Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Comedy Is Dead

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Barry Deutsch

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Help me make more cartoons like this one by supporting my Patreon! A $1 or $2 pledge really helps.

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Happy Halloween!

I totally swiped the “comedy is sacred” gag from Alexandra Erin. (With her kind permission).

The inspiration for this cartoon is pretty obvious – the world is full of comedians, and often staggeringly successful comedians, complaining that comedy is being killed by excessive political correctness (or “wokeness,” or “SJWs,” or whatever term they settle on this week). Examples include Dave Chappelle, Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Burr, Bill Maher, Kevin Hart, Todd Phillips, Chris Rock, and I’m sure many more.

Comedy isn’t dead – there’s amazing comedy on TV, in movies, and in a seemingly bottomless pile of Netflix stand-up specials, including specials by people complaining that it’s become impossible to do comedy nowadays.

They’re partly right. Some comedy does become harder to perform. (Aziz Ansari talked a lot about this in his recent Netflix special). For example, the prospect of widespread condemnation would deter many comedians from doing openly antiblack or antisemitic bits nowadays. But is that a bad thing? Do we want a society that never moves on, never learns? To paraphrase Ansari, a culture that never looks back at it’s old humor and winces, is a society which hasn’t learned or grown.

* * *

Artwise, this is an unusual one for me. I started this one with an idea of comedians scattered across a floor, each one picked out by a spotlight. I really wasn’t clear on how to arrange them, so I drew all five figures the same size, head to toe, and then played around with different arrangements until I had a composition I thought worked. It’s not my usual approach, but I hope you enjoy the result!

In theory, a cartoon like this is a real time-saver for me – just five figures, done! In theory. But in practice, knowing that I only had to draw five figures led me to lavish much more attention on drawing each figure, so no time actually was saved. Oh well.

* * *

There were only three cartoons in October (so you were only charged for three!). I lost a bunch of time this month attending the Humboldt County Children’s Author Festival. (For those of you who don’t know, I have a second career creating children’s graphic novels). This is a very neat festival – the organizers bring in 25 authors every other year, and they send us to three schools each, so in the end about 75 schools get an author visit.

Most of the schools are schools that otherwise would never have visiting authors. The first school I visited this year, required me being drive 50 minutes up a winding mountain road, to visit a two-room school where I talked to eight kids about creating comics.

It’s a privilege being invited to a festival like this, and it’s also very fun for me, both for the chance to visit kids in schools, and for the chance for me to talk with other authors.

* * *

Thank you so much for supporting these cartoons! I really couldn’t do it without your support, and frankly the support of all y’all patrons has changed my life.

You’re seeing this cartoon a week or so before anyone else, but if you’re supporting at the $5 level or above, feel free to share it immediately.

Special thanks to $10 donor Jonah Wacholder, who is also thanked on the sidebar! Jonah, if you’d like me to email you a high-res copy of the cartoon, signed to you, for you to print out and hang, just let me know!

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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has one large panel, plus an tiny extra “kicker” panel below the bottom of the cartoon. The panel shows five people – stand up comics – scattered across an abstract space. Each comedian is being picked out by a spotlight. All five of them have microphones, and all are speaking out, as if they’re talking to an audience. They speak in order from back to front (so each successive comedian is closer to the “camera” than the one before).

The first comedian is a man wearing a button-up shirt and dark jeans, and looks really angry.

FIRST COMEDIAN: If I can’t do rape jokes without getting hissed then comedy is dead! DEAD!

The second comedian is a man with a shaved head. He is wearing a black tee shirt and sitting on a stool, scowling.

SECOND COMEDIAN: Seinfeld won’t even do college campuses anymore. This is how life under Stalin felt!

The third comedian is older than the other comedians, with wide, frightened eyes. He’s wearing a vest and tie; his collar is unbuttoned and his tie is hanging down a bit, not flush against his neck. His tie has a floral pattern.

THIRD COMEDIAN: If I have to drop “women are irrational” and “Asians talk funny” from my set, all I’ll have left is “airline food” and “it’s too hard to program my VCR!”

The fourth comedian is a blonde woman wearing an open button-up sweater over a striped dress and black tights. She looks angry.

FOURTH COMEDIAN: Free speech means the world owes me a living without any $#%!ing criticism!

The fifth comedian has short-cropped hair, an annoyed expression, and a big sneer. He’s wearing a tee shirt with a logo on it (most of the logo, whatever it is – well, it’s a big exclamation mark – is blocked by word balloons). He’s speaking straight to the reader.

FIFTH COMEDIAN: Comedy is sacred and the work I do is important to society!

FIFTH COMEDIAN: Anyhow, lighten up! They’re just jokes and they don’t mean anything!

