Well, I will say it’s handy when someone reveals themself to be such an utter, clueless ass so thoroughly, so that people don’t have to wonder about it at all.
I got it!
Jon Stewart is apparently the drunken lovechild of John Kerry and Rodney Dangerfield!
He could contract that out to Dave Chapelle if he wants.
Bruce Tinsley is just jealous, because the fake Mallard Fillmore strip is funnier than anything Tinsley has done this year.
Exactly my reaction. I could get a better caricature drawn at the traveling carnival.
D_Odds, I’m guessing you don’t watch The Daily Show very often, then. Probably most of the people in this thread do, and thus know that he often refers to his Jewishness or some aspect of Judiasm on the show. (just so you don’t think we’re going solely on “he looks Jewish!”)
Not to rain on anyone’s Tinsley-bashing (personally, I think he’s as unfunny as a root canal) but the “offending” cartoon, as described by Menocchio and Tinsley himself does raise some alarms for me. Without having seen the offending strip myself, I can see where Tinsley is coming from.
Specifically, the fact that the parody strip included Tinsley’s signature really bothers me. All of you have said that, in context, the strip is obviously a parody. However, what if you took it out of context? What if someone scanned it and posted it on a web site without attributing it to Stewart’s book? Ignoring the fact that this would likely violate Stewart’s copyright in the parody, isn’t it reasonable that in that instance an innocent reader of the web site might honestly attribute the strip to Tinsley? Sure, the dialog of the strip includes some pretty over-the-top rhetoric, but you’ve all said that that is what Tinsley is all about. I can easliy see someone saying “Wow, I knew Tinsley was a conservative extremist, but I had no idea he was this bad.” Even the end panel with the “I forgot to make a joke” line doesn’t necessarily scream parody. Cartoonists will often do "very special’ strips on serious topics. To me, that line could mean “This issue is very important to me, so much so that I’m not going to joke around about it, and you shouldn’t either.” All in all, if taken out of the context of the book it seems to me, just from what’s been said above, that Tinsley has a reason to be upset.
The signature is just such a personal thing; such a direct attribution, that it seems especially egregious to me to copy it into a parody. Certainly we’d all be upset if someone was selling copycat artwork with forged signatures?
Finally, one more random thought about the signature. Most parody work does not try to attribute the parody to the original author. Think about parody songs. In those, we can identify that the singer of “Eat It” is Weird Al, not Michael Jackson. If the lyrics were written down, we’d say "Copyright 1985, Weird Al” not “Copyright 1985 Michael Jackson.” Weird Al made no attempt to confuse anyone into thinking that Jacko was performing that song, or more importantly held those views. That is not the case here.
So to answer your comment [mobo85], “Tinsley appears to comment that people might have been misled since the Mallard parody wasn’t signed by the parodist. He apparently didn’t realize that, with the exception of the Mad Fold-In parody (which was actually drawn by Al Jaffee), none of the parody cartoons were signed by the parodist.” [/mobo85] My problem, and probably Tinsley’s, is not that the actual parodists didn’t sign it, that’s fine. But for God’s sake don’t put Tinsley’s signature on it.
I had to look this up- It doesn’t. There is no facimile signature of the original cartoonist on any of the parody cartoons.
But it’s not being taken out of context. Did you click on the link in the OP that has the cartoons? If so, you would have seen that the strip specifically says that his readers are emailing him about his strip’s appearance in America: The Book.
That would indicate that his readers are even more clueless than he is. Or he may understand that the only kind of fans he is likely to attract need such handholding.
I just looked at the original cartoon in the book America – it doesn’t have Tinsley’s signature on it.
If you can’t draw a parody cartoon that looks like the original, then Mad magazine (for one) is in a lotta trouble.
I’m backing him up, here. I checked as well in my copy of the book and no signatures are found anywhere in any of the cartoons.
Back around the early '60s, at least one of Mad’s artists, Wally Wood, signed a few of his comic strip parodies with the names of the original artists. I doubt that they got in any trouble over it though, as Mad seemed to be on good terms with the syndicated cartoonists whose work they parodied. (Read: Mort Drucker, Mell Lazarus and Charles Schulz had a much better sense of humor than Bruce Tinsley.)
Well, looks like I was confused by one of Tinsley’s rebuttal cartoons. In the cartoon marked “Today” in the OP’s link, Tinsley’s making a big deal about the signature issue, and for some reason I concluded that Stewart’s book had included a fake signature. As I said, I don’t have the book, and no one has posted a link, so going on Menocchio’s description, and my poor reading comprehension, I came to a wrong conclusion that was the foundation of my whole post. Well, there’s a half hour of my life I’ll never get back.
But I’ll address a few point anyway:
Expano The fact that the rebuttal strip says that people are emailing Tinsley specifically about the strip’s appearance in the book is inconclusive. It’s a “comic” strip and there are space limitations. The truth could be that Tinsley is hearing about the strip from all different sources, but in the interest of brevity he only mentions actual confusion stemming from the book. Also, even if that was the whole truth, I don’t think it would be important. If the false sig was on there (it’s not, apparently) the potential for confusion would still exist and I would still have a problem.
Cal I never said you couldn’t draw a strip that looks like another’s artwork. I think it was pretty clear that my problem was with the signature (along with a reading comprehension problem as well.)
Do you ever watch his show? He makes self-referential Jewish jokes a few times a week.
None of the parody cartoons in that section of the book have signatures except Jaffe’s.
Tinsley is humorless dipshit.
Oops…posted too soon.
He’s a humorless dipshit who apparently can’t be bothered to check his facts.
Oops. I meant Beetle Bailey’s Mort Walker, not Mad’s own Mort Drucker.
Who the hell bothers to check if an artist signed a particular comic strip? How does the inclusion of a signature make any potential reader more likely to miss the satire? Sorry, but this just doesn’t make any sense. Anyone dumb enough to think that was a legitimate Tinsley comic is too stupid to figure out the importance of the artist’s signature in determing the legitimacy of the comic. I think that level of dumb generally precludes literacy in the first place. Which brings me to my second point: I’ve also got $20 that Tinsley has not received a single letter from a reader who was genuinely confused as to who wrote the strip in America: The Book. Tinsley invented that as an “excuse” to make fun of a prominent liberal humorist. Pure sour grapes, is all it is.
Taking potshots at Mallard Fillmore is even less sporting than taking potshots at Chick Tracts. At least a Chick Tract gives you something to work with, whether it’s the borderline homoerotic adult males or the HAW HAW HAW! count.
Mallard Fillmore is just sad. Its only purpose in life today is to give Prickly City something to look worse than by comparison.