Kicking the Habit: Cartoons About the Catholic Church

Rating:
Summary: From someone who should be in this book's corner
Review: First a disclaimer. I was born Catholic to Irish parents, spent 17 years in Catholic educational institutions, and have many issues (to put it mildly) with the Roman Catholic Church. I love scathing Catholic humor because it works to dissipate my residual antagonism and because, considering the 1950's Catholic culture I lived through, some of its artifacts, folkways, and pastimes are sitting ducks for comedy. Try telling non-Catholics or younger Catholics about the bottle of shoe white that sat next to a missions collection box in school so we could give to the missions and use the shoe white so the whites of our requisite saddle shoes would be white enough to prevent a detention and it's is hard not to convey the humor. It was mad!

I don't know whether Rina Piccolo is Gen-X and therefore different-minded but cartoon after cartoon in this book is simply not funny. The drawings resemble those from 1950's cocktail napkins, cartoon postcards from non-scenic places, and Playboy--those line drawings of women with big bare bottoms and pointy breasts with obese, leering old men. Perhaps this is what tittering burlesque humor is all about and I'm just lacking that sensibility.

I do think Piccolo misreads the cultural repression, though. For example, for all the lunatic behavior of nuns (and I have many stories!), they were women teaching 50-student classrooms unaided and doing it for nothing. In the midst of the madness were sisters who influenced us positively. And many of those same nuns are still busy as octogenarians, working on social justice issues, women transformed by Vatican II to become the Church's great progressives.

This is not to spoil the fun by advocating the sanctimonious, but to say that the essential paradox of life must make itself felt even in the most over-the-top irreverence. For her to have eliminated every trace of warmth from the humor suggests a rigidity in Piccolo that I can't help but think is out of proportion to anything she has experienced.

But that may be the key to the failure of the book for me. She may be aware of the authoritarian arrogance of the Catholic church and be (rightfully) furious about it, but her "humor" is a retaliation to that, as though drawing a bishop in a jock strap will even the score somehow and bring this gargantuan institution to its knees.

I'm currently worshipping as a Lutheran and bought this book in the hope of using its humor to give insight into Catholic culture in talks I'm giving on Catholicism at my church. The very best religious humor can pull out the stops of irreverance, and torture the sacred cows without mercy, but it also gives insight. (Try GROWING UP CATHOLIC by Meara, et al. or Ed Stivender's RAISED CATHOLIC.) I may be overreacting to this book because I believed that it couldn't disappoint me. And 'd be glad to see alternative viewpoints from those who get its jokes so that perhaps I'd get them too. Left to my own devices, though, I'm not its audience and I'm at a loss to know who is.

Rating:
Summary: A lot of fun and very funny
Review: Rina Piccolo is a rarity: a woman who sometimes writes cartoons in the mode of male stand-up comics, in the tradition of Lenny Bruce--offbeat outrage. The first strip I ever saw by Rina was a drawing of King Kong atop the Empire State Building, with the huge gorilla thinking to himself that his genitals fit perfectly into the window. It was so absurd that I had to laugh. I could also however imagine someone clicking her tongue disdainfully in reaction to the cartoon.
Rina Piccolo delights in taking cliched images and providing a bizarrely twisted caption. If you are easily offended, Rina is not for you. But if you believe there's no such thing as a "sacred cow" you may find her sense of lunacy refreshing and unique. This is not a gentle ribbing of The Church, but a skewering. Will recent church scandals make these cartoons more socially acceptable? Perhaps.

Rating:
Summary: Rina Piccolo: Outrageous cartoons, attack dog mode!
Review: Rina Piccolo is a rarity: a woman who sometimes writes cartoons in the mode of male stand-up comics, in the tradition of Lenny Bruce--offbeat outrage. The first strip I ever saw by Rina was a drawing of King Kong atop the Empire State Building, with the huge gorilla thinking to himself that his genitals fit perfectly into the window. It was so absurd that I had to laugh. I could also however imagine someone clicking her tongue disdainfully in reaction to the cartoon.
Rina Piccolo delights in taking cliched images and providing a bizarrely twisted caption. If you are easily offended, Rina is not for you. But if you believe there's no such thing as a "sacred cow" you may find her sense of lunacy refreshing and unique. This is not a gentle ribbing of The Church, but a skewering. Will recent church scandals make these cartoons more socially acceptable? Perhaps.