TINY KICKER PANEL BELOW BOTTOM OF STRIP

The fifth comedian is talking to Barry the cartoonist.

FIFTH COMEDIAN: At least I can still make fun of fatties without much pushback.

BARRY: We’re working on that.

This cartoon on Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Media, Media criticism | 6 Comments

Zephyr

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Mandolin

Zephyr is posing for his princely portrait.

Posted in Cats | Comments Off

Something’s Over There

Posted on November 8, 2019 by Mandolin

Something’s over there, and it will cower in the face of her glamour.

Posted in Drawing | Comments Off

Interviewing the Heartland

Posted on November 7, 2019 by Barry Deutsch

Help me make more cartoons like this one by supporting my Patreon! A $1 or $2 pledge really helps.

In the wake of Trump’s upset (and upsetting) win in the 2016 election, the “heartland interview” – in which a newspaper or TV reporter from the evil elite coast travels to what he or she is certain to say east-coasters call the flyover states, to interview Trump supporters – has become a staple of the news. (In the New York Times, David Brooks recently advanced the genre by not actually bothering to interview anyone, instead making up a fictional heartland voter who he named “Flyover Man,” who by an amazing coincidence has opinions that mostly match David Brooks’).

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with interviewing heartland Trump voters. Once. Or a dozen times. But by now there have been countless “coastal reporter dares to visit the heartland” stories, and it’s become clear that they’re specifically seeking out people who match the reporters’ ideas of who heartland voters are.

Black people live in the Heartland. Liberals live in the heartland (we think of states as being red or blue, but truthfully almost all the states are purple – containing significant numbers of both Republicans and Democrats). There are urban areas in the heartland.

But there’s an unwritten rule about who news spotlights when they visit the “real” America. “Real” Americans, in the view of the news, are white, are rural, are conservative, are Christian, do not live on a coast, and are definitely not immigrants.

And yes, those folks are real Americans! But the rest of us are real Americans, too.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, plus a small additional “kicker” panel under the bottom of the cartoon. Each of the four panels shows a very simple TV set; two bucket stools facing each other, a decorative potted plant, a wall in the back with a few horizontal stripes for color, and a boom mic. Also in every panel, there’s a TV interviewer – a white man with carefully blow-dried hair and wearing a red tie and blue pinstripe two-piece suit – and Chris, a Black woman dressed in a casual-but-nice fashion, with a red shirt and orange skirt.

PANEL 1

Pinstripe is facing away from Chris, towards an off-panel camera. He is speaking to the camera with a big grin. Behind him, Chris smiles and waves.

PINSTRIPE: I’m here in the real America – the heartland – so I can find out what real Americans are thinking! My first interview is Chris Johnson, of Kansas City.

CHRIS: Hello!

PANEL 2

Pinstripe as turned to face Chris and is taken aback. Chris has put one hand on her chest in a “I’m explaining about myself” gesture, and looks surprised; she is no longer smiling.

PINSTRIPE: Er… Sorry. I came here to interview a heartland person.

CHRIS: I am a heartland person! I was born right here in Missouri!

PANEL 3

Pinstripe makes a dismissive “stop talking” palm-out gesture towards Chris. He has turned away from Chris and is talking to someone off-panel. Chris looks offended, crossing her arms and frowning.

PINSTRIPE: Sorry, you’re not the type we’re looking for. Send in a real heartland interview, already!

PANEL 4

A new character, Aaron, has walked on panel, cheerfully waving. He is wearing jeans and a polo shirt, and a yarmulke (the small round hat worn by observant Jewish men and some observant Jewish women). Pinstripe, seeing Aaron, reacts with frustration, waving his arms and yelling. Behind Pinstripe, Chris is amused by the situation.

AARON: Shalom! I’m Aaron from Witchita.

PINSTRIPE: OH COME ON!

TINY KICKER PANEL BELOW THE BOTTOM OF THE STRIP

Pinstripe is making demands of a fat man with glasses and tied-back hair (i.e., a self-portrait of Barry, the cartoonist.) Pinstripe looks angry, Barry looks a little bewildered.

PINSTRIPE: Just find me a resentful middle-aged white Christian with a MAGA hat who’s sick of media stereotypes about the heartland!

Posted in anti-racism, antiracism, Cartooning & comics, Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Elections and politics, Immigration, Migrant Rights, etc, Jews and Judaism, People of Color, poc, Society & Culture, white people, White Privilege | 14 Comments

Thoughts on “Compassionate Simulation”, from PH Lee

Posted on November 6, 2019 by Mandolin

Lee and I did have a very intense process while writing this story. There were a lot of craft questions but because the subject matter of this is so intimate and intense — a child’s relationship with abusive and authoritarian parents from whom they’re alienated — that the story is integrally tied into beliefs about family and children and norms and abuse. Lee has a more pessimistic view of some of these things than I do, which sometimes makes me feel like Polyanna, and sometimes feels like just a different background, and which may well be both. I’m also immunized to the artificiality of several literary techniques that are deployed for this subject matter since I’ve been working for so long. Lee did a good job of calling out contrivances, although some remain because literature is still literature. Like Lee, I enjoy how this fell. It was a rewarding collaboration.

