Friday 19th of April 2024
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jokes and jockettes under the down-under sun are dying in newspapers... long live online angry colours and lines !

jockettes

The power to provoke, stir, enlighten, amuse or simply provide a different perspective in a single picture is unique to cartoonists, who have a range of weapons photographers do not.

But the editor of a collection of the top Australian political cartoons for 2014 has warned the art form's influence is facing an inevitable decline.

"The editorial cartoon appeared as a newspaper phenomena, it's a creation of newspapers so I guess as newspapers decline this particular form of political satire will decline," Best Australian Political Cartoons editor Russ Radcliffe said.

"I can't see any way around that."

Radcliffe said it was an open question as to whether political cartoons generally have a huge impact anymore.

"George Orwell said every joke or every cartoon is a minor revolution, that might have been true in a more deferential age," he said.

"I don't think it's true these days, I mean the fact that you show Tony Abbott in budgie smugglers isn't really a great political statement.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-11-26/budgets-refugees-and-palmer-power-among-top-political-cartoons/5920092

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Yes the print media and cartooning are like dinosaurs... But here on YD, we're trying to evolve feathers and wings to become birds... Birds are descendant of dinosaurs and still thriving today — despite the floury of insecticides and poisons in the air from backyards auto-pumps manufactured by the chemical families who want you to hate those bugs, including those beneficial ones in the neighbour's garden — we try to maintain the course and slam those idiots who are sending the human species to the fictitious heaven (hell) of real idiocy. We might not win, nor shoot those shifty bastards in the end but at least we tried, we try and will try again and again until death of our anger do us part.

To be raving on day in day out, we need to be angry and turn this anger into images and rants... Tony Abbott is a raving lunatic idiot. HE LIES. We should know that. Images are worth a thousand words they say... some of them are worth more words than a novel or a years worth subscription to a news limited sewer outlet. 

For example, the toon above, by one of the best cartoonist in the world, Rowe, shows history of news delivery going back from the prehistorical days of Joh in Queensland (feeding the chooks) to the filtering of the news by Tony Abbott's lying jockettes — plus a mention of the doyen of journalism, Laurie oakes. You would have to read a half-a-million words article to express the same amount of concepts and you'd be crying by the end of it.

Toon at top:  David Rowe's cartoons appear in the Australian Financial Review. (David Rowe)

 

the chimp in our armour...

monkeys...

thank you "mad as hell"

The last sketch after the credits of Mad as Hell SUMMED UP the terrible ordeal that we, the dumb viewers of ABC television, could be submitted to. REPEATS of Dad's Army and of that program with the two Birds of a Feathers and that next door neighbour full of cash... It was BRILLIANT... 

The Gus toon above is also a repeat...

Newspaper Cartoons

Newspaper Cartoons are on the wane because newspapers are on the wane.  Visual mockery of politics and politicians is alive and well on the internet with a larger subject and perspective range and using a greater range of artistic techniques than the dinosaurs of old.  Check out online political cartoonists and illustrators and you'll see fast, funny and provocative toons that will appear to have inspired the old printed toons on the following day.  

It's all part of the digital disruption that technology is causing everywhere, embrace it, it's great.   

the toons have it...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-07/best-political-cartoons-go-on-show-in-canberra/5948592

 

Yes twoeyehead... Here at YD we've embraced the publishing of cartoons since 1951... Er... not quite... The first cartoons published on this site were around March 2005... but I have been cartooning since 1951... My toons are not the best ever cartoons. They are average and should make you cringe rather than laugh. They are quite puerile, infantile and low brow but then they depict puerile, infantile and imbecilic lying politicians. My mind is old and sometimes I think "why bother"... Then I say we cannot let the bastards get away with anything and we've got to be relentless in holding the fort against their assault with crap. It's the battle of elected important nasty stupid shit-men (and women) versus the centre of the universe that is inside everyone decent. 

 

I lost a lot of good tooning typefaces when I changed computers about 10 years ago... I have been too lazy to update and I'm stuck using a second rate typeface. Too bad.

Long live the republic! The cartoon at top by Rowe... and by the way, the last sketches of "Mad as Hell" did not make broadcast. They were only viewable on iView... I hope one day, they will be on youtube...

feeding the dead chooks...

 

"Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward."


From Will Self

 

 

Satire is supposed to prick people's consciences and challenge the powerful - but is that possible in a society where no-one can agree the basis of right and wrong, asks Will Self.

In the wake of the murders of the cartoonists and journalists at the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, I found myself driven to reconsider the nature and purpose of satire.

Within hours of the killings I was contacted by an international media outfit that was putting together a gallery of responses from "the world's leading satirists". Any pride I might have felt at being included in this - potentially - august company was cancelled out by my not, in fact, feeling any pride at all. Why should this be? After all, in a working life that's consisted, in large part, of tossing lexical firecrackers in the bemused faces of more placid verbarians, I've ended up with some of my best friends being satirists. If I wished to dodge the bullet myself, surely it could only be because of some midlife crisis of faith in life's great and compelling absurdity - and so I taxed myself: Could it be that I was falling victim to the usual delusion of the ageing joker, a pathological desire to be taken seriously? Or was I coming to doubt the value of satire itself?

I've always believed - or at least believed I believed - in the moral purpose of satire. Indeed, I remember an essay title from school: "The aim of satire should always be the moral reform of society - discuss," and just how eager I was to discuss it. My personal yardstick for whether or not something qualifies to be satire at all is thus an adaptation of a classic definition of what constitutes good journalism - such an enterprise, it was written, should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". Whenever I'm presented with a cartoon, a piece of writing or a comic shtick purporting to be satiric I always interrogate it along these lines: Who does it afflict, and who does it comfort? If in either case the work is mis-targeted - so afflicting the already afflicted, or comforting those already well-upholstered - it fails the test, and will need to be re-classified, usually as merely offensive, or egregiously offensive. It can be objected that such a narrow classification of satire leaves little wiggle room for modes of discourse that, by transgressing the boundaries of what's acceptable draw our attention to the very contingent and culturally-specific character of much of what we deem to be ethical.

Certainly - to paraphrase the great English satirist Laurence Sterne - they order these matters differently in France. The conditions that produce violent revolution are also necessarily productive of a violent satire - one that may well aim at the moral reform of both the individual and society as a whole, but which, rather than firing Lilliputian barbs, lets fall the cleansing blade the Jacobins dubbed "our national razor". Since the revolution of 1789, the French state has been seized by the paroxysm of regime change on several subsequent occasions. Arguably, each sweeping away of constitutional authority was necessarily accompanied by a satiric outburst that aimed at a re-evaluation of all values, not just some - no institution could be regarded as beyond censure, no individual above the most extreme criticism; with the foundational myth of the First Republic inextricably bound up with violent revolution, each subsequent bouleversement required, of necessity, its own satiric bombshell.

'To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable'

This description of journalism was coined by the Chicago-based humorist Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1937), who put the words into the mouth of a fictional Irish bartender, Mr Dooley - "Th' newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward."

 

read more:

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31442441