Bad Bugs Bunny
Through Sat Dec 8 at the Grand Illusion.

White animators in the early part of the 20th century drew exaggerated racial caricatures because they were squeamish about other races. Now, whites resurrect these embarrassingly obsolete grotesques because we're squeamish about the past. White audiences used to guffaw at the "other" in these cartoons; now they get to laugh nervously at the "self."

Dennis Nyback's Bad Bugs Bunny revue is back, unearthing once again rare prints of the racist and sexist cartoons that reveal America's bigoted roots.

Many of the cartoons are not as outré as you might think. In one short, a dopey black hunter tries to shoot Bugs Bunny, and the wily rabbit outwits him time after time. Sound familiar? It's a black Elmer Fudd. In fact, the black character in this cartoon has many of the same mannerisms as Fudd, gets suckered in the same way Fudd does (by being literally turned into a lollipop), and even has the same body type. The hapless hunter has been deracialized--not so much "turned white" as neutralized, distilled to a Bugs Bunny gray. A similar fate has befallen the far more disturbing and recurring caricature of blacks as plate-lipped cannibals. Though this most perverse white fear--that people will cook you alive and eat you if you stumble upon their society--has persisted throughout cartoon history, it, too, has been deracialized, even dehumanized: the man-eaters have become Tasmanian devils and big orange fur balls named "Gossamer."

As bleak a picture as these cartoons paint, it's notable that the animators weren't necessarily forced to clean up their acts. Cartoons like these weren't censored until the late '50s, well after the 'toon cleansing had begun in earnest (Elmer Fudd was born in 1940). Perhaps the creators decided on their own that the crutch of race humor was unnecessary, that the slapstick hijinks were funny enough (brilliant enough, I'd say) to carry their cartoons to a clamorous "That's all, folks!" ending. Is it too hopeful or credulous to think that they evolved?