Donald Duck's Electrocution: Silent Night

Silent Night (intended for WDC&S #64) is so outrageous it’s incredible Carl Barks even thought to finish drawing and submitting it. Without crossing any blatant lines, its contemptuous and violent mockery of the very idea of Christmas cheer is so feral that it surely ranks as one of the most nihilistic works of 1946 and certainly as bitter as anything by Sinclair Lewis or Nathaniel West, just shrunk down to comic book level. Unfortunately, Disney seems to have yet again squelched the reprinting of this story in Fantagraphics’s reissue volumes, so you’ll just have to find it elsewhere.

Barks’s Christmas stories tended to have a real edge to them. His contempt for the commercial and saccharine side of Christmas comes through, particularly his disdain for the sheer performativity of it all. Everyone singing good cheer, being generous, and wishing well to one another was evidently the height of hypocrisy to Barks, and he usually took the opportunity to point out how poorly humanity lived up to the pretense.

Not, however, like he did here. In his hellbent attempts to spread Christmas cheer to an entire community that wants none of it, Donald wreaks and reaps an astonishing amount of mayhem, ending with what is likely the most violent scene ever to occur in a Donald Duck comic: Donald being electrocuted with a cattle prod and forced to shriek carols at the top of his lungs.

How Barks thought this would pass muster, even given his fairly bulletproof reputation by that point, is beyond me.

The basic setup: against his nephews’ advice, Donald gets it in his head to go caroling.

Whenever Donald’s language turns florid and purple, it always signals he’s in the grip of some kind of romantic illusion. There’s not much space given for the explanation here, though, because there’s too much mayhem ahead. Donald’s taken romantic ideas from books before, but not with such vehemence. It’s as though the ethical imperative to spread good cheer has unleashed his worst inner demon.

Two things emerge. First, they’re terrible singers. Second, the neighbors hate them.

The neighbors don’t hesitate to give him the brush-off either. Violence is their first resort, not that it dissuades Donald.

In the face of absolute rejection from neighbor after neighbor, Donald holds fast to his faith that caroling loud enough and long enough will melt people’s hearts and open them up to the true Christmas spirit. But he’s clearly acting in bad faith. His aggression is so obvious from the start, and his joy in irritating the neighbors so gleeful, that any good will toward men he may feel is invisible on the page. He’s having a blast on the flimsiest of pretenses.

This is all prequel, however, to his confrontation with Neighbor Jones, the meanest version of him we’ve seen yet. Donald wails and Jones fights back hard.

It’s remarkable how the violence is all physical, with barely any preamble. Usually Jones and Donald would have some kind of rancor before escalating to the physical stuff, but caroling is a straight pipeline to some of the most vicious treatment Donald’s ever received.

Donald doesn’t fight back though, which only emphasizes just how awful his caroling must be—his singing itself constitutes physical aggression. On some level, Donald knows it.

Jones puts alum in Donald’s mouth to cause his mouth to pucker and shut him up (a common gag in old cartoons). Having dropped his pretense toward Christmas cheer, Donald turns to outright sonic terrorism, hiding speakers all over Jones’s house to blare carols through.

It works. The nephews start singing and Jones hears it, everywhere. Jones rips his house apart, but there are always more speakers. He’s surrounded, trapped, and guaranteed no peace, just the nephews’ tuneless wailing on Chritsmas eve.

Donald really has won, and Jones realizes that the only way he’s going to get out of listening to the awful caroling is to leverage Donald’s violence against him.

Donald is dumb enough to believe Jones is sincere, perfectly fitting with his own bad faith. Donald’s own profession of cheer was patently false, so how would he have radar for Jones’s insincerity now? The nephews know it’s a trap, but Donald won’t be dissuaded from opportunities for even more caroling/violence.

And Jones really does want Donald to sing—louder, even.

The end.

Not only does Jones find someone who is immune to Donald’s violence—by living across a canyon and being deaf—but he has his revenge by forcing Doanld to sing even more loudly. It’s also the first act of violence against Donald that gets a loud, vocal yelp out of him, the first time he loses control of his own weapon, his voice. It’s absolutely poetic justice—it’s also incredibly brutal. Jones is not a nice guy, but one’s sympathy for Donald is long exhausted by this point.

Structurally, the story is amazing, but the upshot of it is to attack Chrismas from every direction: phony sentimentality, ill will between men, miserable seasonal obligations, and ultimately a pageant of caroling played out as actual torture. Donald’s flowery language of “days of yore” didn’t last a page before being demolished.

And underlying it all is the constant theme of singing carols as a barely-covert weapon. Donald’s bad faith provides completely transparent cover for malice and aggression and above all intrusion: the violation of the home by unbearable, violent singing. (Silent Night is, of course, the pick of the carols for this situtaion.) Donald doesn’t commit any actual acts of physical violence, yet he’s undoubtedly the aggressor all the way through. Jones gets the biggest intrusion of all, which he is powerless to defeat directly.

The whole story is a cry of rage against Christmas and Christmas cheer, making the contemporaneous Best Christmas seem like weak tea indeed.

Subsequent Christmas stories will refine Barks’s suspicion of Christmas while toning down the violence, but the raw disgust on display here is quite powerful. The ideals and peace of the world are wiped away on all sides by the harsh truth of human nature.