Fans of the excellent satirical newspaper The Onion should be familiar with the name Stan Kelly. A fictional editorial cartoonist whose reactionary views on current events and the way things used to be in the “good old days” (he supposedly began working for the paper in 1957) are expressed with hacky, obvious writing and a crude, simplistic drawing style. I remember when I first saw his work in the pages of “America’s Finest News Source” years ago, I totally fell for it, believing it to be a real strip The Onion had picked up to display ironically, like when they used to run Cathy Guisewite‘s “Cathy” in Spanish. Eventually, though, I realized how unlikely it was that any newspaper anywhere would seriously run strips celebrating the deaths of beloved celebrities like James Brown, for example, and that Kelly’s political cartoons were a joke from the start.
Cartoons are maybe the only way you can make the sort of cloying, slimy sexual aggression in characters like Pepé Le Pew funny. Anywhere else (and even sometimes in animation) and it would just make your skin crawl.
This list from Ranker.com has 13 of the funniest and creepiest characters from animated history. Here are just a few of the best entries:
1. Pepé Le Pew
The premise of each and every one of Pepe Le Pew’s cartoons (although hilarious) is that the poor guy has perpetual emotional blue balls throughout his entire Skunk life. There are no other skunks around (which brings me to the conclusion that he’s probably just not going to the right places), so whenever he sees someone that he thinks is a skunk (most often a black cat who accidentally gets white paint on them via walking under a fence or car that has just been painted white), he just up and goes for it.
6. Glenn Quagmire
Of course Quagmire is on this freaking list.
Glenn Quagmire is the resident sexual pervert of Quahog, the fictional Rhode Island town where the fictional cast of Family Guy lives. He basically takes the role of that guy in college who always used to get laid even though his hair was weird, and brings it to a whole new level.
Quagmire will do just about anything to get laid, as you’ll see in the embedded video compilation, and has absolutely no shame about anything he does — which is why he’s awesome.
9. Jafar
The villain in the movie Aladdin, Jafar spends the entire movie trying to marry Princess Jasmine (who, after watching this video, actually kind of looks like a Kardashian) against her will. As one of the most iconic villains of animated film, Jafar commands a presence of high sorcery and extreme power… until he’s foiled by our heroes. But before then, he dresses Jasmine up in an almost Slave-Leia-esque outfit that showcases her body and makes her take up a little bit of Stockholm Syndrome to trick him into letting Aladdin take back the power (the lamp) and save the day.
