394: Anita Bryant 10 - Little Annie Fanny

“Playboy” August 1979
Writer: Harvey Kurtzman
Artist: Will Elder

The last page from an instalment of Kurtzman and Elder's lavishly composed and illustrated if underachieving “Little Annie Fanny” strip. This time the contemporary social trend having a cockeyed glance cast across it is Frisbee playing. Yeeerrrss, not exactly reaching for satirical heights there, I’m afraid. In this instance, the joke is that in all the running and jumping and dashing and catching involved in the so-called supposed sport, the joggling of the title character’s colossal mammalian appurtenances distracts the opposing teams with simply hilarious consequences. So yes, it’s “Playboy” and its booby gags, which I wouldn’t bother posting except it’s the necessary set-up for the final panel and the appearance of a new team who won’t fail foul of their gambit:

Clichés to tick off:
Hands on hips
Prissy look
Bitchiness
Lisping – “Frithbeeth” indeed!
Bruce

And even though it’s almost two and a half years since she first started her campaign, you can just make out that the frisbee in the last panel features a very sour-looking Anita Bryant with the legend “Anita sucks”. Nice to be remembered.

176: Gay Bodybuilding 2

in “Playboy” December 1977
by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder.

A few relevant excerpts from an instalment of Little Annie Fanny about bodybuilders, inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger's then novel rise to fame. Kurtzman and Roth flirt with the homo-eroticism that all this preening narcissism suggests. But again, in the final panel, a fag is a sissy, so there’s no confusion.

62 -Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder: Little Annie Fanny

Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder in “Playboy”, January 1976

A relatively early cartoon about the burgeoning gay scene. And in the pages of “Playboy” no less! Each instalment of “Annie Fanny” was a comic investigation of some new social scene or trend. Annie was always the unwitting stooge, largely oblivious to the effect that her pneumatic charms had on all the other characters. While she naively went about interrogating anyone and everyone about this instalment’s new fashionable milieu, others were trying to divest her of her clothes and attempt a completely different kind of social intercourse. And again in the all gay environment of the bathhouse, Annie is still the only character getting any. Other than one kissing couple tucked away in the shadows of the last horizontal panel, none of the other gays are doing anything more suggestive with each other than dancing or holding hands. There is a weird conflict in this cartoon between gays being sexless so as not to actually disturb any of the readers and yet also trying to cram the panels with as many kinky and perverse images as possible. Homosexuality being the gateway to new realms of freewheeling perversity, we get diesel dykes, transvestites and transsexuals (the penis is particularly unexpected –none of the other gays have one, so the penis in “Playboy” is actually representative of a totally abnormal sexuality that has to be removed. Hmmm.) Indeed, this carton desperately needs the lesbians if we are to get the traditional “Annie Fanny” ending. This bathhouse is not a scene for sexual expression or hot and sweaty man-on-man activity, and all the gays here are limp-wristed, skipping, mincing, coquettish, lisping and fey. At the very moment that gays are creating a new forthright sexual identity/stereotype, while Kurtzman can recognise that this new scene exists, he can only exercise the old weak, almost unsexual, gay stereotype. “National Lampoon” at least always did homosexuals the favour of recognising that at the bottom of all their weird kinks and feyness, they were also strongly sex-motivated.
Of course, this being a Kurtzman and Elder comic, it’s worth looking in all the corners to find all the “eye-pops” – hidden gags.

42 - Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder: Little Annie Fanny

by Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder in “Playboy”, January 1970

A tiny extract from January, 1970’s instalment of “Little Annie Fanny”. The strip, a luxuriously painted comic satire on social mores and sexual humour, had been running in “Playboy” since October 1962, but this is the first time there had been any hint of homosexuality. Kurtzman, the original creator of "Mad" magazine, had to submit all his work to Hugh Hefner who was a big admirer of Kurtzman. So if Kurtzman had made any previous attempts at humour about gays, they had all been nixed.
The shock of the joke is not just that the character portrayed is gay despite his appearance, but an actual joke about homosexuality has appeared in "Playboy". “Playboy” was a big part of the sexual revolution of the 60s, but even the vaguest possibility of homosexuality tended to be absent from its pages - both positive comment or any unpleasant sneering either. Omerta (manly silence).
By 1999, “Playboy” would have no problems printing the comic strip exploits of “Saturday Night Live”’s “Ambiguously Gay Duo”.