I like Martin Rowson personally - indeed, when he was a little boy and I was a teacher, reader, I TAUGHT him! And I hugely admire the uncompromising “saeva indignatio” of his world-view. But not long ago, opening The Guardian to look at his latest effort, I found myself flummoxed. (See above). Obviously, we are in the territory of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy Gale, the Cowardly Lion and the Straw Man are making their way along the Yellow Brick Road. They are apparently being pulled down into a pit by someone I take to be Donald Trump - you can just make out the long red tie in the Stygian blackness of the pit in the foreground.
I was on holiday when reading this , and handed the paper to three other, highly intelligent, companions for illumination. We all got the Wizard of Oz ref. I was meanwhile Googling “Yellow Dick”, and instantly wishing I hadn’t, since I immediately got the offer of various phallocentric porno-images on my phone. Is Trump a Yellow Dick? Is this a coinage by Rowson or is it an idiom? None of us (2 aged 26, one aged 60 odd, and me, the Old Git) had heard of it.
So, the message is… er??!! Trump, in a pit, is luring or dragging the three on the road to their destruction. I assume that the Dorothy Gale figure is meant to be Kamala Harris but it really doesn’t look a blind bit like her. The other two? I assume the cowardly lion is Tim Walz, but again, it doesn’t even faintly look like him. No idea who the straw man is meant to be. In what sense is Trump controlling the Democratic agenda in the US elections? I should have thought they were in the ascendant and - given the single issue of abortion - forget the rest - the Democrats are bound to win - no?
I know we had time to kill, on hols, to pore over the crossword, but that was fifteen absolutely wasted minutes. Over in The Times, a wordless cartoon depicted Kamala (this time just about recognizable from the context, but , really, try harder!) riding side-saddle on a horse or donkey (so badly drawn you could not see which). The animal was being carried, as if dead, by Presidents Obama and Clinton and an unrecognizable figure, possibly Hilary Clinton or possibly Tim Walz again. What was this meant to convey? The Democratic Party is not dead, it is obviously coming back to life after the disaster of Biden’s doddering through his TV debate with Trump.
I mention these efforts by the cartoonists towards the tail end of the Silly Season, because they are not isolated instances. Almost every day, when I open the newspaper, - any newspaper - I look at the cartoon, and find myself unamused and uninstructed. And worst of aa completely baffled. In the old days, Nicholas Garland in the Telegraph used to turn out the same cartoon over and over again. The Garland formula was to have a famous picture, - “When Did you last see your father?” or a Tenniel illustration to Alice
. He would then put “with apologies to… “ at the bottom of the picture. The figures in the picture would be altered, so that Alice or the Mad Hatter or Whoever would have the (just about recognizable) face of some politician of the times, as it were John Major or Tony Blair. I doubt that Garland’s cartoons were ever understood by any reader or raised so much as a smile. He was rewarded with a knighthood - or was it a CBE - at the end of his career. His disastrous example is now often followed - Rowson’s Yellow Brick Road is an example - of some familiar image being re-used for the cartoonist’s own baffling purpose. The dreadfully unfunny “Nature notes”, by Peter Brookes in the Times were not a vg idea to start with, buy they soon became tired to the point of exhaustion. I notice over the years that the only people who have ever pointed them out to me, with approval, claiming that they were amusing, are people with NIL sense of humour. (Most “humour”, whether on the page or the stage, is for those with no humour of their own).
A political cartoon has to satisfy several requirements. It has to be topical, and it has to make a sharp point about the subject. In order to do this, the caricatures of the politicians depicted have to be instantaneously recognizable, and the gag has to be instantaneously both funny and comprehensible. This isn’t the crossword section of the paper. If you are puzzling over the cartoon, then it has failed. YOU HAVEN’T FAILED - IT HAS FAILED!
The fault is the editor’s. If the cartoonist submits a caricature which isn’t recognizable, the drawing should be binned. If the gag isn’t funny, ditto. It doesn’t matter, for my money, how offensive the joke, so long as it fulfils those two criteria.
Because it is still the Silly Season, we had time to pore over the cartoons, and try to fathom their meaning. Unfortunately, the two cartoons mentioned are now the sort of thing we all expect from the papers. Hardly any cartoonists are up to the mark.
I suspect that the reason they are all getting away with it - serving up rubbish day after day - is that the editors have minimal senses of humour, and are therefore shy to say that they do not get the “joke”. It is a special pity , because we live in an age when so many of the politicians of the world are already caricatures - Sir Keir and Angela Rayner are cases in point, but so is Trump. So is Monsieur Macron. I understand the cartoonists’ problem with Kamala, who is a beautiful woman (ditto Giorgia Meloni). But they are supposed to be professionals and they should not let kindness or gallantry get in the way of their job, which is, less to make public figures SEEM ridiculous, as to draw out their INHERENT absurdity.
I never wrote “should try harder” on one of Rowson’s reports when he was a boy - he was the most brilliant pupil I ever had in nine years of school and university teaching. But I say it now. Pull your socks up, Martin. As for some of your fellow-cartoonists - they are pathetic. There must be some young women and men out there who can draw, who have a satirical take on the world, and who could do with the money. Were I the editor of any of the mainstream papers at the moment, I’d be on the look-out. And until a new intake was found, I’d drop the cartoons altogether.
I rather liked both Peter Brookes and Nicholas Garland in their day, though looking back it was for probably for their draughtsmanship rather than their humour (into which their ingenuity didn't always translate). The Telegraph's current political cartoonist is unimpressive on both counts. I struggle to appreciate Rowson's darkness and am repelled by Steve Bell's cruelty, for all that they hark back to Gillray, Cruikshank, etc.
So agree. They’re ugly and NOT FUNNY