Cheesy poetry – Chap. 5, Act 4, Strip 51

Yeah, the rapid speed at which Snuka returned to the fray, after escaping from that death trap, has had one negative side-effect: Dr. Dutchman Fu had had no time at all to come up with a more original death trap for him. Pressed for time, he apparently fell back on the default recipe of the car industry: the same old shit, but larger. (But at least he didn’t fall to the depths of badge engineering: gouda stays gouda, and proudly so.)

But Snuka’s bizarre dream sequence finally gave me a much anticipated opportunity to heighten the general tone and intellectual level of the comic. What better way to do this than having a poetry reading? None, according to my consultant on such matters, Mr. Samuel D. Eagle.

I did expect some difficulties in finding a suitably cheesy poem – or rather, a poem with cheese as its subject. Cheesy poems aren’t actually in short supply. And, as it turns out, poems on cheese are also readily available, thanks to the cheese poet: James McIntyre (1828-1906). It was his favorite subject, and he penned heart-felt and moving tributes to cheeses both great and small. But, given the nature of Dr. Fu’s improved death trap, I had to look no further through his ouvre than to his most well-known poem, “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds”. Read in its entirety by Snuka, above. He even, presciently, included a stanza about the mammoth cheese being about to crush people – it’s really like he wrote his work especially for this occasion.

And Lee Douglas, the actor playing Snuka, had little problem getting into the right mindset for the performance – one of the places where he works as a waiter (to augment his non-income from movies) features regular poetry readings. So he was happy to get to be at the non-receiving end of the pain, for once…

More on Monday.

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