You may have aced high-school physics, but that won’t help you understand cartoons. The animated universe has its own set of physical rules, honed over the years to maximize hilarity while maintaining a wacky sense of honor and order. Here are a few of our favorite scientific laws from that world.
1 Violent Death Is Impermanent
No matter how many times or ways in which Kenny McCormick gets killed in South Park, he’s always back at the bus stop and back to life sooner or later. Same goes for both cat and mouse in Tom and Jerry and The Simpsons’ meta-cartoon The Itchy & Scratchy Show. Usually, this miraculous reincarnation is accompanied by total amnesia from the resurrected one and the rest of the cast, and life returns to normal—or at least the way it was previously.
That cartoons fail to respect the permanence of death is probably related to the fact that they have extremely adaptable bodies. The Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, for example, has survived both extreme nickel poisoning and losing all of the bones in his body and emerged no worse for the wear. After all, as Roger Rabbit learned, the only real way to kill a toon is to dissolve him in Dip—a combination of turpentine, acetone, and benzene.
2 Weapons Don’t Work Well
As Elmer Fudd should know by now, a cartoon gun is basically worthless. Even when it’s not breaking, sagging, or popping out signs that say “bang,” the fictional firearm is almost never lethal even when it fires correctly. Perhaps the rugged physiology and lightning fast reflexes of cartoon characters make them harder to kill. More likely, though, the guns just aren’t that powerful. Even when fired from close range, they usually just blacken the victim’s face, or, in the most extreme cases, rearrange his bill.
3 Bags or Coats Contain Multitudes
If you’re animated, it’s best to never leave the house without a jacket or satchel. That’s because these objects all seem to possess four-dimensional polygons, known to physicists as tesseracts, that appear tiny but are actually large enough to house objects bigger than the wearer himself. How else could you explain that Dora the Explorer’s backpack has produced both ladders and spacesuits or that in Despicable Me, Gru’s pea coat can produce WMDs? Also, we’re not sure if Bender’s internal compartment on Futurama counts as either a bag or a coat, but it still seems to be able to hold everything from popcorn poppers to beer kegs to a baby grand piano.
In 2010, Forbes estimated Scrooge McDuck’s net worth to be $33.5 billion. Good year for gold.
4 Space Is Just a Construct
It’s not just the characters’ accessories that are wacky. At certain times, the toons themselves have access to hammerspace; that is, they can quickly enter and exit alternate dimensions. The term “hammerspace” comes from Japanese manga, where female characters often produce—out of thin air—oversized rice mallets to bonk the heads of men who offend them. Hammerspace only occurs at certain times or in certain places; most notably, there seem to be pockets of it behind thin trees and lampposts, allowing large men to hide in tiny spaces.
5 Gravity Is Relative
One of the most common tropes of the Looney Tunes series is this: A character walks or runs over a cliff but does not fall. Only when he finally notices his predicament and looks down does gravity finally take effect, and he plummets to the basin below at 9.8m/s2. Given that this momentary suspension of physics most often happens during a pursuit of the Road Runner, science writer Jacqueline Houtman coined the neologism Coyotus Interruptus to describe it. The fungibility of gravity in the animated universe also manifests itself in another way. When cartoon characters are scared—or poked in the bottom—they often shoot straight upward as if rocketing away from a zero-G planet.
6 Cartoons Leave Cartoon-Shaped Holes in Industrial Materials
Right before the famous couch gag on the opening sequence of The Simpsons, Homer literally goes through a door in the family’s garage, leaving what’s known in the cartoon physics field as a “silhouette of passage”—a perfect outline of himself in the solid material he went through. While in reality it would be very difficult to find a material that works with humans—maybe a wall of Nutty Bars?—in the Tooniverse pretty much any substance can be perforated in this manner, provided that the penetrating agent is sufficiently scared or excited.
Fall and aftermath aside, the nursery rhyme never states that Humpty Dumpty is an egg.
