comedy, they are fronting a counterculture that is providing a safe haven for disaffected comedy fans around the world.

To some degree, cartoons have always played this role. Shows such as South Park and Family Guy revel in causing as much outrage as possible while also airing on mainstream networks. That is largely due to the form: cartoon characters are detached from reality in a way that actors are not, allowing them to push harder against the boundaries of acceptable discourse. It would take a brave actor to sing ‘I need a Jew’ or play the Queen killing herself, particularly in today’s hyper-politicised, knee-jerk climate.

Suggested reading

Why the woke can't make jokes

By Gareth Roberts

Shock is a common currency in adult cartoons. But when overused, it becomes redundant and ineffectual. So in its singular pursuit of controversy, South Park regularly strays into this territory: jokes can come across as crass and boorish, and viewers grow numb. But as we follow the lives of Frank Murphy and Bojack in F is For Family and Bojack Horseman, this shock is deployed for pathos, not humour, which gives these two-dimensional characters a more 3-D feel.

Both protagonists, haunted (and taunted) by memories of poor life decisions decades earlier, are deeply unhappy: this manifests through depression in Bojack and rage in Frank. The latter even strikes his children. In one confrontation with his son, this anger unravels to reveal a deep self-loathing. On confronting his son about failing school, Kevin retorts that he hates school, and Frank responds: “Well I hate my life but I keep on doing it; I’ve got a mortgage, I’ve got dependents and I’ve got to go downtown every damn day to run that airport.” Dismissively, Kevin replies: “Please, you’re just a baggage handler”, before Frank squares up to him and says: “What the fuck did you just call me?”

Taken out of context, there is not much humour in this scene. If anything, it is an all-too-real display of what goes on behind the closed doors of a family home — so much so that we might forget that we are watching a cartoon. And yet, it is this visceral sense of the real in the unreal — this cartoon realism — that makes the show so funny.

Similarly in Bojack Horseman, never mind that the character is a talking horse, he still suffers from human vices — narcissism, substance abuse, and sexual infidelity. Over entire seasons, we watch the side effects of this destructive behaviour play out. So, for instance, when an old friend dying of terminal cancer refuses to accept Bojack’s apology for abandoning him many years ago, our hero is left without closure. Throughout the remaining seasons of the show, the shadow of incidents like these hang over nearly all of his interactions with other characters. And in refusing to exculpate Bojack, the writers ask us the same questions of its protagonist as they do of our own culture: will we forgive Bojack and more importantly, should we?

Suggested reading

Why coronavirus is a laughing matter

By Giles Fraser

Neither Bojack Horseman nor F is For Family provide any kind of moral guidance. Part of their appeal is that they are non-didactic, which is rare today. In recent years, late night comedy shows like the BBC’s The Mash Report and SNL have sounded more like political rallies than satirical programmes. Since 2016, opening monologues have descended into virtue-signalling rants attacking Brexit, Trump and pretty much anything mildly Right-wing. Even figures inside the BBC have expressed their displeasure at pastiche shows like The Mash Report, describing it as “self satisfied, self adulatory, unchallenged Left-wing propaganda”.

Of course, there are clear commercial incentives at play — audiences are typically urban, liberal and middle-class and networks will cater to that — but it is a troubling indictment on the health of our comedic culture when clapping during these shows is more common than laughter.

That is not to suggest that Trump and Brexit aren’t fair game. It might be low-hanging fruit, but those sides won and comedy’s golden rule is to never punch down. Yet while there is a tacit acknowledgement of the political ascendancy of the populist Right, it is a different story when it comes to the cultural power of the progressive Left.

Some comedians, like Dave Chappelle, have tried to address this. In his  ‘Stick and Stones’ special on Netflix, Chapelle went after some of the Left’s shibboleths: the LGBTQ community, the #MeToo movement and cancel culture. His reward was a vicious backlash calling him “cruel”, “transphobic”, “misogynistic”, saying that he had “lost his comic touch” (in spite of winning a Grammy for the performance). The chasm between critics and audience could not have been more stark on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes: the former giving the show a 0% rating while fans gave it 99%. Chapelle survived the criticism, but as he wryly noted in the special, “this is the worst time ever to be a celebrity”.

