The Zippy strip for today, 3/11, all about sharing a personal name (with some intrusions of the name Melvin):
The large generalization is that mentioning two people together implicates some special relationship, even more so if they share a name (personal name or family name)
In the first panel we start with two authors, from widely separated times, in different genres (plays vs. fiction), and with hugely different styles — but both with the personal name William.
The personal-name sharing goes on with wildly different characters, oddly yoked to one another: Oscar Wilde the writer and Oscar the Grouch the Muppet; Jackson Pollock the painter and Jackson Browne the rock musician (whose career started with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band); Mona Freeman the actress (and painter) and the Mona Lisa (the subject of Leonardo da Vinci’s famous painting).
Still greater intimacy. Merely mentioning two names together implicates some special relationship. Even more so if the names are coordinated, syntactically connected. If I say I celebrate Jane Austen and Ludwig van Beethoven, you will wonder what connects them (answer: both were born on December 16th). Even more if they share a name; if I say I admire both Jane Austen and Jane Goodall, you will suppose some even stronger connection, hard to discern (like Jackson Pollock and Jackson Browne). (As it happens, I admire all four of these people, but that’s just a random fact about my tastes.)
And then if the coordination is simplified syntactically — in what’s known as coordination / conjunction reduction — you will suppose some even more intimate connection. That brings us to the puzzlement that can be presented by coordinated family names (Jane Austen and Goodall impress me; Jackson Pollock and Browne have many fans) and coordinated personal names (Jackson and Henry Pollock have few fans in New Zealand [Henry Pollock is an English rugby union player]; Arnold and Fay Zwicky are little-known in Scotland [Fay Zwicky is an Australian poet]).
It’s all about iconicity. The closer the syntactic connection between the names, the more intimate the conveyed association between the two people named.
But no, I have (at the moment) no explanation for the prevalence of Melvin, though I suspect he might be related to Alfred E. Neuman.
March 11, 2026 at 12:37 pm |
Whenever I notice a pair of celebrities or prominent people sharing a *surname* I usually default to an assumption that they have some sort of familial relation, unless geography or chronology makes it clearly absurd.
Happily, Ira Glass and Philip Glass are cousins! (Second cousins.)
I was disappointed to find, on recently looking it up, that actor Joshua Malina is not the son or other close relation to the late Judith Malina, of The Living Theatre fame. I had confidently assumed they were connected ever since Joshua Malina was on “Sports Night” (1998).
And then there are the Keatons: Buster, Diane, and Michael. Surely one of the three pairings must hold? Nope.
March 11, 2026 at 1:47 pm |
Lovely. Hope springs eternal, as they say. But it is bitter news that Joshua Malina and Judith Malina are unrelated.
March 11, 2026 at 12:49 pm |
And I could swear that somewhere in a preface or personal note somewhere in one of the books by essayist and general non-fiction writer Ron Rosenbaum, I had read his somewhat humorous “apology” for writing some essays on movies in light of his cousin, Jonathan Rosenbaum the professional film critic, looking askance on this development. It makes for a nice insight, I thought, since to my mind Jonathan Rosenbaum is sometimes impossibly stringent as a critic, and is excessive in his devotion to the later career of Godard.
But no. Quick Internet search shows them growing up in different regions and without either one’s biographical sketches mentioning the other. And I was never able to find that passage I thought I remembered from Ron Rosenbaum’s book prefaces or introductions. I’d like to think that is there to be recovered somehow, and that I just failed to see that he was making a joke.
March 11, 2026 at 1:51 pm |
Rosenbaum is, alas, a very common name. So the odds are against relatedness.
At one point in my life, I had three acquaintances named Joel Cohen, all unrelated to one another.