Theodor Seuss Geisel, "The veteran recalls the battle of 1943," published by "PM Magazine" on January 5, 1943 (all images courtesy Dr. Seuss Collection, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UC San Diego)
Although the majority of his books are already some half a century old, Dr. Seuss remains one of the most beloved children’s authors and illustrators in American history. I’d bet that most of us, if asked, could name a Dr. Seuss favorite that made a lasting impression (One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish for me). But how many of us knew that Dr. Seuss, aka Theodor Seuss Geisel, was also a political cartoonist?
Geisel, as it turns out, was the chief editorial cartoonist for the leftist New York newspaper PM between 1941 and 1943, and while there, he made over 400 political cartoons about the war. Nearly two hundred of them were published in a book titled Dr. Seuss Goes to War, and the entire collection is housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego, which has made all of the drawings available online. They range from encouragements to buy war bonds to sharp critiques of American isolationism to caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini, reflecting his strong support for the World War II effort and a biting disappointment with the US government’s inaction for the first part of the war.
Theodor Seuss Geisel, "The Appeaser," published by "PM Magazine" on June 16, 1941
What’s most striking, though, is how the world of the cartoons is so distinctly Seussian. The loose, animated, style and fantastic creatures and human-animal hybrids for which Geisel is still known appear throughout his political oeuvre. Most of us probably wouldn’t expect to see a Horton-like figure alongside Hitler, but here we do, and amazingly, it works.
Geisel went on to support the US war effort more directly, joining the army in 1943 as a captain and the commander of the Animation Departmant of the First Motion Picture Unit of the Air Forces. There he wrote the propaganda film favorites Your Job in Germany and Our Job in Japan, among others.
Theodor Geisel, "Don't let them carve THOSE faces on our mountains," published by "PM Magazine" on December 12, 1941
Theodor Seuss Geisel, "The Appeaser," published by "PM Magazine" on June 16, 1941
Theodor Seuss Geisel, "Hm-m! Can't understand it!," published by "PM Magazine" on February 12, 1942
Editor’s note: One of our readers wisely pointed out that while Geisel’s cartoons express the standard liberal leanings of his day, they also reflect the racism of the time. Rather than caricaturing Emperor Hirohito or other specific individuals, Geisel drew Japanese people according to an ugly, generalized stereotype — “piggish nose, coke-bottle eyeglasses, slanted eyes, brush mustache, lips parted (usually in a smile),” in the words of Richard Minear, author of Dr. Seuss Goes to War. Geisel even went as far as a cartoon representing Japanese Americans as an internal fifth column, which appeared in print only six days before President Roosevelt authorized Japanese-American internment in 1942. Minear’s response to this glaring oversight says it best:
Perhaps it is no surprise that American cartoonists during the Pacific War painted Japan in overtly racist ways. However, it is a surprise that a person who denounces anti-black racism and anti-Semitism so eloquently can be oblivious of his own racist treatment of Japanese and Japanese Americans. And to find such cartoons — largely unreproached — in the pages of the leading left newspaper of New York City and to realize that the cartoonist is the same Dr. Seuss we celebrate today for his imagination and tolerance and breadth of vision: this is a sobering experience.
C. J. Budd, Harper's Weekly, April 17, 1912. Roosevelt as vaudeville barker shouting "Women's Suffrage Forever." (all images courtesy Marc H. Miller) (click to enlarge)
Marc H. Miller is a curator, writer, publisher, artist and art historian, and he is the man behind an exhibition that is currently going on at the Charles P. Stevenson Library at Bard College in upstate New York, The Presidential Election of 1912 in Cartoons. Drawn from his personal collection these images provide a window into the world of US Presidential politics a hundred years ago when Theodore Roosevelt, who was a Republican and a “Progressive” ran in a hotly contested race.
As we gear up for the 2012 elections, these images are a useful reminder about the down and dirty world of politics, what we can expect in the year to come and political mudslinging is nothing new.
Miller is the founder of Ephemera Press where he has worked with cartoonists like Tony Millionaire and James Romberger on a series of pictorial maps of historic New York City neighborhoods. He also curated Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy, which traveled to the National Portrait Gallery and was circulated nationally by the Smithsonian Institution.
I contact him for a quick interview about the nature of political cartoons and their history. He also provided Hyperallergic with a number of images that show the richness of his archive and the diversity of political cartoons during the period.
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E. W. Kemble, Harper's Weekly, March 30, 1912. Roosevelt as a cross-dressing, rock-throwing socialist suffragette. (all images courtesy Marc H. Miller)
Hrag Vartanian: When was the modern election cartoon born?
Marc H. Miller: Modern political cartoons go back at least to the 1830s when Andrew Jackson was president, but they really became popular with the rise of picture magazines in the 1860s and 70s, and later with the emergence of picture newspapers in the 1890s.
Political cartoons were then a small but conspicuous part of the pictorial press, which was the first in an ongoing sequence of new mass media formats, the predecessor of television and the Internet today. HV: What is unique — if anything — about the Roosevelt-era images?
MHM: The 1912 images are unique mostly because of the tremendous passions that the election inspired. It was an unusual three-party race with former president [Theodore] Roosevelt running as a Progressive. Cartoonists always loved portraying TR.
In 1912 much of the pictorial press turned against him with a vengeance. There were some incredible veteran cartoonists working at the time, like Edward W. Kemble and Udo J. Keppler.
