Perfecto Fancy-Boy, the Dingburg psychoanalyst, analyzes the appeal of Helmet Grabpussy in today’s Zippy the Pinhead strip:
(#1) Grabpussy’s real name is suppressed above, as too indecent to mention, even on this blog; but what grabbed me first in this strip was the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy for the psychoanalyst — a name that is most unlikely to have ever been given to any actual person, but is instead a pure creation of Zippy‘s cartoonist Bill Griffith
Zippy is a savorer of words and phrases. (He is also the playful lord of nonsensicality, call him Absurdo.) He has favorite names — Ashtabula, Estonia, Valvoline, Ding-Dongs, taco sauce, and more, treasured just for the way they sound, not for what they refer to; the Talking Heads album Stop Making Sense could have been named in his honor.
And he’s forever latching onto random expressions whose sound enchants him, so that he repeats them for pleasure, like mantras — what Griffy, the cartoon avatar of Bill Griffith, calls onomatomania. (There’s a Page on this blog about my postings on chants, cheers, mantras, and onomatomania.)
Then there’s Griffith’s choice of names for his characters — like Perfecto Fancy-Boy. No doubt intentionally crafted to some degree, but also to some degree pulled out of thin air, from Griffith’s subconscious, picked because they “sounded good”. I’m in no position to say which part is which, so here I’ll just unearth some possible ingredients in the name Perfecto Fancy-Boy, specifically in this name referring to a psychoanalyst.
Perfecto. From NOAD:
noun perfecto: a type of cigar that is thick in the center and tapered at each end.
From the Cigar Aficionado site, “Eight Intriguing Perfectos” by David Savona on 6/23/22, this illustration of four of them:
(#2) Undercrown Sun Grown Flying Pig, La Aurora Original Preferido, Oliva Serie V Melanio Figurado, and Arturo Fuente Hemingway
But why, you ask, should a fictive psychoanalyst have the personal name Perfecto, like the cigars? Ah, because Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was famously a cigar smoker, and even more famously the person to whom the slogan “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” has been attributed. So cigars and psychoanalysis have a special place in the popular imagination. And Perfecto is a good name for a psychoanalyst character in a cartoon.
Now you’re going to want to know if Freud ever said that, or something like it, in English or in German. You won’t be surprised to hear that he probably didn’t. From the Quote Investigator site, in “Sometimes a Cigar Is Just a Cigar” on 8/12/1:
In conclusion, although this expression and its ascription are popular the currently available evidence is unsatisfactory. The first citation in English is dated in 1950 and this is more than a decade after Freud’s death in 1939. Alan C. Elms has called the remark “Freud’s ultimate anti-Freudian joke” and has argued that the quip is not consistent with Freud’s other pronouncements. Unless additional documentation is located QI believes it is reasonable to assert that Freud probably did not make this statement.
Meanwhile, the Spanish name Perfecto (from the Latin for ‘perfect’) is, unsurprisingly, a fairly common personal name and family name, especially in Mexico. So it’s possible that it just bubbled up in Bill Griffith’s imagination as an entertaining personal name for his psychoanalyst character (possibly through a subconscious cigar connection); but it’s likely to have been a deliberate choice.
Fancy-Boy. If it occurs at all as a surname in the Anglosphere, it’s extraordinarily infrequent, so not something that would just pop up in Griffith’s mind when he was looking for an entertaining family name. But he might have picked it out as intentional nonsense, the way he might have come up with Perfecto Fish Sticks, Perfecto Piston Oil, or Perfecto Cross-Tabulation; he is, after all, Absurdo. So let’s see how far we can get by treating Fancy-Boy as a name with a meaning that might be at least a bit relevant to psychoanalysis — whether it was chosen deliberately or dropped fortuitously into Griffith’s consciousness.
Easy possibilities. Based on existing uses of fancy boy (none of them particularly illuminating).
— a few dictionaries list a usage of fancy boy for ‘dandy’ (now glossable as ‘metrosexual’ ), for a man who gives exaggerated attention to his personal appearance
–then there’s a similar expression, from NOAD:
noun fancy man: 1 British informal, dated a person’s male lover: it’s not right she should be flouncing around with her fancy man. 2 archaic a pimp.
From this, it’s an easy step to fancy boy as a person’s young male lover.
A stretch to psychoanalysis. With the name Fancy-Boy as a possible allusion to Jung (whose family name means ‘young’).
A better stretch to psychoanalysis. A complex bilingual play on names, with the name Fancy-Boy understood as an allusion to Favez-Boutonnier. From Wikipedia:
Juliet Favez-Boutonnier (1903 – 13 April 1994) was a French academic, psychologist and psychoanalyst.
After writing successive theses on ambivalence and angst, Favez-Boutonnier became a member of the SFP [Société Française de Psychanalyse] in the tradition of Pierre Janet, working to have psychoanalysis accepted in academia as a form of psychology
Where does the stuff that writers, lecturers, performers, and artists produce come from? Some reflections from me to cartoonist Bob Eckstein in a conversation we had last year on the topic, reported in my 1/17/23 posting “The bearded cartoonist, post simectomy”:
Writers and artists create their characters, locations, situations, and events from bits and pieces of their experience, from an appreciation of those that have cultural value, from pure invention — but the results often resemble, sometimes quite movingly, things in the real world. (And working from a model doesn’t necessarily give greater depth to the result.) [To Bob:] You didn’t intend to draw [great cartoonist] Sam [Gross], but somehow you drew him anyway, who cares by what route.
… I try not to think too much about what I’m doing when I write (or when I made collages), just follow stuff where it goes. It’s a little bit like being possessed, and even when I’ve planned things out carefully, fresh stuff emerges in the doing. (In the middle of a lecture, a useful image or way of looking at the topic … just bubbles up, and you think, what a great way to put that, I didn’t know I thought that, and so on — exhilarating and astonishing.) Then afterwards I’ll go back and analyze my own stuff as if it were someone else’s — always a surprise, to find stuff you had no idea might be there.
The mysteries of artistic creation. We have wandered, inevitably I expect, into the question of where visual and verbal artists get their ideas and how they realize them in detail. Much explicit planning, but also ideas that come into our heads — who knows from where — in the shower.
And then the stuff that appears in the doing of the art. Which comes from somewhere in the artist, but not all of it by conscious thought. “It’s a little bit like being possessed”, I said above. Writers often say that their characters take over the story and tell them where it will go. Bob [said]: “these faces come pouring out onto the page”. Famously, Flannery O’Connor is quoted as explaining: “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” [yes, another dubious quotation, though the sentiment has been quotably framed by many writers]