Day in the Life of an Occasional Cartoonist
Around 15 years ago I got an email from Dylan Smith, the founding editor of a newspaper in Tucson, Arizona, asking me if I would be interested in producing political cartoons for his paper. The job would be unpaid, because he was just starting out and couldn’t afford to pay, but if and when I someday found myself in Tucson, the drinks would be on him. Of course I was thrilled to take the job, and over the course of the next four years or so I produced hundreds of cartoons making fun of as many people and things as I could. Dylan briefed me on Tucson politics so I could put local officials in the crosshairs when appropriate, but I also cartooned about politics on the national and international levels. My targets included presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Kim Jong-Un, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Pope Benedict, and many, many more.
And yet one day – although I had cartooned about President Obama’s voluntary pay cut, his inability to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, his defense of U.S. government surveillance of citizens, his dithering on action against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and more – I got a complaint from a reader, who wrote, “So where's [sic] all the comics disparaging Obama …?”
Which I thought was a good question.
Of course, in these politicized times, many people only see what they want to see, but it was true that I had cartooned more about President Bush than President Obama.
Why?
Well, editorial cartoonists, unlike serial and gag cartoonists such as the great Charles M. Schulz, Bill Watterson and Gary Larson (as you can see, I'm a classicist), rely on current events to inspire their material.
In Larson's case, cavemen and dinosaurs and cats and dogs and explorers and cannibals were an inexhaustible source of hilarity that did not depend on a sitting president's $1 trillion-plus “foreign policy stumble” or a presidential candidate's “indiscretion” aboard a yacht called Monkey Business.
Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes played “Calvinball” while first Republicans, then Democrats controlled the Senate and frittered away taxpayer funds on political pork.
And Schulz … Schulz wrote Peanuts from October 2, 1950 to February 13, 2000. He – and the Peanuts gang – saw it all.
One of the first American editorial cartoonists was Benjamin Franklin, by profession a printer, but also a publisher. Franklin's most famous cartoon, published in his newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette, depicted a snake cut into eight pieces, each representing a British American colony or region. The caption, advocating colonial union, was simply, “Join, or Die”.
Fast forward to the second half of the 19th century, and German-born Thomas Nast waged war in editorial pages (most notably Harper's Weekly) against Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall political machine, which had gained control of the New York City government and was notoriously corrupt. Nast's campaign so successfully aroused public outrage against Tammany Hall excesses that Tweed was arrested and convicted of fraud.
Since Nast, Americans have seen and appreciated Bill Mauldin, who reported on the Second World War from the front lines throughout the invasion of Sicily and Italian campaign; Herb Block, who coined the term “McCarthyism” in a cartoon warning against it; and Pat Oliphant, Jeff MacNelly, Tom Toles, Garry Trudeau, Ted Rall, Walt Handelsman and many others.
But I digress. Where were all the comics disparaging Obama?
Editorial cartoonists need material. Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jeff MacNelly said, “Cartoons are really a negative art form. You never say anything nice. You're always criticizing and dumping on people.”
To do so, however, you need – as is true of news stories – a “hook”. Something has to have happened in order for us to make fun of it. Monica Lewinsky springs to mind, wearing that blue dress she should have taken to the dry cleaner ASAP.
I did enjoy working that vein: after President Clinton's appearance at the Democratic Convention, I did a comic featuring a building custodian, cleaning up all the women's panties that had been (I imagined) thrown on stage by rapturous female delegates.
After Clinton, most editorial cartoonists thought we were entering a professional Dark Age; after all, how could George W. Bush possibly provide more comic material than Bubba?
How wrong we were. Not only was Dubya a fantastic source of material (e.g. inventing weapons of mass destruction, invading foreign countries, choking on pretzels, reading My Pet Goat), but also he had a vice president who shot an acquaintance in the face.
As Charles Dickens might have said, “It was the best of times (if you were an editorial cartoonist, or a writer for Saturday Night Live), it was the worst of times (if you were an Iraqi civilian or an American dealing with the economic legacy of Bush's military adventurism).”
And we worried again in 2004, but Bush got himself re-elected! Cue more hilarity (though at times those weren’t tears of laughter rolling down our cheeks).
In 2008, like many Americans, I voted for Barack Obama. [Sorry, Senator McCain, but Sarah Palin killed your candidacy dead for me (though it was good for dozens of cartoons).]
With President Obama in the Oval Office, it was tough going, cartoon-wise. Obama seemed to me to be – in the vernacular – wound tighter than the girdle of the Baptist minister's wife at an all-you-can-eat pancake breakfast.
And that translates to fewer idiotic gaffes. Which are the low-hanging fruit of editorial cartooning.
But whenever I saw a chance, I tried to do what cartoonists do, and poke fun.
When Obama finally switched sides – so to speak – and publicly expressed support for same-sex marriage, I pointed out that it had taken him far too long to do the right thing. I did one on the Obama-Biden campaign slogan "Forward" (chosen because the campaign's pollsters thought “One Mo’ Time” was “too ethnic”). When Obama visited Kotoku temple, in Kamakura, Japan, I imagined the political fallout – “Obama’s a Buddhist!” – and I did another one in support of the Republican belief that he’s a Muslim.
Mostly, though, my “Obama” cartoons were on the subject of foreign relations … with the president playing a role opposite e.g. North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, or the Dalai Lama.
I did plenty of Iraq and Afghanistan comics, mostly from the perspective of the soldiers serving there, and I enjoyed a week or so of Secret Service cartoons that involved unhappily under-compensated Colombian hookers.
And then the presidential election campaign began. And I had Rick Santorum. And Herman Cain. And Rick Perry. And Michelle Bachmann. And Newt Gingrich.
Santorum was easy (see Google).
Herman Cain, R.I.P., though undoubtedly one of the good guys, and one of the guys you'd like to have dinner (pizza?) with, was not one of the guys you'd like to have as your president.
Michelle Bachmann? A nice reminder that the American political system really does give almost anyone the opportunity to scare the living crap out of the entire free world.
Mitt Romney kept his head down while his opponents self-destructed, one-by-one, as the media (and public) spotlight shone on each of them in turn.
In case you don’t follow American politics closely, if you have any skeletons in your closet at all, running for high office, they will be exposed.
What has changed, of course, since the 2012 presidential election is that there is no longer any behavior that can disqualify a (Republican) candidate. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?”
Outrageous, right? Little did we know what was in store for us …
I (mostly) stopped cartooning for the Tucson Sentinel in 2013, so I (mostly) sat out the Trump presidency, but as a native New Yorker, I thought he would provide plenty of material for cartoonists. What I hadn’t anticipated was that his behavior would be so outrageous it defied parody. Saturday Night Live used Alec Baldwin as their stand-in for Trump, and their sketches comprised Baldwin with a Trump combover reading Trump statements pretty much word for word.
Which was not that funny.
The good thing about political cartoons is that, with humor, you can make very accurate criticisms without consequences. The only thing that can be criticized is that there are newspapers that demand that the politician to be mocked must be of a specific ideology, or that the cartoonists themselves be of an ideology and renounce criticism of their own politicians. And then there are the cartoonists who criticize one another, without fear of losing work. Those are the ones who have the most sources for ideas to do their work, they have no political limitations.
Yes I genuinely think our modern politicians have killed the political cartoon, which is based on imagining a fairly ludicrous but powerful person doing an absolutely ludicrous thing. If you look out the window and they’re actually doing it, it kills the joke😢