Almost every cartoon reflex you have was installed by a man born in Taylor, Texas in 1908. 🎬 The screeching stop. The double take where the eyes leave the head. The sign that drops into frame at exactly the wrong moment. The wolf whose jaw hits the floor. Fred Avery, who everyone called Tex, did not invent animation. He invented its timing.
He came out of Central Texas to California in the late 1920s, lost an eye in a horseplay accident at a studio, and went on to run the unit at Warner Bros that took a mild rabbit character and gave him the attitude that made him a star. Avery is the reason Bugs Bunny leans on a tree and says something insolent instead of running away. Later at MGM he made Droopy and pushed gags so far past physical possibility that the cartoon stopped pretending to obey any rules at all.
He was not a household name and he did not particularly want to be. 🐺 Directors and comedians knew exactly who he was, and you can trace a straight line from his timing through decades of American comedy that came after. Not bad for a kid from a cotton town in Williamson County who grew up watching pictures in a storefront theater.