Udo J. Keppler, Puck, April 10, 1912. Roosevelt as a tattooed man with his lies indelibly inked on his body.
HV: What lessons can we learn for today from these images? Are there any common themes?
MHM: They remind us that partisan personal attacks in the media are nothing new. Just like today, the popular mass media a hundred years ago had no qualms about putting out totally distorted, crass images. Their motivation was also largely the same, in part a desire to advance a political agenda, but even more out of a need to attract attention and become commercially successful. HV: What do you think about contemporary political cartoons? Have they gotten better or worse? And in what way?
MHM: There is a lot of great political cartooning today like Barry Blitt’s New Yorker covers, and on television there is South Park. I like drawn cartoons, although today most of the best opinionated, political satire take other forms like the Colbert Report [television show], and the montages of sound and images seen in political commercials.
C. J. Budd, Harper's Weekly, November 9, 1912. The Democratic ticket Woodrow Wilson and VP Thomas Marshall win the election and take a bow..
Harry Westerman, Cartoons Magazine, May 1912. William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt battle for the Republican nomination.
Nelson Harding, Cartoons Magazine, May 1912. Some soundbites from the battle between Taft and Roosevelt.
Sharon Butler, “Collinwood” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches (all images courtesy Theodore:Art)
Most artists I know are aware of the painter Sharon Butler, not because she’s an overhyped art star, but because of her reputation as a serious, feet-on-the-ground, working artist. Recognized for her blog Two Coats of Paint, Butler ruminates on issues of contemporary painting and the day-to-day realities of life for artists in the early 21st century. Butler has also been a practitioner and proponent of a style of painting she dubbed “The New Casualism,” which she characterizes as “the rising inclination of artists to explore the metaphorical implications of failure, imperfection and imbalance—the artistic significance of the off-kilter and the not quite right.”
Installation view of Sharon Butler’s new paintings at Theodore:Art (click to enlarge)
Butler’s new body of work, on view at Theodore:Art in Bushwick, might then surprise visitors, who enter the gallery and find it filled with mostly compact, sturdy, and resolved paintings. Taking in the richly evocative color and touch of the individual works, a viewer can scan the room, noting and cross-referencing how marks and visual elements are reimagined in different compositions. The impression of rigorous painting is supported by the show’s press release, which reveals that Butler has settled on firmer ground on which to work, landing a new studio space in Dumbo and conjuring up paintings that reflect this stability and concentration. Her varied paint handling is tethered to a variety of subjects, both physical and cerebral, that reappear and rub off on one another.
Sharon Butler, “Animated Reader” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches (click to enlarge)
At 16 by 20 inches, the majority of Butler’s new paintings are small scaled and have a recurring motif of dots and dashes. Small dots may line up or drift away, grow to the size of balls or group into cloud-like formations. Dashes appear tight or brushy and can resemble nautical flags, computer code, or paragraphs (I was reminded of Philip Guston’s open books). The paintings have titles like “Animated Reader” or “Interstate,” which might offer keys to the source material. Sometimes compositions are resolved with a strong figurative element like a green mushroom or, in the case of “July,” what looks like a distorted lectern. Others are dense and grounded with choppy hatched marks that suggest language, highways, or architecture. A few are more tentative and ephemeral, appearing as diagrams or schemes with a stark frontality.
Sharon Butler, “Marti Pello” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
Butler layers colored strokes on top of one another, sometimes in a discordant manner, sometimes with subtle hues from the same family. The grooved pentimenti of amassed marks assert themselves from beneath, having undergone processes of revision, editing, or erosion. “Marti Pello” is a densely packed mass of cadmium, lemon, and Hansa shades that puts an end to the argument that it’s impossible to make a yellow painting. Other works, like “After DH 2” and “Goethe Color Triangle,” culminate in scattered rainbows resting on pearly grounds.
Sharon Butler, “Goethe Color Triangle” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches (click to enlarge)
The process of making a painting is accentuated as Butler brings forth a catalogue of mark-making strategies. She stains, brushes, overlays, etches, graphs, and adumbrates with light pencil stencils. The colors and spaces she depicts come across as on-the-spot observations of places or things, or memories and inventions that appear to evolve, the paintings recording change. One gets the sense that Butler works on many pieces at once, revisiting a work when the time is right, when she has found the correct moves and counter-moves. The paint and process laid bare serve as both metaphor and physical record of the artist’s mental wanderings and actual travels, whether she has just put down a book, visited a gallery, or been on a road trip as a teacher or lecturer. Judging from the many words and pictures on display that evoke driving and highways, I imagined the artist steering a car at night, crossing from one state line to the next, the radio on with a voice forecasting the weather and road conditions.
Sharon Butler, “Tornado Warning” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
With their multilayered entry points, Butler’s paintings have an inquisitive quality — a sort of painter-as-philosopher sensibility that considers every aspect of the creative process. They are scaled just right, like visual equivalents to poems or diary entries, and surprise with their fast-flowing array of designs. Her abstract painterly techniques and figurative glyphs are well married and suggest a personal dialogue with other artists and art history; I happened to think of such different painters as Lois Lane, Gael Stack, Charles Marburg, and Clint Jukkala. A painting like “After Frank Stella” manages, with an economy of means, to be an homage timed to Stella’s Whitney retrospective, while also tracing a lineage from Minimalism to the New Casualist ethic.
