THE FUNNY FONDLED FAIRYTALE FROG

In the summer of 1981, when Britain’s royal wedding was the big news, America’s humorists briefly made "Cinderella" their favorite fairytale. But once the newlyweds were managing to get into the media only by sassing the queen, gestating a baby, or posing in bikinis, an earlier favorite climbed back to the preeminence it had enjoyed for a number of years. Television script writers, advertisers, comic strip artists, cartoonists, columnists, and sundry higherbrowed jokesters again were having fun most often with "The Frog Prince" in comparison with other märchen.

Even during the premarital ballyhoo, one cartoonist merged the competing tales when he pictured Diana strolling hand in hand with Charles and wondering whether England’s royal troubles had ended. One glance at her Prince Charming would show they hadn’t: he’d turned into a frog. Soon after the nuptials Prince Charles himself helped recall "The Frog Prince" by giving his bride a silver frog sculpture to serve as a figurehead for her car.

During a typical six week period just before the royal wedding: In a Bob Hope TV skit, Phyllis Diller, cast as a princess, bussed a frog; he became a prince and bussed her back; she turned into a frog. Four syndicated comic strips played with osculations that humanized frogs or frogized humans. Stationery stores sold greeting cards that portrayed bekissed frogs that at once changed into humans or vice versa. A mail order catalogue advertised men’s T-shirts with a frog’s picture captioned "The Handsome Prince" on them. Three other catalogues offered T-shirts or aprons labeled "You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs Before You Find Your Dream Prince."

Still another listed an amphibian-topped music box that plays "Some Day Your Prince Will Come" ($13.95 plus postage). An x-rated movie advertisement in newspapers showed a frog leering at a prince and princess who were necking; the caption tactfully revised the song title to "Some Day My Prince Will Arrive." Ann Landers’ widely circulated advice column headed an exchange, "They Want Princes, and Not Toads." A folklore journal prepared for publication a learned article, "Modern Anglo-American Variants of ‘The Frog Prince.’"¹

And getting into the spirit of the thing though a mite vague about cause-effect relationships, a Japanese auto maker advertised with a

television film: A frog appeared on the screen; there was a gaudy explosion; he was transformed into a Subaru.

These related phenomena challenge any trend-spotter worth his salt to survey them and similar ones and, if possible, to figure out their profound significance.

For centuries frogs have shaped our lives. As folklore proves, in addition to curing toothaches and cancers, they brought warts, wealth, immortality, and death. God used them to plague old Pharaoh. The little creatures gave their lives to help William Harvey trace blood circulation and to educate Luigi Galvani about electricity and generations of students about biology. From Aesop, Aristophanes, and La Fontaine to Mark Twain, Owen Wister, and John Steinbeck, frogs were featured in imaginative literature.

But it wasn’t until the last two and a half decades that caressed, caressing, and transformed frogs hopped into innumerable sketches, jokes, stories, poems, comic strips, and cartoons to pay their disrespects to one ancient fairy tale for a mass audience’s amusement. The story from which the spin-offs spun was the one that folktale indexes summarize this way: "Type 440.² The Frog Prince. . . . A maiden promises herself to a frog in a spring. The frog comes to the door, the table, the bed. He turns into a prince." And instead of reverently retelling this märchen, the popular recyclings leave out most of the story, greatly modify part of it, and poke derisive fun at almost every detail in the original narrative.

Playful greeting cards offer recipients special birthday treats if they follow the traditional magic formula: "Kiss the ugly frog and he’ll become a handsome prince." Open one card, and the amphibian turns into a mongrel named Prince. Unfold another, and you’re told, "The joke’s on you, WART LIPS!" In the syndicated comic strip, "Wizard of Id," a frog tells an ill-favored crone that a witch hexed him, and "only a kiss from a beautiful woman can turn me back." The hag’s smack transforms him into a dog. "You didn’t tell me you were a dog!" "We’re even!" Oral yarns have incredulous parents discover a young man in bed with a concupiscent daughter. In the Ozarks: "She told her father about the little old toadfrog, and the witch that put a spell on him, and how it all happened. But the old man didn’t believe the story, any more than you do."³ In New York City, "You’d be surprised at the difficulty she had, in the morning, convincing her mother."⁴

All too often, frogs simply refuse to cooperate. One in a cartoon is doing his frantic damnedest to hop away from a buxom old woman

who lustfully chases him. A comic strip frog, similarly harassed by a harridan, hollers, "Knock it off, you old bat. I like being a frog!"

