This situation, of course, being mere corroborating evidence, as Tinsley has shown not the merest shred of an embryo of a sense of humor as long as he’s been drawing Mallard Fillmore.
Actually, I’m kind of with Miller on this one. You wouldn’t really expect Mallard Fillmore fans (a demographic which, like leprechauns and cobbler’s elves, I find it hard to believe actually exists) to read America: The Book, would you?
I’ve seen maybe 2 or 3 episodes. I listened to America, the audiobook while reading my normal periodicals or napping (which means I didn’t see the parody strips), but I don’t recall any references to his heritage. Doesn’t mean there weren’t any, I just don’t recall them.
I pose a question then. Are there ANY right-leaning cartoons out there that are actually funny? I would presume not, as anything remotely funny that isn’t too extreme would be running in my paper instead of MF.
WorldNetDaily fans, apparently, read The Onion. Anything’s possible in this wacky world of ours.
Daniel
The signature has nothing to do with satire. The signature (if it existed, we’ve established it doesn’t) is attributing words and ideas to someone who didn’t write them. Can I assume that you’d have a probelm with someone attributing words to you that you didn’t write?
Well lookie there. Miller thinks I’m pretty smart. Think I’ll use that as a sig. Screw the fact that I didn’t check to see if he ever actually said it. It says right here on a message board that he did so it must be true.
To me its the same thing. If Stewart’s book had attributed a cartoon to Tinsley that Tinsley didn’t write, parody or not, Tinsley would have every right in the world to be pissed.
But he didn’t! Whew, crisis averted.
What might be missing here is the legal notion of parody under U.S. law, which requires that in order for something to be parody, it must send two, contradictory messages: (1) that it is the work of the original author, and (2) that it is not the work of the original author. For parody to work, it has to communicate both things at once, and I believe the parody comics in America are very good examples. On the one hand, they clearly reference the original source, while making it obvious that they were not done by the original author.
As to the side issue of the signatures that rpinrd is concerned about (by the way, did you know that America did not feature the signatures?), I believe that you could make a case that both contradictory messages could be conveyed even if the signature was there. In other words, even with Tinsley’s signature appearing, you can make clear that Tinsley didn’t do it. I’ve seen parody like this often – usually verbal works rather than visual ones – a parody of a famous work or of a political pundit’s column, in which the name of the person being parodied appears in the byline – yeah, on the one hand, it credits the target of the parody, but it’s also clear that he or she didn’t write it.
In the present case, I think that if you were going to do this the text of the parody would have to be a LOT more distinguishable from something Tinsley would actually write; for example, if the text advocated imposition of shira law in the US.
Here, the views expressed in the parody are just a matter of small degrees away from something Tinsley would actually say. Therefore, it might not be clear to the average reader that Tinsley didn’t write it.
As a side note, I think this whole discussion would depend on how close the art work in the parody adhered to the art in the original. If the art was vastly different from the original, (hell, use a chicken and call the parody Rhode Island Regan - everyone would know what you were talking about) such that the totality of the parody made it clear what it was not the work of the original author, then the signature is of less importance. Of course, I can’t speak to the art work because I don’t have the book. Did I mention that I don’t have the book and therefore mistakenly believed that the parody contained Tinsley’s signature? It’s not in there you know. Really, it’s not.
Hey, Prickly City has its moments. And the coyote is cute. Mallard Fillmore, on the other hand, has no moments.
Also, while Prickly City is a conservative strip, it at least:
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Tries for humor and
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Criticizes the administration if it feels it deserves it (Look at its series of strips on Abu Ghraib).
Mallard Fillmore doesn’t do either of those.
Michael Ramirez, editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times. I disagree with his positions but that hasn’t stopped me from chuckling at a lot of his work.
So-called hatred of Bush (the Secret Service had a problem with this one…wonder why?)
Tinsley disagrees. His specific complaint, in this comic, is that exsistence of his signature on the parody strip is confusing people as to who actually wrote the comic. This is a bullshit claim: anyone dumb enough not to get that the strip is parody in the first place is too dumb to even think about checking for the signature.
Actually, the claim is stupid on two levels, because I’m pretty sure Millard Fillmore has included actual quotes from real people to set up gags before. By Tinsley’s own logic, his readers are apparently meant to assume that direct quotes that appear in his strip are instead fabrications
That’s not really a parody, though, is it?
I don’t think that he would, actually. He’s got every right in the world to be pissed that Stewart was making fun of him, but to focus on the (nonexsistant) signature is, frankly, dumb. The book is full of invented quotes being put into the mouths of real historical and contemporary figures. The intro to the book is signed “Thomas Jefferson,” not “Jon Stewart pretending to be Thomas Jefferson.” Does the estate of the very late president have the right to be offended by this, or is it well within established parameters for the use of parody?
I say, it’s the latter.
I don’t think Tinsley has ever personally expressed the opinion that he’s not actually funny. Which is, after all, the entire point of the parody.
Incidentally, the art work is largely indistinguishable from Tinsley’s own. I do not feel that this is remotely significant in determining the appropriateness of the parody.
To the contrary; Tinsley’s gripe there is that the comic is unsigned. Then he claims that he himself has more integrity than Stewart because he puts his name on his strip.
Besides being generally stupid, isn’t Tinsley making a mistake in calling attention to somebody who does far, far better political humor? (Reminds me of Tucker Carlson making the mistake of trying to zing Stewart with some sarcasm:
Carlson (sarcastically): You should teach at a journalism school.
Stewart: You should go to one.)
Conservatism is an inherently unfunny philosophy, IMO:
[ul]
[li]You can’t make fun of God, 'cause that’s blasphemy.[/li][li]You can’t make fun of religion, because that’s also blasphemy.[/li][li]You can’t make fun of your parents, because that’s rude.[/li][li]You can’t make fun of authority figures[sup][/sup], because that’s disrespectful.[/li][/ul]
[sup][/sup] An exception being liberals, since they’re automatically not worthy of respect by dint of being liberal. 
Conservatism, in short, is too full of itself to make fun of anything other than folks-who-disagree-with-me. Really limits the targets for comedy, y’know?
How about the fact that it is part of a series of parodies of various cartoonists? The context is relevant in parody. That someone with a chip on his shoulder might take it out of context is not relevant.
I like making fun of conservatives as much as the next man, but I don’t think you’re right about this. I think conservatives are less funny right now because (a) they’re in power, and (b) most of the stupid things in the world are being done by conservatives. There are plenty of humorless liberals, and plenty of conservatives with a good sense of humor. People who can openly and honestly and unreservedly laugh at themselves are, as always, rare. And that’s true on all sides.
C’mon. I’m pretty liberal myself, but this really is painting with a broad brush. You can make the same list for liberals: You can’t make fun of women, because that’s sexist. You can’t make ethnic jokes because that’s racist. You can’t…etc, etc, etc.
Conservatives think we liberals are as humorless a bunch as we think they are.
B’God, you’re right! That makes it even stupider, considering it comes in a book with a photograph of Jon Stewart on the cover.
A poster on another message board put it best: “Maybe [Tinsley] wants to give Warner Brothers a call before bitching about plagiarism? What’d he do, trace Daffy and then give him a different color set?”