For any painter, the key to what makes a good picture might be painterly facility tied to idea — in other words, an artist’s expressive mastery of her medium coupled with a compelling statement will yield a project worth doing. Some painters today take advantage of the creative tension inherent in a need to paint, while facing down antagonizing forces that suggest otherwise. They work in the space between an analysis of their methods and the context of their labor. Sharon Butler strikes me as this sort of intellectually curious painter: not having made up her mind, not falling into any one camp, but enjoying the restless frisson of not knowing where she’s going, while being pulled in contradictory directions.
Sharon Butler, “American Still Life 2” (2015), oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
Sharon Butlercontinues at Theodore:Art (56 Bogart Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn) through February 21.
Fred Valentine, “The Pumpkin Festival” (1991), charcoal on paper, 50 x 44 inches (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
It’s an unsentimental portrait, to say the least. The unsmiling girl stares straight at you, the mutant-looking rag doll under her right arm shrouded in shadow. Only after you break the grip of her gaze do you notice the streaks and abrasions marring the drawing’s surface and the landscape that’s mysteriously etched onto her left shoulder.
So it goes in The Pumpkin Festival and other Portraits, Fred Valentine’s current show at Schema Projects in Bushwick, whose unassuming title seems determined to pull the rug out from under you.
The exhibition is composed entirely of drawings from the late 1980s and early 1990s, which the artist made by laying down a solid ground of dense, black charcoal and then roughing out his forms with an eraser.
The title drawing, “The Pumpkin Festival” (1991), is the one with the girl — the artist’s daughter — clutching a rag doll. Like most of the other works in the show, she emerges out of the black field with the softness of a form incrementally revealed in the dim light of a darkened room.
Fred Valentine, “Modiano” (1990), charcoal on paper, 50 x 44 inches (click to enlarge)
The streaks and abrasions, like scratches on movie film, play with your sense of what is on, above, or behind the picture plane — the image and the material never quite settling into an easy détente. The girl is embraced by the encircling darkness, her lower body slipping deeply into its shadows; at the same time, the surface erosion unites her face and upper torso with the composition’s abstracted elements, such as the erased smudge that pops out, like a lens flare, near the top right corner.
The landscape of wintry trees bedecking her blouse appears to be neither an image projected on her clothing nor a scene glimpsed through a magically transparent body. Rather, it feels as if her shoulder is becoming the landscape, her body sinking into the earth surrounding her. The opening montage of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) comes to mind. In the lower right, the girl’s left hand is rendered fingerless, like a mitten, as if she were a rag doll herself. There is no indication, anywhere, of a pumpkin festival.
“The Pumpkin Festival” is eerily quiet and profoundly disquieting. If it raises an unanswerable question about the trees on the girl’s shoulder, it’s a riddle that’s compounded by similar landscapes appearing at regular intervals on the left shoulder of other characters included in Valentine’s portrait gallery.
The recurrence of this motif takes on a musical intensity, deepening in emotional resonance, like a muted drumbeat, as it travels from “PH” (1990) to “KG” (1992) to “Modiano” (1990), subjects differing in age, gender and race. But each recurrence does nothing to divulge its meaning, if meaning is defined as literal or logical sense.
Words are the enemy here; with their superimposed elements (in addition to the landscapes, there are multiple eyes, nostrils and mouths) and their greater or lesser degrees of physical defacement (from splits and cuts to children’s drawings in felt-tip marker), the portraits brim with a powerful aphasic eloquence, a silent articulation grounded in the tension between material and image.
Fred Valentine, “KG” (1992), charcoal on paper, 50 x 44 inches
In some of the works, including the searing “KG,” the surface is sliced away and another sheet of paper containing a face — or, in one instance, text (the diamond-shaped “SP,” 1994) — is pasted into the empty space beneath. The inserted portion doesn’t jibe in scale or tone with what’s left of the original portrait. Straddling classicism and collage, this pictorial fragmentation, fused as it is with the paper’s fragmentation, turns the work into a collision of Cubism, Surrealism, and Chicago Imagism, but with a humanity that undercuts the cerebration and irony permeating those styles.
It’s hard to believe that the works in The Pumpkin Festival and other Portraits were made 25 years ago. Aside from the blackened fissures erupting across some of the surfaces, which look as ancient as the moon, the drawings come across as fresh from the studio, with an urgency that consolidates current strains of thought on content and intentionality, materials and medium.
Fred Valentine, “SP” (1994), charcoal on paper, 16 x 15 inches (click to enlarge)
Valentine approaches drawing with the sensuousness and scale that is customarily applied to painting, yet makes sport of the fragility of the paper. His surface lacerations and disruptions unsettle the image to a starkly expressionistic effect without once engaging the stylistic tropes of expressionism (the slashing gesture, the exaggerated mark).
Despite the improvisational feel of each work, the motifs stringing the portraits together (the landscapes, the vertical streaks, the lens flares in the upper right, the sliced-up surfaces, the children’s drawings, the diamond-shaped formats) evince an overarching sense of purpose, of creating a cohesive emotional and material density that pushes the imagery into a wider experiential arena.
