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in class. She then daydreams of doing battle against an old-maid schoolteacher and three anthropomorphized schoolbooks. In Alice the Jail Bird (1925), Alice (now played by Margie Gay) and her animated feline pal Julius steal a pie, are arrested and successfully start a prison riot during which they escape.
    This rebellion against authority was often manifested in the shorts through behavior that emphasized the bawdy or sexually licentious.
    This can be seen in the recurrent trope of the “party,” which Merritt describes as “the most common expression of irresponsibility . . . an unau-thorized free-for-all or jamboree where underlings . . . overturn the conventional order.”9 Merritt’s description of the running motif of the
    “party” invokes the spirit of the “carnivalesque” that media scholars have adapted from Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais. The medieval carnival stressed bodily pleasure and excessiveness (particularly in regard to bodily functions) in order to overturn the received notions of morality, discipline and social order that ruled society outside of carnival time.10 Disney’s early work celebrates the spirit of the carnivalesque, including the constant reveling in the function and physical assault of the body. Alice Rattled by Rats (1925), for example, perfectly displays the orgiastic nature of carnival. Alice leaves Julius in charge while she’s away, but while chasing some mice, Julius inadvertently falls into a basement tub of moonshine (another recurrent joke in Disney’s films during this period of Prohibition). With Julius stumbling about drunk downstairs, the mice have a field day destroying the house with their makeshift celebration. Mice begin shimmying madly to the wild music being played. One mouse shimmies with such abandon that s/he drops her/his pants.
    In Disney’s use of the carnivalesque during this early period, much of the “low” humor common to broad farce, vaudeville and burlesque found their way into the shorts. The aforementioned “losing one’s drawers” was a popular gag amongst Disney and his animators, showing up not only in Alice Rattled by Rats, but in Alice in the Jungle (1925) and Alice’s Tin Pony (1925) as well. Later, in Disney’s second cartoon series about Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, panties humor appears again. The 8
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    climax of one cartoon, Tall Timber, shows Oswald being chased into a cave by a bear and a terrific fight ensuing off screen. Oswald emerges with a bearskin coat and the bear in nothing but a bra and panties.
    “Outhouse humor” often rules the day in the Alice Comedies and the Oswald cartoons. In Alice’s Orphan (1926), Julius finds a discarded waif who comes complete with what appears to be a soiled diaper. The animation in Alice’s Egg Plant (1925) takes particular delight in the physical exertion required by hens to lay eggs. Another recurrent image, if not necessarily a specifically recurring character, was the cow, who usually provided a good udder joke. The similarity of cow udders to human erogenous zones (female breasts in function, male genitalia in body location) was capitalized upon often in these cartoons. As the cows often found themselves stuck in confined spaces or needing to be hoisted, some other character would get a good squirt of milk in the face as a result. Cows would appear so regularly in the Oswald series that Merritt tries to argue that “the cow” is a character and sidekick to Oswald.11
    The prevalence for violence upon the posterior of characters is another common motif, one that would recur throughout Walt’s tenure at the studio. Characters are constantly landing butt-first into cacti or getting a round of buckshot in the behind. (Even live-action five-year-old Margie Gay as Alice gets a bullet in the rear in Alice the Jail Bird .) Walt must have found such “butt humor” amusing, because it becomes obvious throughout the years that animators at the studio