A frog may fail to keep his promise. An Esquire drawing portrays a disgusted princess at dawn, scowling at a smirking frog beside her in her bed and saying, "You lied!" One Penthouse cartoon shows a nude princess sourly watching a surfeited frog as he redons his pants; another shows an amphibian accomplishing his foul purpose while his disgusted victim complains, "Hey, I thought you were supposed to change to a prince first!"

The spell may be only partly broken. A newspaper cartoon and a Penthouse drawing show a semi-prince griping about the low voltage of a princess’s recent smack—obvious since the osculation has not defrogified his lower extremities. Even after the caress seems to have worked, his royal highness may retain awkward pre-disenchantment habits: In Harper’s Magazine, then Playboy, then a newspaper cartoon, and then a comic strip, the prince embarrasses his mate in front of God and everybody by darting out a long tongue and catching a fly.

The Bob Hope blackout summarized earlier combines a couple of foul-ups that previous jokesters had exploited: A Charles Addams cartoon in the New Yorker and a Valentine had had a princess buss an amphibian, then become one herself; and a Muppet show had had frog Kermit kiss a human bride and thereby turn her into a frog.

Even when a disenchantment comes off according to schedule, several spin-offs show, a "they-lived-happily-ever-after ending" may not follow. In a Ladies’ Home Journal cartoon, an enthroned king glares at his queen and growls, "If you must know, yes! I was happier when I was a frog." A poem in the New Yorker has the prince gripe because his human bedmate is unappealingly warm and, unlike a female frog, has "breasts . . . soft and dry as flour." A cartoon shows a troubled princess and her prince, still a frog, keeping an appointment with a marriage counselor. The comic strip "Momma" tacks a new one-liner onto an old favorite: "You know how before you find a prince, you have to kiss a lot of frogs? Well, even after you find a prince, you have to worry about his croaking." The warning has been justified by a newspaper drawing: Two ladies in waiting stand beside a prince’s robe and crown lying on the shore of a pool and stare at widening circles on the water as one says, "A shame. When he was a frog he was a swell swimmer.

Several cartoonists have made use of such underminings of the old tale and others to comment on current events. A queen tells a

dejected king who sits by a genealogical chart tracing his ancestry to an amphibian: "I told you you’d regret getting all involved in this Roots business!" A princess asks a visiting frog, "How do I know you’re a prince and not just a presidential candidate passing through?" After a female labeled "Iran" kissed Ayatollah Khomeini, he turns into a frog. A winged sprite labeled "Congress" waves a wand above a frog labeled "Social Security"; he shoots out his long tongue and slurps down his would-be disenchanter.

Any guess about the implications of these and similar jokes must take into account the popularity of fairy tales, the way they’ve been tampered with, and widespread feelings about them.

The many spin-offs from the Cinderella story, "The Frog Prince," and other märchen make one fact quite obvious—that the tales are known and remembered by a huge audience. All the playful indignities that artists and writers perpetrate would fail to get laughs if everyman, everywoman, and everychild did not recognize at once each deviation. And it is noteworthy that the incongruities that have to be seen—between wild imaginings and earthy naturalism—are of a sort that long have tickled Americans. (In old-fashioned tall tales, for instance.)