As common elements reappear, now here, now there, across the scarred surfaces, Valentine’s subjects nevertheless retain their individual secrets: the rows of large, stenciled numbers across the front of “SC” (1990); the words “culpo culpa” (“I blame blame” in Latin) scratched like graffiti near the neckline of “KG”; the source of the upside-down text pasted in the hole carved out of “SP.”
Fred Valentine, “SC” (1990), charcoal on paper, 49.5 x 44 inches
The frontal poses and black-and-white imagery recall bygone photo albums, damaged and streaked with age. Despite the wounds inflicted on the surface, there is a protectiveness about these portraits, an immersion within a self-contained, perfectly realized realm, where their isolation only increases their intimacy.
Revealed at a 25-year distance, Valentine’s monumentally rendered images of family and friends are as much artifacts as artworks, perceptions embedded in carbon dust and shielded against time’s slow fade.
Louis Draper, “Young Man Smoking, New York” (c. 1965) (all images courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery)
In November 1955, four days after Robert Frank was arrested, questioned and released in Arkansas under the suspicion of being a Communist spy, he took a photograph, ‘‘Trolley — New Orleans’’ (1955), that was included with 82 others in his justly famous book, The Americans, which — we should remember — was first published in France in 1958. Frank’s photograph shows a line of white and black faces looking out the window of a trolley in segregated America, with the whites in front and the blacks in the back.
I thought of that photograph while walking back home from a retrospective exhibition of photographs by Louis Draper. Draper was born in 1935, a decade after the Swiss-born Frank, in the former capital of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia, during the Great Depression. With segregation firmly in place, he would have been one of the people Frank photographed sitting at the back of the trolley in 1955, which was four years after Tennessee Williams’ play was turned into the film A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden. Segregation was simply an unspoken fact of that and so many other Hollywood films. Who wants to think about such things while sitting in a movie theater? I suppose only those who have to.
Louis Draper, “Snowy Footprints on Sidewalk, New York” (c. 1965)
Frank, who was an outsider and white, showed one aspect of a social order in which African Americans were both segregated and second-class citizens. The reason why I thought of Frank’s outsider status — and the role it played in his photographs — was because Draper lived for many years in Harlem on 127th Street, where he was a member of the black community and good friends with his neighbor, Langston Hughes. Draper’s photographs of Harlem, Mississippi, and Senegal afford us another view, that of an insider turning his views of the community he inhabited and knew well into art.
I suppose what I am getting at is context, and there are many contexts to consider. When I searched the collection of the Museum of Modern Art online, I wasn’t surprised to learn that it contains many Frank photographs, but I was disappointed to learn that there were none by Draper. Isn’t it time for MoMA to stop treating artists such as Draper, Ray DeCarava, Wifredo Lam, Norman Lewis, Ruth Asawa, and Alma Thomas as if they are second-class citizens? Sure, things are changing, but am I supposed to be happy when they toss out a few crumbs?
Louis Draper, “Malcolm X, 369th Armory, Harlem New York” (1965)
There are more than seventy-five vintage prints in Louis Draper at Steven Kasher (January 14–February 20, 2016), a show that should not be missed. In 1957, while he was taking photographs for his college newspaper, Draper saw the catalogue of the exhibition, The Family of Man, organized by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art. A landmark exhibit at the time, The Family of Man has since been roundly criticized by such well-intentioned figures as Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Christopher Philips for being sentimental and humanist. Whatever its success or failure, its catalogue prompted Draper to move to New York City to become a photographer.
Soon after arriving in New York, and perhaps feeling a safe distance from the South, Draper took a photograph, “Congressional Gathering” (1959), which shows a row of bed sheets hanging from a clothesline, seemingly at night. Five years earlier, the United States Supreme Court made its landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education to end segregation in public education. Four years earlier, Emmett Till, a fourteen year old boy, was lynched and brutally — and, I would add, gleefully — murdered in Mississippi, where the perpetrators were later acquitted. Frank’s photograph of the New Orleans trolley says a lot about the state of America in the 1950s, but so does Draper’s.
Louis Draper, “Congressional Gathering” (1959)
Draper’s photograph still disturbs, and it should send a shock of recognition through anyone who cares to look. Its title speaks volumes. Despite the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared segregation in public schools “inherently unequal,” Draper knew that he lived in a segregated world where members of Congress belonged to the Ku Klux Klan. The sheets, which he photographed in the dark, sag so loosely off the line that the light hitting their top corners evokes the Klan’s conical masks. Draper’s image summons the deep fear that must have been felt by every black person in America; this was what it meant to exist in a lawless society. Till’s murder and the acquittal of his killers confirmed it. As much as I love’s Frank’s photograph, Draper’s speaks to another, deeper part of us — the one where the fear of faceless authority churns. As recent events again make clear, no matter how minor the supposed crime, some people don’t get out of jail alive.
In 1963 – in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement — Draper was one of the founding members of Kamoinge Workshop, a group of fifteen black photographers. As the introduction to their first portfolio of work stated, this group’s “creative objectives reflect a concern for truth about the world, about society, about themselves.” Ray DeCarava was the Kamoinge Workshop’s first director. Hughes, who was friends with Henri Cartier-Bresson, introduced him to Draper, who got him to speak to the members of Kamoinge. This way of transmitting knowledge is basic to any art or literary group, and isn’t about networking or social climbing.
