Cartoon: Right-Winger With A Zinger

This cartoon belongs to a particular subcategory of my cartoons – what I think of as the This Appeals To My Particular Sense Of Humor And I Have To Draw It To Find Out If Anyone Else Will Find It Humorous category.

The cartoons in this category are often ones I’m especially fond of. And usually, at least some of my readers find them funny, too. But some of the time, the cartoons just get no response other than what I imagine is an embarrassed quiet. I imagine my audience sitting silently in a metaphorical auditorium, not wishing to hurt my feelings but not knowing what to say. There is an occasional cough.

(Part of the appeal of this cartoon, for me, is that, like Fezzik in The Princess Bride, I love inane rhymes.)

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In the Washington Post, Kat Jercich wrote:

…There is no need to be cute or funny; don’t say your pronouns are “princess” and “in charge.” You may get a laugh, but is the cost — the alienation, discomfort or frustration of vulnerable people — worth it? A cisgender person who claims that their pronouns are “dance mom” and “brat” is suggesting that they are not interested in how fraught this matter can be for trans and non-binary people.

…Taking pronouns seriously signals that you’ve thought about what trans and gender-nonconforming people face. That doesn’t automatically make you an ally … But it does mean you’re at least trying to demonstrate basic respect.

It’s possible for cis people to make pronoun jokes totally innocently – maybe they’re not very hooked into the current political culture, and they don’t realize that pronoun jokes have been weaponized by the right as a way of saying “fuck trans people.” But we should learn better, because whether or not we all realize it, these jokes have been weaponized and come off as deliberate disrespect.

And for many, it’s not so innocent. For right-wingers, pronoun jokes aren’t about being “cute or funny”; they’re a form of virtue signaling (for the peculiar form of contempt that right-wingers erroneously consider virtuous). A pronoun joke is a way they recognize each other. It’s a way of saying “I’m with you, I’m in the in-group, I hate all the same people you hate.”

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Drawing this one was so fun! The simplicity of the visuals (just one dude standing on a suburban sidewalk) let me concentrate on making clean and lively lines, and the figure drawing doesn’t look stiff to me. This is the sort of detail that I don’t expect anyone but me to pay attention to, but I think his mouth came out really well in this cartoon.

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TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. Each of the panel shows the same man, a conservatively-dressed guy with short hair combed in part, wearing a polo shirt and gray slacks, standing on a suburban sidewalk.

PANEL 1

The man stands looking directly at the reader, smiling, his arms crossed.

CAPTION: Right-Winger.

PANEL 2

The man is now bursting with anger, raising a fist into the air and mouth open hugely as he yells.

CAPTION: Right-winger shit-slinger.

MAN (yelling): Stolen election! Groomers! Hunter Biden’s Laptop!

PANEL 3

In a closer shot, the man is smirking as he speaks more softly directly to the reader. I did my very best to draw him with what’s referred to as “a punchable face.”

CAPTION: Right-winger shit-slinger with a zinger.

MAN: My pronouns are screw and you!

PANEL 4

The camera has pulled back again. The man is thinking very hard, sweating, one hand on his chin, looking up into the air, frowning with effort.

CAPTION: Right-winger shit-slinger trying to think of a zinger that isn’t that stupid pronoun shit for the 1000000th time.

MAN (hesitantly): Um…  Uh…

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This cartoon on Patreon