This 1964 ‘Nancy’ Comic Had A Better Pronouns Joke Than Anyone Elon Musk Would Retweet
Since “comedy is now legal on Twitter,” can we get Nancy a complimentary blue check?
Every alt-right influencer, CEO, comedian and politician has a pronouns joke — or, it would be more accurate to say, every alt-right influencer, CEO, comedian and politician has the same pronouns joke:
- “My pronouns are prosecute/Fauci.”
- “My pronouns are vote/Trump.”
- Or, during the time of year when Starbucks’ holiday-themed cups create a national emergency in the right-wing media, “My pronouns are merry/Christmas.”
It’s the same joke, endlessly repeated and usually quote tweeted by billionaire demagogue Elon Musk during his daily 18-hour Twitter scroll.
This article not your thing? Try these...
Thankfully, there is a fan page on Twitter devoted to Ernie Bushmiller’s syndicated comic strip Nancy that can teach Musk and his friends how to make a smart, funny and original joke about pronouns — or, at least, it can teach Musk how to repost the strip, probably with Bushmiller’s name cropped out of the screenshot.
Bushmiller first drew the precocious eight-year-old cartoon character Nancy in the comic strip Fritzi Ritzi in 1933 before the prolific cartoonist spun her off into her own strip five years later. Bushmiller would continue to draw Nancy and her antics in her eponymous comic until his death in 1982, which means that, under Bushmiller’s authorship, Nancy made 49 years’ worth of jokes without once repeating literal Nazi propaganda about transgender people or publicly professing that she wishes her own transgender daughter whom she didn't bother helping to raise would die.
As it turns out, the grammatical structure of pronouns aren’t some existential danger to Western civilization, and their presence in humor doesn’t have to be baked into dubiously sourced bigotry and fearmongering. But, if any Musk fans feel that their cisgender identity is threatened by an innocuous joke told by Nancy (she/her), they may have trouble blocking the Nancy fan account thanks to Musk’s new Twitter rules — they can, however, always drown it out of their feed with pro-bigotry, alt-right Dilbert strips courtesy of Scott Adams.