Hare-Brained Bugs Bunny Analysis of Rabbit of Seville

Hare-Brained Bugs Bunny Analysis of Rabbit of Seville

Hare-brained
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…
 -John Donne, Meditation 17

In 1950 Warner Brothers released the Looney Tune short Rabbit of Saville. Chuck Jones, one of the more pioneering formulators of Bugs Bunny’s persona, directs this parody of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. Rabbit of Saville is notable for its overlay of “high” and “low” culture, wherein the usual tropes of a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd routine are framed inside an empty opera set, gags are rhythmically timed by a sped up adaptation of Rossini’s overture, and the characters speak in an operatic style. The campy bricolage in this particular short serves as an innovative extrapolation of Looney Tunes’ stylistically absurd humor that distinctly flaunts its’ love of imaginative play through its deployment of narrative structure, thematic content, and the notably flexible physical laws. Bugs Bunny’s characteristic trickstering through chaotic disruptions of social narratives reveals aspects of the relationship between the unconscious social identity theories specifically because it is explicitly played off for laughs amongst the wide culture of broadcast television (Freud 163). The ubiquity of Bugs Bunny’s disruption within the ‘tooniverse’ even penetrates the ‘fourth-wall’ to challenge the very notion of the audience’s relationship to its’ entertainment, exhibited in Rabbit of Seville by Bugs’ closing address to the audience after humiliating Elmer Fudd: “…eeeyah, next.”
Clearly the laws of physics in Rabbit of Seville’s universe are not very similar to our own; instead, reality is a subsidiary function to plot. The untethered, fantastical possibilities of Loony Tune shorts are reminiscent of a dreamscape. Although a dream is charged with the esoteric meanings of an individual, while a cartoon short is charged with creating meaning for a cultural audience. Having the plot bound solely to the imagination allows for an even...

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