I’d totally agree for you, but it doesn’t explain how Garfield is still syndicated.
Personally, I think newspapers should take the initiative, and systematically destroy any cartoons that think this joke is funny. Not because it’s racist, mind you. Because it’s tired and hackneyed.
If it were up to me, the funnies would include Get Fuzzy, Doonesbury, Opus, and reruns of The Far Side. Everything else would get the axe.
Sure would end the complaint of cartoonists worldwide of not getting enough page space for their precious artwork. Four strips on one page should make them big enough.
I was a fan of Johnny Hart for many years. By the late 70’s I had a bookshelf filled with all of his B.C. and Wizard of Id books. At some point I noticed he was injecting religious messages into his newspaper strips. This annoyed me but I continued to enjoy his wit. The religious content grew and grew and one day he trashed a menorah and insulted an entire religious group. I listened to the bullshit evasions and decided the guy had gone over the edge. From that day I skipped over the strip when I read the funnies. I only found out about the Islam insult from this thread. More bullshit. There was nothing obscure about that. Garry Trudeau defended Hart by saying that cartoonists don’t use innuendo of that kind. Also bullshit. Hart has been using symbolism and innuendo for years, it is virtually his modus operandi. Hart claimed that his Islam insult was merely a joke about smelling shit, just a man going into an outhouse. Today’s strip (first I’ve read in years with the hope of seeing an appropriate example of double-entendre or implication) starts with an ant thinking “It’s so simple it’s silly!” then shows him crawling into his anthill and thinking “…You hide in a hole in the ground, and no one on earth can find you.” A reference to Saddam Hussein? Of course it was. But if that was a ‘bad’ thing Hart and his defenders would have claimed it was just about an ant crawling into his anthill. Despicable bullshit!
Hart’s religious bigotry is beyond question. Unfortunately his poor judgment in making this bigotry a part of his work calls into question his judgment on displaying his possible ethnic bigotry. Refusing to run the strip was good judgment and charges of “oversensitivity” are asinine.
Maybe someday somebody will give us some examples of this “rampant oversensitivity” these bigoted right-wing morons are always bitching about. What’s wrong? Can’t make your jokes about Tiger Woods ordering watermelon and fried chicken for the Masters champion’s dinner? Can’t tell Polack jokes? Here’s my impersonation of the typical person who bitches about “oversensitivity”: “Shee-it! Niggers is always callin’ each other ‘nigger.’ Why cain’t I call’em niggers? They’s ‘oversensitive’ is what. It’s thet danged political correctiveness. Fag liberal commies are agin’ my rights of free speech!”
You know, it has been said that we judge others by their behavior and ourselves by our intentions. I never trust vigilante moralizers for exactly that reason. The Legion of Decency is dead. Let it rest in peace.
You know Lib, I think it’s pretty charitable of you to assume you were being judged by your actions, there.
It was just a humorous slant, after all.
(Glances around, looking for the claws to come out…)
I don’t know why he still gets paid to draw that strip. I can’t remember a single time where it was ever funny.
Not me, Larry. Johnny.
It’s not too often that I agree with vanilla, but IMO you’re way off on this one. The A & F controversy was due to the fact that they deliberately created shirts with outdated stereotypes of Asians. It wasn’t the pun that was offensive, it was the appearance of the caricatures and the old stereotype of all Chinese people having jobs doing laundry. I’m no fan of Johnny Hart, but I don’t see any evidence that that’s what he was going for at all. In this case, I think it really was just a bad joke; I’m not aware of any standard stereotype of Asians as not being able to build airplanes. And unlike the recent outhouse strip that generated so much controversy, this one at least makes sense. There is a joke there, however lame it may be.
And Larry, people might be misreading your OP because the title is a little misleading. To say Hart “puts his foot in it” implies that he did something other than just being a lousy cartoonist.
The cartoon reminded me of this:
“We were discussing what to call my TV show… and the management had their own suggestions… ‘East Meets West’… ‘Wok on the Wild Side’ - W-O-K, wok… so I threw a huge tantrum and I said, 'Fuck it, we’re gonna call it Chinkies.” - Margaret Cho
Give the guy credit…for having been a lot worse in the past. Remember “Flank Rroyd Light?” Remember “Gleetings, you just been drafted?”
He’s trying to be more sensitive… Even George Wallace saw the light, toward the end of his days…
Jeeze, he beats the hell out of “Marmaduke…”
Silas
Here’s an example of oversensitivity: Your feeble attempt to reproduce an Appalachian accent suggests that you think rednecks are ignorant and racist. If you want to do something about prejudice, look in the fucking mirror.
Ya know, I’m no fan of Hart at all, but could someone please point out where in that cartoon he indicates that the Wongs in question are Asian? Their names are even given as “Fred and Stanley”, hardly typical “Asian” names. Is it only because of the last name “Wong” that everybody is ASSUMING that it’s a racist reference? I remember growing up there was a family of white Wongs…er…Wongs who were white…er…fuck, everything’s a bad joke in this thread, you know what I mean. Two doors down from us, in the neighborhood I grew up in, there was a Caucasian family named Wong. whew
In this case at least, I’m calling “bad pun”.
FTR, the joke was in a Bennett Cerf collection published in the 1940s, and it was mildly funnier:
In a maternity hospital, a Mrs. Wong gives birth to a white baby. Mr. Wong points out to her that “Two Wongs don’t make a white.” She replies, “Yes, but in this case it’s purely Occidental”.
I don’t consider the cartoon racist, but much worse – it isn’t funny. But then, BC rarely is these days. Hart’s passive-agressive, “Who? Me?” attempts to piss off non-Christians are the only thing I find interesting about him anymore.
Ha! They have “Europe” and “The Rest of the World” listed under the heading of “Evils of the World.” Of course, they have “The Law of God” under there, along with Pornography, Blasphemy, and Terrorism, too.
Complicated folks.
Dear God. X
Okay, okay. The Luanne-Tiffany-Gunther threesome was a little weird, but we all learned a lesson: eventually the nice guy wins, especially if he supplies the coke.
I don’t know about the OP’s, but at least that one has a joke. Can someone please give me a hint what he’s on about in this Wizard of Id strip?
I can’t figure how to link directly to it, but it’s at this site, and it’s from Saturday January 24, 2004. I am just flabbergasted as to what he might be getting at.
Dammit - and now I notice that one was written by Brant Parker. But I’m still completely in the dark as to what it means.
DNA evidence is now being used to free some prisoners from Death’s Row who were wrongly convicted. Clearly this scheduled hangee has just gotten a similar reprieve.