Why do we love Tom and Jerry--part two

It seems to me that there are several explanations as to why Tom and Jerry still seems funny and acceptable with its level of violence. There is a strong touch of idealistic harmlessness to the basic settings of this cartoon. There is never any blood in any scene in the cartoon. Characters can be cut into pieces, smashed flat, but never would they ever bleed. , Immortality has also been bestowed upon all the characters in Tom and Jerry. There is also never any death, actually, never any actually harm done to the characters. No matter how blown up or how battered a character is, they will always be up and about again in less than a few seconds. And anyway, these are all animals we are talking about. Though we always talk about protecting the environment and loving the animals, when it comes down to it, the majority of us are still always more concerned for ourselves.

It seems that subconsciously, most human beings view bloodshed, long-lasting physical damages, death as important symbol indicating how violent and gruesome a scene is. The bloodier and the more deaths, the worse-off it is. By entirely eliminating blood and damage to the characters, and even their surroundings from the cartoon, it inevitably makes scenes of violence seem much less serious and severe.

These particular characteristics that help make the violence in the cartoon seem less severe has brought me to relate to the ideas of consequentialism. In a sense, the fact that we see Tom and Jerry as extremely funny rather than unbearably violent exposes us to a very consequentialist side of the picture. We feel ok to laugh at the cartoons because we are used to evaluating the seriousness of an event through its results. If all characters are all still up and about by the end of the cartoon, it’s all cool. What they had gone through, all the exploding, cutting, jamming all therefore harmless and funny. Since all is well, no thought needs to be put into what had happened. Beyond that, it’s a CARTOON for god’s sake, what can hurt? It’s all made up and not even acted out by real people.

With such thoughts that come to mind, it strikes me that we have a universal appreciation of humor in such “harmlessly” violent cartoons, from Tom and Jerry, Looney Tunes to more recent and more violent ones like South Park. I can see that these cartoons make violence seem less than what it is and more ok to laugh at through multiple ways, among which are the two methods I have mentioned above, but why do we like humor that is rooted in violence anyway? In our society, violence is severely condemned both by morals and law, and people do not hesitate to be terrified or condemn real life acts of violence. Then why is it that we paradoxically find joy and laughter in humor based on these evil deeds? Do we necessarily find more pleasure when our sense of guilt that rises and clashes with the irresistible impulse to laugh?

Maybe there is an inevitable nature of violence deeply hidden in each of us.