Louis Draper, “Boy and H, Harlem” (1961)
Timeless: Photographs byKamoinge (2015), edited by Anthony Barboza and Herb Robinson, coedited by Vincent Alabiso, with a Foreword by Quincy Troupe, is a beautifully produced book documenting this group’s activities. Although not acknowledged on the cover, Deborah Willis has contributed an essay to it. This book is an essential document to the history of American photography. In celebration of this book’s publication, celebrating the group’s fiftieth anniversary, there is an exhibition, Kamoinge: Timeless, currently on view at the Wilmer Jennings Gallery at Kenkeleba House on the Lower East Side (December 15, 2015–Feb. 20, 2016).
There are photographs by Draper of black children playing on the streets, crossing the street as they walk home from school, big smiles on their faces. This is a world that he was part of, and knew well. If you think of them as social documents, you will miss the art. There is a portrait, “Malcolm X, 369th Armory, Harlem” (1964) in which only a sliver of Malcolm’s face is visible, the rest immersed in shadow. Draper is using the available light and seems to make himself invisible, that he wants to see, rather than be seen.
Louis Draper, “Boy and Movie Poster, Harlem, New York City ” (1968) (click to enlarge)
Sometimes the children Draper portrays look defiant, and why wouldn’t they be? In “Boy and H, Harlem” (1961), a skinny teenage boy, playing stickball, stands beside a wall. What does the “H” crudely painted on the wall behind him stand for? What associations does it stir up? What about the word night” hand-lettered on a store window in “Young Man Smoking, New York” (c.1965), that is cropped by the photograph’s right edge so that we read “nig?” On the other side of the cropped sign, a boy in a hat, looking all grown up, stares at the camera, smoking. In this and other portraits, the available light caresses the faces, and a moment of tenderness filters throughout.
In “Boy and Movie Poster, Harlem, New York City” (1968), a young boy is running down the street. Above him, and spanning the length of photograph, is a poster of famous Hollywood stars, all white. The juxtaposition is all, just as the person in the photograph. “Snowy Footprints on Sidewalk, New York” (c. 1965), who is walking in the snow, hidden under an umbrella, might remind you how difficult it is for some to make their way in an all-white world.
Louis Drapercontinues at Steven Kasher Gallery (515 West 26th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) through February 20. Kamoinge: Timelesscontinues at Wilmer Jennings Gallery (219 East 2nd Street, East Village, Manhattan) through February 20. Timeless: Photographs by Kamoinge (2015)is published by Schiffer and is available from Amazon and other online booksellers.
2001Too SoonGilbert Gottfried, The Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner“I have a flight to California. I can’t get a direct flight — they said they have to stop at the Empire State Building first.”
In the wake of 9/11, there was no consensus on how to return to making fun of the world. New York–based late-night shows like Letterman, The Daily Show, and Saturday Night Live opted for sincere, gentle returns, while The Onionput out its finest paper to date. But only three weeks after the attacks, Gilbert Gottfried rejected the niceties at The Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner, where he told this joke and received a chorus of boos and “too soon” from the audience. (In response, Gottfried went into a legendary rendition of the backstage joke “The Aristocrats.”) It’s hard to say it was the first joke to get the “too soon” treatment, but it was definitely not the last (it wasn’t even the last for Gottfried), as the debate over how comedians respond to tragedies has been going ever since, especially with the rise of social media. With this joke, however, in hindsight, people yelled “too soon” too soon; his joke was doing what comedy should do: not mocking the victims or belittling legitimate suffering, but finding the honest humor in real-life horror during a sensitive time.
2002The Foreigner BeltDave Willis, Matt Maiellaro, Aqua Teen Hunger ForceIgnignokt: Well, how will you like the belt when you’re cold as ice? [The Mooninites freeze Carl and steal his porn.]To focus in on any one moment of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the low-fi animated series about humanoid fast-food items, is to hit directly on the sort of full-throttle absurdism that has come to represent Turner’s entire Adult Swim programming block. In the first of its 11 seasons, ATHF set the tone of its mayhem with antagonists including the snotty 2-D delinquents the Mooninites. In the episode “Revenge of the Mooninites,” Ignignokt and Err acquire a miraculous belt that provides “all the superpowers of ’70s supergroup Foreigner,” and proceed to torture our heroes — evoking Foreigner’s song “Cold as Ice” to freeze one character stiff and giving another “Double Vision.” (Eventually, white-trash neighbor Carl turns his own head into a Connect Four board by invoking “Head Games.”) This bizarre twist on pop culture represented the network’s maximalist new take on late-night stoner comedy: clever rather than slack-jawed, and stuffed with so many jokes that missing one doesn’t matter. Without notions like the Foreigner Belt, there would be no frenetic Tim & Eric segments, no “Too Many Cooks,” and certainly no weird, random Old Spice and Skittles commercials on national TV.
