How Do You Create A Leftist Animated Cartoon That Is Actually Funny?

Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrong and also the creators of the new animated series Papa and Boy, currently making its debut on the worker-owned streaming platform Means TV.

Papa and Boy is an absurdist comedy, but it's rich with political and social commentary. It's set in a dystopian world where fathers tyrannize over sons and justify their rule with a spurious ideology. Today Sean and Aaron join to discuss how they managed to make the series leftist while keeping it funny, and how Papa and Boy depicts:

• The role of propaganda in keeping populations docile and complacent
• The way meritocracy forces those at the bottom to compete for scraps and meaningless baubles
• How hierarchical relationships are not only oppressive but do not even serve the interests of those at the top of the hierarchy
• How people who suffered personally sometimes use their own experience as a justification for keeping others in similar conditions
• How the oppressed are deprived of knowledge about the possibilities for alternate social arrangements and kept in the dark about the power of collective action
• Much else!

The Current Affairs article Nathan mentions about meritocracy and bullshit jobs is here.

"[The social order] requires the boys to be demoralized and it requires the papas to be fearful of what the boys can accomplish and to prevent them from collaborating, in the same way that in current society huge companies like Amazon and Starbucks are fighting tooth and nail to prevent unionization efforts, because they know that if workers work together they'll be able to extract concessions from them and to change how things are working."

"If you can't imagine that another world is possible, or even that resistance to the current world is possible, it places you exactly where the hierarchical systems want you to be. That's why propaganda, and terms like 'It is what it is,' are so powerful in terms of keeping society the way it is, because they seek to limit the horizons of what people as see as possible. Having those moments of realizing 'Oh, maybe it is what it is but it doesn't have to be,' is so powerful."