Cartoons train audiences to accept punishment as the condition of life.

Evidence

The quantity of organized amusement changes into the quality of organized cruelty. The self-elected censors of the film industry (with whom it enjoys a close relationship) watch over the unfolding of the crime, which is as drawn-out as a hunt. Fun replaces the pleasure which the sight of an embrace would allegedly afford, and postpones satisfaction till the day of the pogrom. In so far as cartoons do any more than accustom the senses to the new tempo, they hammer into every brain the old lesson that continuous friction, the breaking down of all individual resistance, is the condition of life in this society. Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in real life get their thrashing so that the audience can learn to take their own punishment. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 108

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compression of the argument — that amusement’s quantity becomes cruelty’s quality, that fictional thrashings tutor real submission — is dense enough to sit with.
• XREF: connects to: Cartoons shifted from fantasy vindication to rehearsals of cruelty against the individual. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 108; Comedies about cheerful deprivation train audiences to accept humiliation — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 227; Mass culture trains viewers to behave as if misery did not exist — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 131 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Comedies about cheerful deprivation train audiences to accept humiliation #corroborates (0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 227
• Mass culture trains viewers to behave as if misery did not exist #corroborates (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 131
• Cartoons shifted from fantasy vindication to rehearsals of cruelty against the individual. #corroborates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 108
• The spectacle of punishment produced substitutions and misrecognitions of identity #expands (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 395