Adult cartoons are an igloo of shelter in this blizzard of hysteria. Even so, cracks do appear. Most notably when Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, an Indian-American character from The Simpsons in the character was removed from the show because of its negative perpetuation of South Asian stereotypes. The cancellation of Apu marked a new step in the culture wars: that cartoons, like words and people, could be removed from the public sphere as easily as they entered.

With 2.5 million people expected to tune in to the mid-season return of Rick and Morty next week, the show’s success could serve as an example for others to follow. The health and vigour of the adult cartoon industry shows that the appetite for comedy remains as strong — if not stronger — than ever. For now, the comedy industry is on life support. It is cartoons that are keeping it alive.

If you want a truly fantastical world – a place where evolution has gone cubist and the boundaries between animate and inanimate cannot be taken for granted – you might prefer BirdTown, home of Tuca and Bertie.

Tuca and Bertie is an animated sitcom on Netflix about an anxious wannabe pastry chef named Bertie and her off-the-leash best friend Tuca. Bertie is a songthrush, Tuca is a toucan, and they live in an apartment building in a sort of an avian version of New York.

Bertie’s boyfriend is a robin. Her colleagues include a pigeon and a cocksure rooster. But BirdTown also contains other animals (migrants presumably) and the odd human (since we’re animals too, right?)

There are also anthropomorphic plants who walk around on two legs – including a sexy leaf lady who lives across the hall from Tuca and occasionally takes her top off. Some of the buildings have breasts. Mobile phones periodically sprout arms and legs. And the subway trains are giant snakes.

All this emerged from the imagination of Lisa Hanawalt, a rare female in the male-dominated world of animation. Her anthropomorphic art provided the look (and, clearly, a lot of the deviance) of Netflix’s other animated masterpiece, Bojack Horseman, co-created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. That show is about a washed up 1990s TV horse, and it’s set in a half-animal, half-human Los Angeles called Hollywoo.

More from this author

'The Inner Level', inequality and why sad is the new hip

By Richard Godwin

Tuca and Bertie is a bit like Bojack, but in a major key. What it lacks in male angst, it makes up for in unhinged feminine joy. Comedians Ali Wong and Tiffany Haddish clearly had a blast doing the voices. And yet if you were to read about it without having seen it, you might imagine it was all rather serious and worthy, with a capital hashtag.

The Guardian has described it as a “feminist fairy tale”. The New York Times applauded one storyline involving Bertie’s macho/predatory boss, Pastry Pete for revealing “dark truths” about the restaurant industry. In the New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum frames the show (along with Fleabag and Bojack) as part of TV’s wider reckoning with #MeToo. “[These] plots are not so much about individuals as they are about the systems around them, and the troubling sensation of recognizing a bad pattern by seeing that you are part of it”.

I detected a similarly portentous note creeping into the reviews of Cuz I Love You, the recent album by the American rapper-singer-flautist Lizzo. I like Lizzo. It’s hard not to. Her signature song, ‘Juice’, is about how great it is to have a big bottom and it will not fail to make you smile.

“It ain’t my fault that I’m out here makin’ news / I’m the pudding in the proof / Gotta blame it on my juice,” she runneth over in the chorus. Another of her songs, ‘Soulmate’, is about how masturbation is fun. “True love ain’t something you can buy yourself / True love finally happens when you by yourself”.

But again, if you had read about Cuz I Love You without having heard it, you might imagine that it was a sombre march upon serioustown. ‘Juice’ becomes a “statement” about “body positivity”; ‘Soulmate’ is an “empowering” message about “self-care” and “sex-positivity”.

“Lizzo can make masturbation seem like a political act”, notes the NYT critic Craig Jenkins. That’s better than making a political act seem like masturbation, I suppose, but still. Why must we turn juice into gruel?

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Lizzo’s music is less deserving of critical attention than Radiohead or Kendrick Lamar or Joni Mitchell. Nor that Tuca and Bertie’s exploration of female friendship is somehow less ‘important’ than Bojack Horseman’s treatment of male depression (which, by the fourth season, becomes about the least interesting thing about Bojack anyway).

