Cartoon comedy: "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century"

Cartoon violence doesn't need to be "mindless."  Sometimes it can be skilfully integrated with witty wordplay and creative jokes about fictional technology. Director Chuck Jones and writer/story artist Michael Maltese demonstrate this in their classic cartoon Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (Warner Bros., 1953).

In this cartoon, Daffy (as Duck Dodgers) and Marvin are rival claimants, on behalf of Earth and Mars respectively, for Planet X and its precious resources (Illudium Phosdex, the "shaving cream atom", if you're curious).

Marvin has Daffy at ray-gun point with an "A-1 Disintegrating Pistol" (A-1 is evidently the Martian counterpart of Acme), but Daffy isn't bothered, as he's wearing a "disintegration-proof vest".  This is a funny "technology" gag in itself: the idea of a futuristic version of a present-day item (a bullet-proof vest), and the idea that you could protect yourself from disintegration the same way you could protect yourself from a bullet.

This is followed by the first of two gags where a piece of technology does what its description says it will... but not in the way you would reasonably expect.

The vest itself is disintegration-proof... but it doesn't make the person wearing it disintegration-proof, and Daffy is reduced to a pile of dust on the ground.

After recovering from his ordeal (we'll come back to that) Daffy threatens Marvin with his own Disintegrating Pistol.  "And when it disintegrates... it disintegrates!" boasts Daffy.  Like the vest, though, the pistol has an accurate but misleading name.

The pistol doesn't disintegrate the target you fire it at, it just... disintegrates.  It's a disintegrating pistol!  (To use the grammatical terms, Marvin's disintegrating pistol uses "disintegrating" as a transitive verb - a pistol that disintegrates *something* - while Daffy's uses "disintegrating" as an intransitive verb.) 

These gags are not only clever in their use of wordplay, but also in that they make good use of the cartoon's setting and premise: we're not just given some standard gun gags with the word "disintegrate" slapped on them.

So, yeah, how did Daffy recover from his disintegration?  Fortunately Porky, in his sidekick role as Daffy's "eager young space cadet", was on hand with an Acme Integrating Pistol!

I don't know if this was intentional, but I like how it's an "Integrating" pistol rather than a "Re-Integrating" pistol.  The name suggests it's not just useful for restoring someone, but that you could point it at any pile of dust and have it turn into something.  Either way, it's still a funny idea, having another futuristic pistol to undo what the previous one did.

Anyway, Porky points the pistol at Daffy's remains and "integrates" them back into Daffy who, for the first few seconds, reacts with dazed bewilderment, jabbering "who... what... where?"

They didn't have to do this.  They could have had Daffy just quickly reconstitute himself either on-screen or off-screen and moved on to the next scene without breaking any cartoon rules.  

But instead, Jones and Maltese took advantage of the setting and premise to get some more humour out of how Daffy gets restored, and how he reacts to it - just as they used the premise and setting to come up with jokes about accurately-but-misleadingly named technology.  And they not only did this alongside good old cartoon violence, but incorporated them into the same gags.  Now that's cartoon storytelling!