2003Black White SupremacistDave Chappelle, Neal Brennan, Chappelle’s Show[Clayton Bigsby removes his KKK hood to reveal he’s black. The white-supremacist rally attendees are stunned. One woman throws up. A man’s head explodes.]Before Chappelle's Show, the world had enjoyed sketch shows featuring predominantly black casts, but never before had the realities of race relations in America been presented so irreverently. Opposed to sketches like “Word Association,” which confronted racial tensions head on, Chappelle and his co-creator used ridiculous premises to underline the absurdity of the national environment. Take the show's best (though it will never match “I'm Rick James, Bitch” in popularity) sketch, which aired in the premiere episode. Chappelle plays a blind, black white supremacist. It's a concept that is equal parts silly and brilliant. By having the white supremacist be black, it underlines how insane the concept of racial prejudice is, considering what we think of as race is just a social construct. It will make your head explode. It instantly changed comedy about race in this country, as Key & Peele played with a few years later. The sketch, and the show, in general, also changed the public conversation about social responsibility and comedy. What kinds of jokes is it okay for which kinds of people to tell? And to repeat? Are the ones on comedians of color to ensure that their white fans don’t misinterpret their intentions? Chappelle set up the sketch by saying that the friend he had played it for said it would set back black people, foreshadowing a time when comedy was scrutinized like never before.
Bush vs. BushJon Stewart, The Daily ShowStewart: “Tonight it all changes. We’re gonna have an honest, open debate between the president of the United States and the one man we believe has the insight and the cojones to stand up to him. So, first, joining us tonight, George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States. Welcome, Mr. President.” Clip of President Bush: “Good evening, I’m pleased to take your questions tonight.”Stewart: “Well, thank you very much, sir. I’m pleased to ask them. Taking the other side, joining us from the year 2000, Texas governor and presidential candidate, George W. Bush.”When Jon Stewart took over The Daily Show in 2000, he couldn’t have known that one of history’s most ridiculous presidential elections was only months away, or that his election-coverage name, “Indecision 2000,” would turn out to be so prescient. In the following years, the slow-moving train wreck of the Bush administration gave Stewart and his team an amazing opportunity to build their fledgling late-night show into an institution, one that would eventually host presidents and prime ministers. This segment was one of the show’s earliest and finest moments of righteous indignation, using a format that would become a staple of the show: employing contrasting video clips to highlight someone’s hypocrisy. Digging through the archives of Governor Bush’s 2000 presidential election and comparing his statements with 2003’s President Bush in the run-up to the Iraq War, The Daily Show was cleverly using resources available to any news organization to provide the sort of accountability journalism that the media was failing to do.
2004‘Boy, That Escalated Quickly!’Will Ferrell, Adam McKay, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron BurgundyThe Adam McKay comedy that helped set the tone for an era of Will Ferrell blockbuster comedies is also a touchstone of millennial culture. For a movie that was endlessly quotable, one scene’s staying power has lingered on in particular: after the epic fight scene, the discussion back at the newsroom. The self-referential scene is the epitome of what would come to be defined over the next decade as an ironic, new-wave of comedy, in which doing something absurd must immediately be followed by pointing out its absurdity. It's a nifty trick you'll see basically every night at any of the Upright Citizens Brigade's four theatres. Where early eras of improv rewarded commitment to the scene, UCB, which McKay was part of in its early stages, allows for a have-it-both-ways detachment: You're in the scene, but you're also outside the scene. You murder someone with a trident; you point out that you murdered someone with a trident. Outside of improv, or real life for that matter, the line also reflects the internet’s love of pointing out things. “That escalated quickly” became another way to say “that happened.”
2005‘Nooooooo, Kelly Clarkson!’Steve Carell, Judd Apatow, Miki Mia, Seth Rogen, Romany Malco, and Paul Rudd, The 40-Year-Old VirginIt’s hard to credit anything other than the scene in which Steve Carell actually has his incredibly hairy chest waxed as the catalyst that super-=charged the Judd Apatow empire of heartfelt R-rated comedies. It’s a one-take, expletive-fueled tour de force, punctuated by almost “adorable” outbursts, like the one mentioning American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson. Carell sacrificing his body for the bit was the ultimate move for his character: a good-natured guy falling victim to hypermasculine peer pressure, especially at a time when “metrosexuality” had emerged and disrupted gender politics on a broad, pop-culture level. As for Carell’s counterparts, including his waxer, their genuine reactions of hilarity and horror give it that blooper-reel feel, like you’re already watching the even-funnier deleted scenes, a technique that seeped into just about every partially improvised movie to follow.
‘I Was Raped by a Doctor … Which Is So Bittersweet for a Jewish Girl.’Sarah Silverman, Jesus Is MagicBy 2005 Sarah Silverman was a well-known comedian without a full-length stand-up special. Famous for her controversial, off-color jokes, she kicked off her concert film, Jesus Is Magic, with this provocative line, which embodied everything that made her a groundbreaking comic: her willingness to play with stereotypes while challenging the boundaries of taste via her cutesy, ditzy alter ego. Though, for better or worse (oft for worse), the joke did kick off a trend where it seemed every comedian needed to have a rape joke. Still, her provocative persona always had more depth and vulnerability than most shock-jock types, and in this perfectly formed one-liner is the seed of her later, more infuriated material about rape. Without Silverman, who had previously bounced between clubs, alt scenes, and sketch comedy, there would be no Amy Schumer or Anthony Jeselnik, though her influence can be felt across the entire comedy spectrum. Lazy SundayAndy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer, Jorma Taccone, Chris Parnell, Saturday Night LiveParnell: But first my hunger pains are stickin’ like duct tape / Samberg: Let’s hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes /Parnell: No doubt that bakery’s got all da bomb frostings /Samberg: I love those cupcakes like McAdams loves GoslingThe Lonely Island didn't create the “viral video” or the SNL Digital Short, but it brought the former into the mainstream and the latter into the 21st century. The first of their silly sing-along videos, “Lazy Sunday” couldn’t have been timed better: It premiered literally two days after the official launch of YouTube. Granted, NBC didn’t quite understand the power of virality at that point — the network removed “Lazy Sunday” from the video-sharing site and restricted it to iTunes (albeit for free) — but the video spread around the internet nonetheless. (Years later, it rightfully found a permanent home on YouTube.) While “Dick in a Box” may have been the best video, and “YOLO” arguably their best song, the perfect blend of catchy tune, simple video, and goofy idea in “Lazy Sunday” spawned, for better or worse, a sea of imitators.
