The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain't Dead by Keith Knight
Reviewed by A. Jarrell Hayes
Life’s funny. It takes a keen eye to pick up some of the less obvious humor. It takes a sharp pen to sketch out scenes of life’s irony in a comic strip. In The Knight Life: Chivalry Ain’t Dead, the comic strip’s creator Keith Knight demonstrates that he possesses both a keen eye and a sharp pen.
In The Knight Life strips, Knight uses his wife, family, and neighbors to poke fun at cultural differences, racism, phobias, and other topics that aren’t funny by themselves. But Knight creates an interesting cast of characters surrounded the central figure, Keith Knight. Keith is often the outsider and gets placed in adventurous and perhaps precarious situations because of the people associated with him.
Keith’s wife, Kerstin, is German and has an intense fear of spiders and clowns, and suffers from an overactive imagination concerning them. Gunther is Keith’s friend and is a sucker for punishment and finds himself either manipulated into cross-dressing or undergoing some torturous atrocity, like getting his hands chopped off while auditioning to work as a street sign spinner.
Probably one of the best characters is Dexter, a gangsta rap artist whose record label faked his death in order to boost his album sales (that’s a loaded bio). Dexter walks around in a black hoodie and bullies Keith into participating in his schemes: such as having Keith illustrate Dexter’s inappropriate children’s book or combine his bully camp with Keith’s cartoonist camp. Dexter’s relationship with his brainiac son reminds us that children can be more mature than their parents.
The Knight Life is a product of its times, with the motifs of unemployment, bad economy, and government budget cutbacks of essential programs dominating the strip – including the school system cutting the letter K from the alphabet (much to Keith’s obvious dismay). Knight sprinkles in a few scenes of President Obama’s ascension, racist cops, and racial profiling, to round up the topics of conversation in the black community. Knight keeps his self-directed jokes to a minimum, and does a great job of focusing the humor between Keith and Kerstin on their cultural – rather than racial – differences.
Knight doesn’t just poke fun at unpleasant situations: there is a series chronicling the triumphs of “Life’s Little Victories.” The series gives the book a pleasant outlook on life; when big events go wrong, sometimes it’s refreshing to focus on the little victories. The Knight Life is a total victory for Keith Knight.
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In The Knight Life strips, Knight uses his wife, family, and neighbors to poke fun at cultural differences, racism, phobias, and other topics that aren’t funny by themselves. But Knight creates an interesting cast of characters surrounded the central figure, Keith Knight. Keith is often the outsider and gets placed in adventurous and perhaps precarious situations because of the people associated with him.
Keith’s wife, Kerstin, is German and has an intense fear of spiders and clowns, and suffers from an overactive imagination concerning them. Gunther is Keith’s friend and is a sucker for punishment and finds himself either manipulated into cross-dressing or undergoing some torturous atrocity, like getting his hands chopped off while auditioning to work as a street sign spinner.
Probably one of the best characters is Dexter, a gangsta rap artist whose record label faked his death in order to boost his album sales (that’s a loaded bio). Dexter walks around in a black hoodie and bullies Keith into participating in his schemes: such as having Keith illustrate Dexter’s inappropriate children’s book or combine his bully camp with Keith’s cartoonist camp. Dexter’s relationship with his brainiac son reminds us that children can be more mature than their parents.
The Knight Life is a product of its times, with the motifs of unemployment, bad economy, and government budget cutbacks of essential programs dominating the strip – including the school system cutting the letter K from the alphabet (much to Keith’s obvious dismay). Knight sprinkles in a few scenes of President Obama’s ascension, racist cops, and racial profiling, to round up the topics of conversation in the black community. Knight keeps his self-directed jokes to a minimum, and does a great job of focusing the humor between Keith and Kerstin on their cultural – rather than racial – differences.
Knight doesn’t just poke fun at unpleasant situations: there is a series chronicling the triumphs of “Life’s Little Victories.” The series gives the book a pleasant outlook on life; when big events go wrong, sometimes it’s refreshing to focus on the little victories. The Knight Life is a total victory for Keith Knight.
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