You can see the whole thread on Twitter here, and also quoted below.

(paragraphing imposed by Rachel’s evil enter key)

“So here’s a thought about how difficult it is to balance aesthetics, truth, and humanization when writing about abuse. It’s from the experience of writing Compassionate Simulation together with Rachel Swirsky.

Link to the story at Uncanny Magazine. We argued a lot while writing it; nearly over every word. One of the big things we argued about was how bad to make the parenting, and how to express that badness.

The story came out of Rachel wanting to write something based on my game “Island in a Sea of Solitude,” which is part of “Four Ways to Die in the Future.“That core idea drifted over time. Rachel took one of the roads not taken and turned it into her own story, Your Face in Clarkesworld.

But Compassionate Simulation turned into a story about a dysfunctional parent-child relationship. IIRC, I wrote the first pass that included an abuse narrative, and wrote it in a fairly mimetic fashion (drawing directly from the experiences of people I know who’ve cut off their parents). Rachel pointed out that, as written, no one would care about this at all, because Joseph was coming off as a one-dimensional monster. And, although it took me a while to understand, she was right about that.

The truth of it is that in real people, we excuse and dismiss behavior that, in fictional characters, we correctly see as monstrous. A real person necessarily as more complexity than a fictional character, and of course in most real cases we already know the person and have existing social bonds with them. None of that is present in fiction. So while I was writing behavior that I had seen in person described as “complex” or “there are two sides to this story” in fiction it just came across as cartoonishly evil, to the point where readers would immediately disconnect.

Then, in the rewrites, Rachel dialed it back to a single traumatic moment. Which is one of the go-to literary approaches to trauma (and for good reason: it’s good in writing not to unnecessarily multiply the themes or the scenes). But that introduced problems of its own.

There is a problem, in writing, when you portray an abusive man in a sympathetic light, people will sympathize with him entirely, to the point of dismissing and dehumanizing his victims. And the story was beginning to swerve into that narrative: “It was only the one time.” In life, though, it’s never only the one time. It was important to us that the story honestly represent family trauma, and I know of almost no one who has cut off their parents over a single traumatic incident. So having the story revolve around a single incident was viscerally uncomfortable to me. So that was another hurdle for us.

In the end, through a lot of talking and negotiation and planning and reading analysis of estranged parents’ forums on http://issendai.com, we managed to produce the final story.

I’m really proud of the final text. I think we managed to thread the needle of being truthful without overbearing, and of portraying a humanized portrait of a dysfunctional parent without making him the center of the reader’s sympathy. But that’s is a difficult needle to thread. Writing the story gave me an appreciation for exactly how difficult.

Writing something truthful isn’t just about mimesis and it also can’t be straightforward “portray everyone sympathetically.” It needs a conscious balance. Also importantly, in a broad sense, it’s okay to be thinking about fiction explicitly and directly. Writing doesn’t have to entirely be about our first inspiration. Sometimes the right path is to sit down and talk through the goals of the story in an analytical way.

Also importantly, in a broad sense, it’s okay to be thinking about fiction explicitly and directly. Writing doesn’t have to entirely be about our first inspiration. Sometimes the right path is to sit down and talk through the goals of the story in an analytical way.”

Posted in Essays | 1 Comment

“Your Face” in Spanish

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Mandolin

It is so cool to see my story in other languages! I can’t read most of them, but it’s still really fun to know the story has a life beyond the words I chose. My story “Your Face” has already been translated into Chinese and Spanish — here’s the Spanish version on Cuentos para Algernon, a nonprofit blog and anthology run by Marcheto, who also wrote the translation. https://cuentosparaalgernon.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/tu-cara-de-rachel-swirsky/

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

A Haiku for Saturday, November 1st

Posted on November 1, 2019 by Mandolin

The cold that nestles,

knits a blanket, lights a fire,

turns you toward yourself.

Posted in Poetry, Rachel Swirsky's poetry | Comments Off

Cartoon: Defending Free Speech

Posted on October 30, 2019 by Barry Deutsch

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Help me make more cartoons like this one by supporting my Patreon! A $1 or $2 pledge really helps.

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I have three complaints about the way mainstream pundits treat the “campus speech” issue.