2006White House Correspondents’ DinnerStephen Colbert“Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32 percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”Showing up to hear Stephen Colbert, or Colbert’s bloviating right-wing pundit character “Stephen Colbert,” at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2006 must have been one of the biggest missteps of George W. Bush’s presidency — minus his signature policy decisions, of course. Never did the former Colbert Report and current Late Show host Colbert prove his fearlessness more than during this jaw-dropping 20-minute set. Heedless of Bush’s grim visage or the stunned discomfort of those in the audience, Colbert continued his comedic assault just feet away from the POTUS. Directly addressing Bush throughout, Colbert mocked the president’s penchant for hollow photo ops and likened the flailing administration to the Hindenburg. The joke above exemplifies Colbert’s set, ironically linking the conservative Colbert character with Bush to poke at the POTUS’s longstanding beef with the media and disinterest in public opinion. The up-close-and-personal delivery of this barb, among others, refreshed political satire by making it feel immediate, dangerous, and necessary.
2007Louis C.K. on His KidsLouis C.K., Shameless“The other kid we have, she’s a girl, and she’s 4, and she’s also a fucking asshole.”In an alternate universe, Louis C.K. could have easily remained a very good, underappreciated New York stand-up, another middle-aged white dude performing at the Comedy Cellar every night. But in his 2007 HBO special Shameless, he called his 4-year-old daughter an asshole, and things shifted. The honesty of his perspective as a father genuinely trying to engage with his kids, while still seeing the world through the eyes of a cynical comic, was cathartic for parents and eye-opening for nonparents, and shone a light on the darker corners of that intimate, fundamental parent-child dynamic that is rarely explored. It would inspire legions of stand-ups to pick apart their own relationships and biases, and upped the ante for soul-baring onstage.
2010Marc Maron on His Adam Sandler JokeMarc Maron, Robin Williams, “WTF”Williams: It’s also when you do jokes about famous people or anybody and then you run into them. Maron: Well, Sandler never forgave me for something.Williams: Are you serious?Maron: Kinda. I did this joke where I used as a descriptive, you know, I mocked Adam Sandler fans. And then I run into him at the Improv one night, and he was like, “I hear you're talking about me.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I did it on television.”
Around 2009 and 2010, a second comedy boom exploded, during which fans developed a different relationship with comedy: Self-proclaimed “comedy nerds” were as interested (if not more interested) in comedians' backstage life as they were in their crafted jokes. And Marc Maron's conversation with Robin Williams, on the 67th episode of “WTF,” was its breakthrough. Here was a legend having the sort of frank conversation about comedy and being a comedian that was previously relegated to green rooms and road gigs. Maron and Williams trade stories, and Maron brings up an old joke and the beef he has with another comedian (a theme of early “WTF”s) that resulted from it. It was conversational, it was inside-baseball, and hundreds of thousands of people heard it.
2011Wedding-Dress Food PoisoningKristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Maya Rudolph, Jessica St. Clair, Ellie Kemper, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Annie Mumolo, Paul Feig, Judd Apatow, BridesmaidsLillian: It’s happening. It's happening. It’s happening. [She kneels in the middle of the street.] It happened. It happened. Whitney: Oh, no. Don’t you dare ruin that dress.Annie: You’re doing it, aren’t you? You’re shitting in the street.Four years after Christopher Hitchens penned a Vanity Fair essay arguing that women aren’t funny, out came a film that would change the conversation about women in comedy for the next decade. Its success proved that an all-female cast could make an R-rated, Judd Apatow–sized hit comedy for all genders to enjoy. And nothing said that louder than the scene in which they all collectively shat their dresses. Despite being an outrageous sequence of events, it has subtlety as well: You never actually see poop (although you do see plenty of vomit) and they don’t try to make scatological humor somehow seem “sexy” just because it’s coming from a woman (think:Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle). Instead, there is something almost punk rock about Maya Rudolph kneeling in the street in her pristine, white wedding dress.
2012Voice of My GenerationLena Dunham, GirlsHannah: I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.Girls, more than any other piece of comedy of its generation, illustrates the young person’s never-ending battle between irrational confidence and extreme self-loathing — something this joke typifies. When the show premiered, this quote was used by critics to hammer the show’s navel-gazing, yet it deftly made light of and satirized the art of personal mythologizing. We have to assume Dunham knew that her show would stand for an entire demographic, and, in a way, it has. Through her narcissism, emotional sensitivity, confusion, and desperate need for belonging, Hannah really is the voice of her generation. That voice has inspired comedies like You’re the Worst and Master of None to continue mining the same complex, fraught landscape of depression, ambition, and identity, without blinking.
