What’s So Funny?

Chapter Seven takes up the topic of Zen cartoons, which provide further glimpses of Zen and Zen art concepts, perceptions, and desires in operation away from the canon, even as they draw at times from canonical works and have their own “canonical” tropes. The chapter also explores the larger question of Buddhist/Zen humor in order to think through the very question of cartooning Zen. It proposes the category, “Bodhi-characters,” various figures drawn from the classical Chan/Zen pantheon along with recent Zen-master-esque figures, such as The Dude from The Big Lebowski (1997), who perform and are adored for their counter-normative if not absurdist attitudes and utterances that intimate (to some) Zen philosophical and spiritual truths. These figures create, I suggest, a modern-contemporary neo-“pantheon,” that embodies often the conception of Zen as residing in particular attitudes and demeanors, often linked to the comedic.