And it’s not as if these critics are making this stuff up, either. Hanawalt has explicitly said that Pastry Pete was inspired by some of the creepy male gatekeepers in the comic book world. By the end of the season, we realise why Bertie is so anxious, and we’re deep into the jelly of trauma, abuse and recovery – albeit in a storyline that involves a battle with a giant crab on a lake made of jam.

But that episode reclaims the right to be silly too. It features a wise owl (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) who makes delicate little dioramas out of broken shells. “I fill the shells with scenes from my life and dreams and I take it all very seriously,” she tells Tuca. Before bursting out laughing. “Just kidding! I like jokes.” Jokes! Remember them?

What I mean is, there is something a little absurd in this clickbaity tendency to judge all culture in terms of its political relevance. Anyone would assume that the most worthwhile thing art could do would be to comment on #MeToo, or empower the big-bottomed community – and the rest of the stuff (the funny stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff that you can’t quite get out of your head) were mere padding.

As Rebecca Liu has argued in regard to writers such as Phoebe-Waller Bridge, Sally Rooney and Kristen Roupenian, emerging female artists are often weighed down with an imagined “significance” relating to some message of empowerment – and not allowed simply to exist on their own terms.

Suggested reading

How punditry polluted the novel

By Douglas Murray

There is an obvious problem with the “issues” approach when it comes to art made by women and minorities – it’s another form of ghettoisation. To frame Tuca and Bertie as a post #MeToo drama says: “Hey, don’t watch this if you’re not with the program!” People don’t tend to say that kind of thing about Game of Thrones.

Lizzo, meanwhile, clearly finds it all a little constraining:

All these fucking hashtags to convince people that the way you look is fine. Isn’t that fucking crazy? I say I love myself, and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s so brave. She’s so political.’ For what? All I said is ‘I love myself, bitch!’

It all marks an impoverishment of our wider critical discourse – an unintended consequence of trying to expand it. Back in 2012, the Stanford professor Sianne Ngai wrote a fascinating book called Our Aesthetic Categories in which she attempted expand critical theory beyond traditional categories like “beautiful” and “sublime”. She chose to examine three “marginal” categories that had emerged in our late-capitalist era: “cute”, “zany” and “interesting”.

If you look at the sort of content people share on social media, you might see what she was getting at: we judge kitten pix “cute” and long-reads “interesting”. And then it becomes tempting to consider other categories too: “relatable” “relevant” and “problematic” are labels that crop up, over and over again. And they’re not necessarily positive.

The reductive charge of being “problematic” has already condemned the 1990s sitcom Friends in the eyes of half of the internet: so hard to look past the privilege of its all-white cast! And that’s before we’ve talked about the fat-shaming or homophobia. Vintage Simpsons episodes are newly vexed, thanks to the problematic portrayal of Apu. And can you listen to Strangeways, Here We Come anymore, given Morrissey’s views on immigration? Many people can’t.

But if “problematic” politics are enough to condemn songs and shows we might once have enjoyed (Johnny Marr’s guitar be damned!), the inverse must also be true. A show like Tuca and Bertie must be good because it’s coming from the right place politically, and because it has relevant things to say. It’s also doubtful it would have been commissioned prior to #MeToo.

But “relevance” of this sort is primarily a media category, not an artistic one. It’s what a journalist sent to interview an artist might be (regretfully) expected to wheedle out. It’s what makes for a hot take on Twitter. But it isn’t usually why most of us turn to art.

Suggested reading

What's the point of political fiction?

By Sam Leith

Artists can take us away from this world and point towards other possible worlds. It would be nice to think they could aspire to irrelevance – the sheer pleasure of creation. There’s nothing particularly relevant about John Coltrane’s saxophone on My Favourite Things and this is why I never tire of it.

So, sure, listen to Lizzo because she’s body-positive. But also because her rhymes are delicious and she’s as funky as a dog in shades. And it’s OK to watch Tuca and Bertie because it’s silly and playful and sexy, the talking plants really are something, and the cartoon form allows Hanawalt to go to places where conventional TV can’t go.

In collapsing the boundaries between human and animal, animal and vegetable – even animate and inanimate objects – it seems to me that Hanawalt has done something miraculous and Goddesslike. She has imagined a new world. So let’s not drag her back down to this one.