Politics & Power Quote by Johan Huizinga

A Sunday comic strip is supposed to be harmless: bright ink, broad jokes, a weekly ritual that asks nothing of you but a smirk. Huizinga’s line turns that innocence into an indictment. The humiliation isn’t that the jokes are bad; it’s that the culture can accept bad jokes as comfort, even as a kind of moral permission slip. He’s sniffing out a peculiarly modern shame: mass entertainment that is cheerful by design, yet quietly coercive in its simplicity.

Huizinga, a historian of play and culture, understood that “play” is never just play. Games, rituals, and amusements teach a society what to value and what to ignore. The Sunday funny pages look like leisure, but they’re also a weekly catechism in smallness: a training in predictable punchlines, safe mischief, and the refusal of complexity. “Innocence” is the trap door. Because the comics present themselves as apolitical, they can circulate a flattened view of human life without ever having to defend it. You’re meant to consume and move on, not think, not argue, not remember.

The question form matters. “Do you know anything...” is a dare posed as casual conversation, a rhetorical shoulder-check. It implies the answer should be obvious to anyone paying attention, and it spreads the blame: if you’re not embarrassed, maybe you’ve already been acclimated. In an America of booming mass media, the funny pages become a symbol of how a modern public can be kept docile not by brutality, but by benevolent triviality.