First of all, they vastly exaggerate the scope of the issue. Second, most of them barely acknowledge campus censorship coming from the right (Reason Magazine is an exception).

But, third and most importantly, they give little or no attention to much more effective attacks on free speech. The people most vulnerable to censorship are the people with the least privilege and standing in our society, such as sex workers, undocumented immigrants, and prisoners.

I’m not saying that genuine censorship on campus shouldn’t be reported on and editorialized against. But the attention campus speech gets, compared to the way pundits almost totally ignore other forms of censorship, is infuriatingly disproportionate.

And it’s hard not to see it as an unconscious bias based in self-interest. Columnists writing for major magazines and newspapers know that they will never be censored by laws targeting sex workers, or I.C.E., and it’s extremely unlikely any of them will spend significant time in prison.

But all of them either have been campus speakers, or can imagine themselves being campus speakers. All of them have friends and colleagues who speak on campuses. And that makes any threat to campus speakers seem far more immediate and significant to them, than objectively more threatening and harmful censorship against the less powerful.

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Here’s an essay on this by Noah Berlatsky.

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Panel one is exciting, to me, because I didn’t trace it, or use a perspective grid, or use the computer equivalent of straight-edges to help me draw. I just drew the capital building freehand.

That probably won’t seem like a big deal to you. But to me, it’s a great advance. I never would have attempted freehand drawing of this complex a building a few years ago!

I’m constantly jealous of cartoonists who are great at drawing architecture freehand – done well, it looks amazing. It’s much more expressive than the merely accurate results I can get tracing a photo. Panel one isn’t a great drawing of a building – but it’s certainly passable, and I’m proud of having achieved that. :-)

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Here are a few links with more info about the issues mentioned in the first three panels.

Panel 1, on censorship of sex workers by Congress:

With FOSTA Already Leading to Censorship, Plaintiffs Are Seeking Reinstatement Of Their Lawsuit Challenging the Law’s Constitutionality | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Why FOSTA’s Restriction on Prostitution Promotion Violates the First Amendment (Guest Blog Post) – Technology & Marketing Law Blog

Panel two, on I.C.E. targeting undocumented immigrants who criticize I.C.E.:

ICE arrested activist just hours after he recited a poem criticizing the agency – ThinkProgress

ICE Keeps Arresting Prominent Immigration Activists. They Think They’re Being Targeted. – VICE

Panel 3, on censorship of prisoners:

Inmate Says He Was Thrown In Solitary for Talking to Reporter

Do American prisoners have free speech?

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As always, thank you so much for supporting these cartoons! There are a lot of terrific cartoonists out there, but I think I have a point of view, and an approach, that is pretty unusual in editorial cartoons. Thank you for making it possible for these cartoons to exist!

I won’t be posting this cartoon in public for at least a week, but if you’re pledging at the $5 level or above, feel free to show (or post) it without waiting.

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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels, plus a small “kicker” panel below the bottom of the cartoon.

A large caption, at the top of the cartoon, says “DEFENDING FREE SPEECH.”

PANEL 1

This panel shows the Capital Building in Washington, D.C., where Congress meets. Two word balloons come from inside the building.

SPEAKER 1: Our new law will force websites to silence sex workers!

SPEAKER 2: Good plan!

PANEL 2

Two men, wearing jackets and hats that identify them as I.C.E. agents, stand talking to each other outside a depressing blocky-looking building. One of them is angrily pointing to something on his tablet. The other is grinning and holding up a forefinger to make a point.

ANGRY I.C.E. AGENT: An illegal immigrant wrote a poem criticizing I.C.E.!

SECOND I.C.E. AGENT: We’ve got our next target!

PANEL 3

Inside a dirty-looking prison, a prison guard in uniform leans on a cell door, talking to the prisoner within. A small barred window is in the cell door, and through the window we can see part of the face of the prisoner. The guard is grinning; the prisoner looks angry.

GUARD: Let’s see you talk to any more reporters from here in solitary!

PANEL 4

A large caption at the top of the panel says “THE PUNDITS REACT!”

Inside a room with a sofa and a vase on a table, two pundits – one male, balding and wearing a necktie, the other a woman with black hair and glasses – are talking. The man is looking at something on his phone screen and looking panicked; the woman is striking a heroic pose.

MALE PUNDIT: Oh no! A wealthy writer with a huge following and plenty of access to media was protested on campus!

FEMALE PUNDIT: This is the worst threat to free speech ever!

SMALL KICKER PANEL UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE COMIC

The male pundit looks serious as he speaks to a self-portrait of the cartoonist.

MALE PUNDIT: If wealthy powerful pundits don’t stand up for the wealthy and powerful, who will?

Defending Free Speech | Patreon

Posted in Cartooning & comics, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc., Media criticism | 37 Comments