Poet Anne Sexton gave a likely reason for such familiarity: "They hit you—give you low blows—because you see, you learn them as a kid."⁵ The Grimm Brothers’ tales kept on hitting her as an adult; her retelling of them in verse was crucial to her survival and her development as an artist. Other authors testified that fairy tales nourished their creative genius in important ways, among them Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkein, Louis MacNeice, Randall Jarrell, Donald Barthelme, and Eudora Welty.⁶ And ever since märchen began to fascinate folklorists, not only writers but also scholars and scientists have venerated them. Beginning with Freud and Jung, psychologists agreed that they were profoundly influential. So did anthropologists and social scientists. Albert Einstein told a mother that the best way to prepare her son to succeed in science was to "read fairy tales, more fairy tales, and even more fairy tales" to him.⁷

Enthusiasts long have protested against tampering with such narratives. Back in 1853, Charles Dickens fiercely attacked a "perverter" of "the literature of our childhood." "It is a matter of grave importance," he said, "that Fairy tales should be respected, . . . as much preserved in their simplicity and purity . . as if they were actual fact. Whoever alters them is guilty of an act of

presumption."⁸ More recent admirers of the genre have issued similar warnings. Critic Roger Sale in 1978 summed up their beliefs when he classed such stories with "the great kinds of literature," noticed that "they do what no other literature does," and held that "the ancientness of the tales" and "their persistence in so many different countries . . . make them a literature that latter day people need to treat with great care and respect."⁹

So some advocates of high regard for märchen call pranksome spin-offs "twistings," "misrepresentations," or even "attacks." Max Lüthi, a leading scholar of the tales, predicts that, as they have been in the past, the frivolous distortions will be forgotten: "Astonishingly unyielding, the Grimm märchen always have overcome attacks, parodies, and travesties. They are impregnable and will put down distortions."¹⁰

This may be. But a change that is worth noticing has taken place. Writers, it is true, long have made jokes about different fairy tales, and about spells, transformations, and other fairy tale conventions. But in the past the audiences who laughed at such tamperings were, with few exceptions, relatively small groups of disillusioned, cynical intellectuals. The vast majority didn’t encounter, let alone find amusing, the burlesques. In the past, as folklorist Hermann Bausig says, "the folk belief in magic was much too innate" to permit widespread appreciation of the spin-offs.¹¹ Nowadays, the public that makes posters, cartoons, jokebooks, newspapers, and TV advertisements pay no longer is immunized by faith. The Lady in Dubuque, excommunicated in 1925 by the New Yorker, may not go for irreverent witticisms about motherhood, patriotism, or God, but she evidently giggles at today’s blasphemies against fairy tales.

"Blasphemies" may be too strong a word. But the jesters who have put down practically every detail in "The Frog Prince" and other venerable fairy tales thrive upon disbeliefs in things long considered sacred. They, and their audiences, take for granted the skepticism played up not long ago in a cartoon: When that much-admired schlemiel, Ziggy, asked in a bookstore for How to Beat Inflation, the clerk told him that it was out of stock but an equivalent substitute was available—Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Burlesques of a number of these indicate that what Russell Baker calls "a kind of rage—as if people are saying, ‘Let’s pull the temple down’"¹² is widely shared.

And the preeminence of irreverent "Frog Prince" takeoffs in particular signals burgeoning mass popularity of black—or at least dark grey—humor. During the first decades of the present century,

"Red Ridinghood," "Snow White," and "Cinderella" were the fairy tales most often debunked and derided. But in the last three decades, as has been noticed, except when "Cinderella" took over for a few summer weeks, the amphibian bridegroom tale has won and held first place. The rash of naughty cartoons featuring fondled and fondling amphibians in Esquire, Playboy, Playgirl, and Penthouse suggests why: This story offers parodists particularly good chances to joke about racy aspects of sex. Another victory in a popularity race among folktales supports this hypothesis—the triumph of the frog over a lengthy list of fauna which become bridegrooms of humans in märchen. (The most popular next to the frog is the Beast that Beauty weds; the least practical are the whale and the louse, for opposite reasons.) Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim tells why he believes the frog won:

Compared with lions or other ferocious beasts, the frog (or the toad) does not arouse fear; it is an animal which is not at all threatening. If it is experienced in a negative way, the feeling is one of disgust, as in "The Frog King." . . . What happens to both frog and girl confirms the appropriateness of disgust when one is not ready for sex. . . . Preconsciously the child connects the tacky, clammy sensations Which frogs (or toads) evoke in him with similar feelings he attaches to the sex organs.¹³

Anne Sexton rendered the feeling poetically in her poem, "The Frog Prince": "At the feel of the frog / the touch-me-nots explode / like electric slugs / . . . He says: Kiss me. Kiss me."¹⁴

