Adventure time is a fantasy science fiction adventure comedy animation set in a region of post-apocalyptic Earth called the Land of Ooo. Finn is the last known human after the Great Mushroom War (nuclear war), is a 14 year old boy raised by magical talking dogs. He is an aspiring hero. With his brother, Jake the Dog, he navigates his way around the various kingdoms, villages, time and space to become a hero. The duo interacts with princesses, villains, monsters and the Dead world.
Adventure Time, the Wasps and the Frogs use humour devices to express serious messages. By engaging the audience first by creating immediate reactions, Aristophanes and Pendleton Ward can then reveal their serious social messages on the old and new generation, the role of the poet, and the nature of entertainment through humorous stereotypes, humorous metaphor, and parody.
Humorous stereotypes are used to parody the new generation through Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time and Bdelycleon from the Wasps. Lumpy Space Princess is a metaphor for the new generation. She parodies the toxic, spoiled and vapid teenagers of the ‘Valley Girl’ era originating in the 1980s. The dawn of cellular phone technology and materialism, Lumpy Space Princess represents an era and provides social commentary of the benefits and detriments of such a lifestyle. Lumpy Space Princess is obsessed with gossip, calling them “drama bombs” and has an extremely apathetic attitude about everything besides current trends, her popularity and appearance. She will stop at nothing to fit in and be popular. Like Bdelycleon’s generation in the Wasps, Lumpy Space Princess has too many materialistic, selfish and shallow pursuits such as “surgery to make [her] body hot”. Lumpy Space Princess, like Bdelycleon’s generation, is too concerned with “the ringlets and the fashions...of the namby pamby youngsters of today.” The new generation portrayed in the Wasps have self-indulgent pastimes of dressing up in fine, foreign clothing and attending symposia. The mocking of modern trends is used to show Aristophanes’ message of restoring old values and the stupidity of the new generation. His purpose is to re-unite Athens during a time of turbulence and desperation due to the Peloponnesian War. Social commentary is used in the character of Lumpy Space Princess, imploring modern day viewers to reconsider one’s actions and rethink their position in their new generation. Becoming Lumpy and thus a member of Lumpy Space is visual humour device which expresses a disease of the mind. In Lumpy Space, the Lumps is an incurable disease of the herd mentality and inability of independent thought, as this attitude results in their exclusion in Lumpy Space. This is shown through three alienated non-Lumpy people who possess an antidote to Lumpiness, who are “notorious for being smooth posers” because they are cured.
As a comic poet in Ancient Greece, it was a cultural convention to play a teacher’s role (didaskalos) and train the chorus at their rehearsal. This term however also describes Aristophane’s relationship with the audience. His aim in the Frogs is “to amuse you citizens and to advise.” He calls Wasps a “little fable with a moral.” He portrays Athens as diseased in the Wasps, then dying in the Frogs. Both Aristophanes and Ward encourage independent thought and acknowledge the importance of educating their audience as both want to develop better citizens and generations for the future. Both comedies possess an inherent faith in their audience to be aspire to better themselves and to serve their land. Education is a central aspect of both comic texts and through social commentary, audiences throughout time can learn the different, conflicting ideologies portrayed in each time period.