‘Hello, I Have Cancer.’Tig Notaro, LiveBefore 2012, Tig Notaro was an alternative-comedy darling whoseperformances relied heavily on goofy nonsense. But with one unforgettable set at L.A.’s Largo, she changed the trajectory of her career and raised the bar for onstage honesty. The months preceding her performance had seen her suffer from life-threateningC. diff, break up with a partner, and lose her mother in a tragic accident; then, just before the show, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. This one heartbreaking line kicked off one of the most important stand-up sets of all time and immediately became the stuff of folklore, as comics and audience members described the stunning show.
2013Maria Bamford on How People Talk About Mental IllnessMaria Bamford, Ask Me About My New God!“People don’t talk about mental illnesses the way they do other illnesses. If I was like, 'Wow, apparently Steve has cancer. It’s like, ‘Fuck off! We all have cancer, right?'“Ever since Richard Pryor, comedy has been open to the confessional; stand-ups have been free to talk about the darker parts of their minds. But what if those darker thoughts aren't quirky or comically weird or “what everyone's thinking,” but something seriously wrong? Over the last decade, Bamford has been pushing comedy in this direction. She tackles the twists and tangles of her mind as a really smart, funny cat would a ball of yarn, batting at it in wonderment to the delight of all who are fortunate enough to witness. And she is battling the stigma around mental illness, and comedy about it, by writing the above perfect joke, taking aim directly at the stigma. The good news is it seems to be working, if the rise of sadcoms and shows with depression and mental-illness story lines like BoJack Horseman, You're the Worst, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are any indication. Tina and Amy Host the GlobesTina Fey, Amy Poehler, the 70th Golden Globe AwardsPoehler: I haven’t been following the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty, but when it comes to torture, I trust the woman who spent three years married to James Cameron.Tina Fey and Amy Poehler weren't an unknown quantity when they were tapped to host the Golden Globes in 2013, but history has shown that not all great comedians make for great award-show hosts. Fey and Poehler started off with relatively safe monologue jokes, and it was with this line, halfway through, that they sharpened their focus. Drawing attention to Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, Poehler attacked not her controversial film but her less-than-beloved ex-husband. The result was an almost-perfect joke; tightly constructed, perfectly paced, funny even if you really didn't know the details and funnier still if you did. Its impact was instant. Listen to how the room reacts: After the initial wave of shock echoes through the room, a genuine laugh follows. Much more than a celebrity roast gag, the joke set up the pair’s perspective as truth-telling, unabashedly pro-women joke-slingers with no fear.
2014Hannibal Buress on Bill CosbyHannibal Buress“He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people. I was on TV in the ‘80s. I can talk down to people because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby, so that brings you down a couple notches.”Hannibal Buress probably didn’t set out to bring justice to dozens of women or spark a national dialogue about sexual predation when he started explicitly referring to Bill Cosby as a rapist in his stand-up. This joke wasn't even ready for wide release — it became public via a grainy cell-phone video. But its impact was monumental, getting people talking about accusations that had dogged the venerable Cosby for years. And the context matters: Buress, one of today's most successful young black comics, took aim at perhaps the most iconic black comedian in history; the joke itself is about getting out from under his glaring disapproval. In doing so, he did what so many comedians claim to do but rarely deliver on: busting taboos, speaking the unspeakable, making enemies. Whether or not it was his intention, Buress’s words brought results: There’s almost certainly a direct line from his joke to Cosby’s recent indictment, and it’s in this new environment that comedian Beth Stelling recently came forward with her own story of abuse in the comedy community. As influence goes, it’s hard to think of many jokes that had more impact.
2015Bitch Better Have My MoneyEllen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, Justin Timberlake, The Tonight Show
The night after Stephen Colbert debuted as the host of The Late Show, Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon reportedly wanted to assert the dominance of his show and sensibility. He did so with the sight of Ellen DeGeneres doing her best Rihanna impression, waving her hand around like a gun, and mouthing the words to “Bitch Better Have My Money” while Justin Timberlake looked on. Was it funny? Nope. But it sure was fun! And it makes sense, as during his time in late night Fallon pushed a style of comedy that equated fun and funny. Better yet, DeGeneres, who after a career as a respected stand-up arguably pioneered that style with her daytime show, was at the center of the act. Of course, it went viral: This style of populist comedy goes down easy, and spreads even easier.
12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer
Amy Schumer, Jessi Klein, Daniel Powell, Ryan McFaul, Inside Amy Schumer“I don’t think she’s protagonist-hot …” “But Kevin James is?”
In many ways, 2015 was Amy Schumer’s year, in large part because her Comedy Central show, Inside Amy Schumer, cemented its place in the comedy canon. With this episode-long sketch, a perfect re-creation of the 1957 film 12 Angry Men, Schumer put the audience in her shoes — that is, as a very funny person judged more by some for her looks than her talent — and produced one of the funniest, sharpest half-hours of television in recent memory. There are too many lines to choose the most perfect (“Oh, Amy. I didn't see you there. I thought you were a garden gnome”) but the heart of the piece — that 12 men must decide if Schumer is “hot enough” to appear on television — is the type of brutally hilarious idea that rarely makes it on television. Along with her pitch-perfect Friday Night Lights parody, the memorable “Last Fuckable Day,” and the Emmy-winning “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” Schumer found herself leading the way in 2015 as such excellent feminist comedy as Broad City and Sisters took over the landscape.