However, as a leading folklore scholar, Kay F. Stone, has noticed, in "Der Froschkönig," placed at the very start of the Grimm Brothers’ famous collection, the frog says nothing of the sort. And the princess does not break the spell by giving the slithery creature a kiss—not at all—but by bashing him against the wall. Professor Stone wonders about the reason for the departure from the original version, and suggests a likely one:

In our modern parody, the story is first made more romantic than it is in the original, and then it is made more absurd. Such treatments are skeptical not only about magic enchantments but about "true love" as a long lasting thing—another kind of enchantment? . . . We feel the need as adults to laugh at stories we were probably moved by as children.

The iconoclastic amusement, Stone adds, "seems to be a nervous laughter."¹⁵

The incongruity in "Frog Prince" spin-offs between disillusionment, skepticism, disgust, and carnality on the one hand, and, on the other hand, innocence, trustfulness, hopefulness, and continence, is

a funereal sort increasingly popular with a general American audience, a massive group that only recently has found this kind of incongruity appealing.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

NOTES

    ¹Wolfgang Mieder, "Modern Anglo-American variants of the Frog Prince," a typescript of which the author made available before its publication in New York Folklore. The article cites spin-offs in addition to those that I mention, as do Lutz Röhich, Der Witz: Figuren, Formen, Funktionen (Stuttgart, 1977); Lutz Röhrich, "Der Froschkönig und seine Waldlungen," Fabula, 20 (1979), 170–192, and Professor Mieder, Grimms Märchen-modern: Lyrik, Prosa, Karikatarin (Stuttgart, 1979).
   ²Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk Tale, 2d revised ed. (Helsinki and Bloomington, 1955–1958) not only assigns this classification but also cites widespread appearances of the type. Additional citations are provided by Emlyn Elizabeth Gardner, Folklore from the Schoharie Hills (Ann Arbor, 1937); Vance Randolph, The Devil’s Pretty Daughter and Other Ozark Folk Tales (New York, 1955) and Ernest Baughman, Type and Motif—Index of Folktales of England and North America (The Hague, 1966).
   ³Randolph, Devil’s Pretty Daughter, p. 92.
   ⁴Christina Stead, Letty Fox (New York, 1946), p. 296. Stead cites oral sources.
   ⁵Quoted by Polly C. Williams, "Sexton in the Classroom," in Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, ed. J. D. McLatchy (Bloomington, 1974), p. 99.
   ⁶For Miss Welty’s testimony, see Merrill Maguire Skaggs, "The Uses of Enchantment in Frontier Humor and The Robber Bridegroom," Studies in American Humor, 3 (October, 1976), 96–102, and Welty, Fairy Tale of the Natchez Trace (Jackson, 1975), pp. 11–18, 21, 26. For Randall Jarrell’s comments, see Suzanne Ferguson, The Poetry of Randall Jarrell (Baton Rouge, 1971), pp. 64,103,158–159. The other authors are cited in Roger Sale, Fairy Tales and After: From Snow White to E. B. White (Cambridge, 1978), passim.
   ⁷Quoted by Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Austin, 1979), p. 1.
   ⁸Michael C. Kotzin, Dickens and the Fairy Tale (Bowling Green, 1972), p. 26.
   ⁹Fairy Tales and After, p. 24.
   ¹⁰"Zum Schutz von Dornröschen," Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December, 1977, p. 31
   ¹¹Quoted by Röhrich, Der Witz (Tubingen, 1977), p. 127. Röhrich adds, "In past epochs, the supernatural was not available for fun making. Märchen, fables and sagas represented supernatural happenings, but as yet jokes did not. Comic perspectives were prerequisites for complete rationality. This, in fact, is the basic reason why the surrealistic joke is not a folk product: more or less, it is a joke for intellectuals."
   ¹²Quoted by Hugh Sidey in "Today is No Time for Gags," Chicago Sun-Times, February 24, 1980.
   ¹³Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment (New York, 1974), pp. 289–290.
   ¹⁴Transformations (Boston, 1971), p. 99.
   ¹⁵Letter to the author, January 9, 1980, quoted with Professor Stone’s kind permission.