"for Heaven's Sake! Grown Men!"

By RICHARD CORLISS

Next week the imposing galleries and auditoriums of New York City's Museum of Modern Art will be turned into a barnyard. A stuttering pig, a frazzled black duck, a wily coyote, an amorous skunk, a pussycat with a paunch, a tiny yellow bird and, to be sure, the world's most "wascally wabbit" will invade MOMA for a four-month tribute to the Warner Bros. cartoon shop, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. But that's not all, folks. Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote, Pepe Le Pew, Sylvester J. Pussycat, Tweety Pie, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Merrie menagerie will be starring in nine sublimely lunatic hourlong cassettes--the Golden Jubilee 24 Karat Collection--issued next month by Warner Home Video. And this season CBS will air a special to be produced by Saturday Night Live's Lorne Michaels. All in all, a fitting encomium for some of the top film artists and pleasure givers of the past half-century.

Oh yeah? What's art, doc? You mean those six-minute strips of animated paint and ink that served as anarchic baby sitters for a couple of generations of Satur- day-matinee kids? A duck getting its beak blown askew by an irate hunter is art? Well, yeah, when the duck is Daffy and the hunter is the dully malevolent Elmer Fudd. In Rabbit Seasoning (1952), Daffy and Bugs are out to convince Elmer that the other is the legally blastable species. In the midst of an argument, Daffy encounters some pronoun trouble and tells Elmer, "I demand that you shoot me now!" Daffy turns to Bugs, sticks his tongue out in "nyah" fashion and promptly gets both barrels of Elmer's shotgun. When the smoke clears, Daffy's beak is arranged around his left ear, with the tongue still protruding. Daffy deftly pushes the tongue back into the beak (to a cork-popping sound effect), replaces the mandible, stalks over to Bugs and / mutters, "Let's run through that again." Bugs' cunning, Elmer's gullibility, Daffy's indomitable ego and Director Chuck Jones' comic artistry are all on display inside of 20 seconds.

Not every Warner's cartoon is so heavy on the cordite and flying feathers. Some go in for the big soulful eyes, pastel prettiness and comforting moral of the traditional Disney cartoon. Feed the Kitty (1952), the acme of Jones' career, is a fable about a bulldog who falls into mad maternal love over a winsome kitten. But even in Warner's usually violent cat-eat-bird, rabbit- humiliate-duck world, character is at the base of the comedy. Each nuance of eyebrow makes Bugs' almost inhuman sangfroid seem more endearing; each microsecond of exasperated deadpan underlines Daffy's status as Hollywood's least placable loser; every syllable of Sylvester's lisp or Pepe Le Pew's fetid French intensifies the viewer's ability to believe that these creatures are not only personalities but gifted movie stars. Bugs, even when dolled up in drag (a spectacle that always drives Elmer to embarrassments of lust), is Cagney plus Groucho. Pepe is a Charles Boyer with negative sex appeal. And whether in basic black or in period parts such as Robin Hood, Doorlock Holmes and the Scarlet Pumpernickel, Daffy is Everyman--well, Everyduck--on the worst day of his life. He is also the subtlest farceur in pictures.

After an hour or so spent in their company, it takes a stern suspension of belief to remember that these star actors were born and raised in the genially warped minds of a cell of young cartoonists 40 and 50 years ago. Of the six major Warner's directors--Jones, Isadore ("Friz") Freleng, Robert McKimson, Bob Clampett, Fred ("Tex") Avery and Frank Tashlin--the first three spanned virtually the entire life of the shop, from the early or mid-30s until it was closed in 1963. In 1937 Warner's hired Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand funny voices, most of them sounding like a Bronx sharpie with a case of adenoids. And somehow, over the next 25 years, they all kept getting better. "We wrote cartoons for grownups, that was the secret," said Jones' ace story man Michael Maltese in a 1971 interview. And they could behave "almost like children, making absolute idiots of ourselves. An outsider would see us and say, 'Well, for heaven's sake! Grown men!' But we understood."

By the end of the year, MOMA visitors and cassette buyers should understand what Critic Manny Farber realized about the Warner's cartoons in 1943, "That ( the good ones are masterpieces, and the bad ones aren't a total loss." It would be fine if films with such titles as Porky in Wackyland (Clampett), Show Biz Bugs (Freleng), Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (Jones), What's Opera, Doc? (Jones) and Duck Amuck (glorious Jones) were embraced by the canons of academe. But imagining this, one can also hear Daffy grouse, "What a revoltin' development thith ith." Better, perhaps, for the Warner siblings to wear their garlands lightly, or let them fall off, while their antics continue to provide not so innocent delight for another millennium or so of children. The rest of us can find our wicked frissons in Warner's cartoon art and laugh hysterically all the way to the museum.