Reader Linda Calhoun spotted this Doonesbury strip and knew it would be appropriate for this website. Click on the link to go to the site. The author, of course, is Garry Trudeau.
The students clearly haven’t heard of Joe Biden’s habits.
An unwoke host
May 19, 2019 • 8:00 am
I’ll have to start following Trudeau again.
No one else has had a finger on the American zeitgeist’s pulse the way Trudeau has for going on a half century now.
He’s in reruns during the week, but does new material on Sundays.
L
Everything summed up in one cartoon. Excellent!
The word used so much I dislike: “Woke”, “safe space”
I stopped reading Trudeau’s cartoons after he blamed the murdered Charlie Hebdo journalists for having ‘wandered into hate speech’. I just couldn’t find him funny after that.
Yes, me too. That was a line in the sand for me. At least at the time – things have rather shifted since then.
And I’m not sure this strip is actually critical of ‘woke’ culture at all. It seems to be portraying the patriarchal figure as a blustering tit complaining about a snowflake culture that doesn’t actually exist. One of the students doesn’t even know what he’s talking about in the final panel.
If it is critical of ‘woke’ culture it’s pretty oblique.
Have to say I’ve never laughed at any of his stuff, and never found it particularly intelligible or consequential.
Try this one; I love it. (And I have an autographed copy.)
Trudeau was a hundred and eighty degrees wrong on Hebdo, but I’m loathe to cut someone off completely for a single transgression. Plus, I think he retracted his initial statement (as well he should’ve).
That’s rather clever, yes.
In the UK we had him on the back of the Guardian G2 supplement. I just remember his work being very stylish…and distracting me from the quick crossword.
Trudeau took a hiatus from the strip in the 1980s, and when he came back, the quality of his artwork was vastly upgraded. I suspect he used the time to take some art courses he’d missed as an undergrad at Yale.
I can’t recall exactly when Trudeau stopped being funny but I know it was before Steven Colbert (another of my former heroes) stopped being funny. I suspect Trump is partly to blame in both cases (what is he not to blame for?). Satirizing a caricature is both nearly impossible and too easy: anything you come up with either pales compared to the real thing or ends up looking like a cheap shot. Dubya was a hard target but touchable; Trump is immune to satire and makes any attempt at it backfire as merely mean-spirited.
“Trump is immune to satire and makes any attempt at it backfire as merely mean-spirited.”
Yes, he’s somewhat immune to satire, but nothing you can say about a dog turd can seem mean-spirited.
Yep, Trump has rendered the subtleties of satire and irony as dead as Dillinger. What’s left to use against him are farce and parody.
I am still a big fan of Colbert, but I just cannot watch the show. It is like when someone you care who has joined a cult.
There seem to be a lot of talented and creative people who seem these days to spend 80 to 90% of their time in a rage about Trump.
When your sister joins a cult, you still care about her, but you really get tired of hearing her gushing about the divinity of the Rajneesh.
Not only that, nobody seems to be putting any real effort into making clever and insightful humor. It is just angry rage, and some of it, even from Colbert, is quite crude and vulgar.
I suspect there is a feedback loop aspect to the whole situation, like when kids tell each other scary stories while camping, and become truly terrified of sounds in the dark. In this case, everyone is expected to state how much they hate Trump, so it sort of amplifies. Like a religious fervor. Evangelism with Trump as Satan.
I hope everyone will just sort of snap out of it. Not that I expect people to support or endorse him. I am not willing to go there, either. But perhaps emotions more in proportion to actual offenses.
I disagree. There is nothing to be done about DT except to rage and insult him until he is dust and gone. God be willing. Colbert is holding on to a vision of a better America to which we will someday return. I give him great credit. How can you possibly make Trump humor less than an angry rage?
+1
I agree. In absence of Congress, the law or the journalists holding him to account, you guys in the States only have the satirists left doing their job.
“How can you possibly make Trump humor less than an angry rage?”
If it could be done with Hitler (think Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator” or Mel Brooks in “Springtime for Hitler”), it can be done with Trump. It just takes less ranting and more imagination. I suspect Jon Stewart is behind Colbert’s current lack of the latter.
I won’t deny your point. But remember The Great Dictator was a brilliant 2 hours and 5 minutes. Colbert puts on a monologue every weekday night through the whole administration. He uses this opportunity every week day to eviscerate DT for behavior resembling a mafia boss. Give him half a break. Charlie was great, but so is Colbert. He does a good job of keeping tabs on every lie, and every failure of a deeply flawed human being who happens to be president of the USA.
Pretty sure he’s mocking the people who mock safe spaces and wokeness here.