dumb donald — a cartoon i half-remember, accurately

dumb donald lived in a cartoon i half-remember and accurately. he wore a hat over his eyes. i wear a beanie indoors after the DIY haircut. the third yoga mat watches. water is overrated, by the way, and that is unrelated, except it is exactly related, in the cartoon way.

this is, i should say up front, the dumb donald of the saturday-morning fat albert cartoon, the one with the junkyard and the songs and the hat that came down past the chin. not any other person of any other surname. this is a cartoon. the post is about a cartoon. the only politics in this post is the politics of the kitchen kettle, which has a position, and i will get to it.

i am writing this from the desk on a tuesday morning. carla is in the training session on the third floor, the one about the new expense portal, which buys me the rest of the morning, give or take a fire drill. the kitchen, where this whole thing germinated, is two rooms away in my apartment, but the memory of the kitchen is right here on the desk, because i had cereal in it earlier and the box was a particular shade of brown that reminded me of dumb donald’s hat.

writing this between sips. the kitchen kettle is, by my ear, two minutes off boiling.

dumb donald, my best recollection

i have not seen an episode of fat albert in roughly two decades. i am, therefore, the wrong person to write a definitive piece about dumb donald, which is exactly why i am writing it. the wrong person, writing from the desk in a small window before carla is back, is the right voice for a cartoon i remember in pieces. for the broader cluster on dumbness as a category, i drafted the pillar on what dumb actually means at this same desk a couple of weeks ago; this post is the satellite that orbits a cartoon character.

here is what i remember, with confidence calibrated to the actual evidence in my brain. dumb donald wore a long pink hat that came down over his eyes and stopped somewhere around his mouth. he was, as a result, partially blind to most of the action. the other kids — fat albert, weird harold, mushmouth, rudy, bill, russell — treated him with patience. nobody mocked him on screen, that i can recall. the show, in its odd, plodding way, was kind to its dumbest character. that part i would defend in court.

what i do not remember: any specific episode. any specific dialogue. any specific reason the hat existed. there is, i’m fairly sure, a story somewhere about why he wore it, possibly in a serious comic-book magazine, possibly in a fan wiki i refuse to consult, but i don’t have it. i have the hat. i have the silhouette. i have the gentle treatment. that is the file.

this is, in fact, how most of us experience cartoons we watched between the ages of seven and ten. we don’t remember plots. we remember silhouettes. donald is a silhouette. so is the third yoga mat under my couch, in a different way.

the cartoon morality of being the dumb one

here is the part i actually came to write. saturday-morning cartoons from that era had, almost without exception, a designated dumb character. not the villain. not the comic relief in the sneering sense. the dumb friend. the one the others protected. you can pull up almost any ensemble from that decade and find one. the cartoonists understood something that, frankly, the modern internet does not.

they understood that dumb is not a moral failing. dumb is a position in the group. someone has to be slightly behind on the joke for the joke to land. someone has to ask the question that lets the smarter character explain the thing the audience also doesn’t know. the dumb friend is, structurally, the audience’s representative inside the cartoon. you root for him because he is, in some way, you. that is the pact. that pact has aged better than most.

this is what the cartoon was actually about, when it bothered to be about anything. the dumb friend in any group is the one who keeps it human. take him out, you get a writers’ room that hates the audience. leave him in, you get a scene where the others wait for him to catch up, and the waiting is the warmth.

my own diy haircut, which would qualify

i should, in the spirit of disclosure, admit that i am writing this from under a beanie. last sunday, in the apartment, with a pair of scissors of unknown vintage and the bathroom mirror at an angle that did not help, i attempted a small adjustment to the hair above my ears. small adjustment is a generous phrase. the adjustment escalated. i would describe the result as uneven, in three directions, with a feature on the left side that requires explanation.

i now wear the beanie indoors. i wear it to the desk. carla, on her one pass past my chair this morning, said nothing, which is either kindness or the training session running long. the beanie covers approximately the same percentage of my face that dumb donald’s hat covered of his. i have, accidentally, become the silhouette. that is a fact. the fact is in the file.

this is, also, a working example of the cluster’s thesis. dumb is an act, not a category. on sunday i did a dumb thing with scissors. on monday i wore a hat about it. on tuesday, here at the desk, i am writing fifteen hundred words on a children’s cartoon i barely remember. the through-line is not failure. the through-line is continuing. that, also, is what donald did. he kept showing up to the junkyard. so do i. the desk is the junkyard. the beanie is the hat.

THE BEANIE. STAYS. UNTIL THE HAIR. CATCHES UP.

the third yoga mat, in attendance, as ever

the third yoga mat lives, as you may know if you’ve read the trivia questions on dumbness i drafted on a thursday, under the couch in my apartment. it has been there since 2023. it is, presumably, evolving. when i think about dumb donald, i think about the third yoga mat for reasons that are, on the surface, indefensible, and on the inside, exact. they are both kept. they both refuse to leave. they both watch.

the yoga mat is the donald of my apartment. it doesn’t speak. it doesn’t move. it covers a portion of the floor it should not, strictly, be covering. and yet i would not, under any circumstance i can presently imagine, throw it out. it has, in its silent and rolled-up way, become part of the cast. donald is part of the cosby-kids cast in exactly that register. he is there. he wears the hat. he counts.

this is, in my experience, a thing about objects you have done a dumb thing to acquire. they earn a kind of permanent residency. they are not the airpod, which i have lost; they are the fork, which i kept. the third yoga mat is in the donald position. so is the good knife, which has not been used and which lives, ceremonial, on the magnetic strip in the kitchen i can see from where i’m writing. the good knife is the dumb donald of the kitchen. it watches. it does not cut.

the water take, briefly, on cartoon physics

cartoons, especially the saturday cartoons, ran on a logic where water was always rendered the same way: a small puddle, a perfect splash, a cube-shaped flood with a wave on top. children of my generation grew up with the visual idea that water was, at most, a comedic prop. that has, weirdly, infected my actual relationship with the substance. i think water is overrated as a drink, which is a position i hold sincerely. water is the most overrated drink. coffee has a job. tea has a job. wine, for stefan, has a vocabulary. water does the bare minimum and acts like that’s a personality.

donald, in the cartoon, was sometimes near a fire hydrant. so was every kid on television in 1972. the hydrant existed to provide a comedic spray. the spray was the joke. the water was, even then, a prop. i mention this because cartoon physics is, for a certain generation, the foundation of how we feel about the actual physical world. donald’s hat, in the rain, never visibly soaked. that is information. i absorbed it. you absorbed it. that is why i, today, am suspicious of weather apps.

verdict — the cartoon was a documentary

the kettle has stopped clicking. i should, before carla is back, drink the tea i made out of obligation rather than belief. (water is overrated, but tea has a vocabulary; we live with the contradiction.) the beanie stays. the third yoga mat is still under the couch. the good knife is on the strip. donald, somewhere on a streaming service i don’t have, is still wearing the hat over his eyes.

tuesday, 10:38am, second cup. carla’s training is rumored to run until eleven.

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