Thursday 28th of November 2024

the trials and tribulations of satirists...

rating

The case of the humping cartoonists...

Following a very poor and self-serving analysis by Paul Barry at Media Watch of a particular situation, Gus has decided to go and inspect the annals of humping dogs and other unrelated humping characters throughout history — without mentioning a special sensitive case. Nonetheless we have of course got to mention the hamster being humped. 


Art is a funny beast. There is of course various forms of expression but each have their limits of skills, of penetration and of influences. Music is more abstract unless one adds words... Songs can be very powerful and satirical songs have a special place in explaining a point. But for me the most explicit power resides in the drawing. The image. A song is linear, a drawing can be seized from which ever corner we wish. An image is worth a thousand words, we often say. But an image can have limits to express an abstracted specific thought, where words can be more explicit. Thus the image often stays in the didactic domain while showing an illusion of what is or what is not. 
Photography has taken over as our main source of visual illusion. A photograph of a space is not the space itself. So we are still trying to create technology such as goggles that can show us images in 3D... 3D TV is only a restricted framed image with depth. The 3D goggles are still somewhat limited in terms of sensory perception though it was perfected in the episodes of "Red Dwarf". So to cut to the chase, the good old fashioned cartoon still holds a lot of power to make a strong and quick political point with a stick. 

Satire can be discreet... Satire can be vicious... Satire can be lame, but in general satire is necessary to counter-balance our psychopathy, personal and communal. Psychopathy is what may have saved humans from extinction in regard that humans are a somewhat flawed species in which no two specimen look the same, apart from twins, triplet and the like... 
I also believe for example that religion is a form of social psychopathy. The case in point being demonstrated by the cartoons of Mohammad creating hysteria beyond belief. Psychopathy in human is what provides our grand excuses for not being human. It gives us our illusion of being demigods. It gives us our meaning of life, though we don't need one beyond life itself. 
Satire thus needs to pull our pants down from time to time otherwise we become full of our own enlightenment. Satire can never go too far. May be... who knows... Except some satire needs to have a rating to protect young eyes from carnal knowledge before time. Hence the genuine warning at the front of this line of blogs. 

I believe Mark Scott was rightfully good natured to let this one go to the keeper... I could spend 14,329 words to analyse his gracious reaction and the value of this image in depth, but that would be a waste of adjectives and of artistic critical analysis and I do not know the subtext of his relationship with the Chaser mob. 
scott

Not clever but straight to the point. Trousers down. End of story.

Same with this one too. Says it in a nutshell... "What does it say?" I hear you ask... It's very simple. It shows that the pig is quite happy for having been spared the abattoir... so far. Just kidding. You read what you want in it... Still not very clever mind you, but there, it's straight to the point. Trousers down. The hamster has a beef with Barry and shows him humping a pig... 
barry

Talking of pigs, more clever is this old cartoon (extract shown) by Jean-Marc Reiser... Go analyse this Mister Freud!... The whole cartoon apart from the shown little corner is devoted to people in a four story building looking for the mirror — a small mirror that the lady, in the first window shown here, has "lost"...
pigs

This reminds me of a restaurant in Barcelona (Manuel?!), where the kitchen and cigarette smoke clouds were hovering just above the head of the waiters... The restaurant was packed with customers, mostly students, artists and intellectuals looking like Picasso... The food was fabulous and there in the middle of the room, a couple of male dogs where humping... actually they were at it with full penetration but this could be too much information... No-one took notice even when the dogs switched...
Animal humping has been with us even before the Greek gods created satyrs. Half goat, half human, part god, these creatures have had a long history — longer than Christianity... I have already used this image of satyrs here:
is the pleasure of sex democratic...

For me I have not indulged into depiction of humping except on rare occasions like the one below: 
donkey

I know... it's a bit lame... 
Before the Revolution, the French had cartoons in pamphlets such as the one below of the populace being humped by the king, by the clergy and by the nobility... Nothing new. This is what the stupid nasty 2014 Tony budget is doing — emulating this history that led to a revolt. Please take note of the chains, the nakedness and the blindfold... No torture technique has surpassed this. 
class


Quite amusing...

 

 

The French also had images depicting the Queen Marie Antoinette either as a lesbian or as a nympho...

Marie Antoinette was the subject of countless cruel, and sometimes pornographic, pamphlets throughout her reign. Pornography in eighteenth century France took the form of crude caricatures, colorful cartoons, and even sophisticated etchings and engravings. Pornographic songs, plays and news-like stories were also popular. Marie Antoinette was a favorite target of seditions libelers because, to them she represented an extravagant lifestyle, everything they hoped to attain but knew they would not. To some pamphleteers, Marie Antoinette was the symbol, the very cause, of all that was wrong with their economy, society and government. Pamphlets were used to accuse Marie Antoinette of all manners of debauchery, including adultery, lesbianism, and incest.
http://leahmariebrownhistoricals.blogspot.com.au/2010/07/royal-dildo.html

marie-A


Here Marie Antoinette is shown with a dildo...
In another line of blogs, I have shown a Reiser cartoon explaining the bible story of the biblical floods and how Noah did whatever to stop humping.... Very funny.
species of earth...
reisernoah


Some cartoons were inter-country relationships. Here are a couple depicting Franco-US relationship and US-Japan relationship, all with dogs:
jefferson
This cartoon shows Jefferson as a dog and Napoleon as the hornet. Napoleon is preparing to sting Jefferson, and in order to avoid being stung, Jefferson is coughing up money for the French diplomat in front of him. This shows that Jefferson was regarded as a puppet for the French.
stapush.weebly.com

hawaii
An 1897 editorial cartoon with John Bull, Uncle Sam, and a dog symbolizing Japan from the newspaper the Hawaiian Gazette. The dog follows the "Hawaii" sausage in Uncle Sam's pocket
en.wikipedia.org


But the populace still loves a good hanging... Hanging the gentle gentry gently from a gantry... Is Blackadder the fellow pulling the ears of the human wheelbarrow?
gentry
http://leahmariebrownhistoricals.blogspot.com.au/2011/03/flatulent-fatties-msr-fancy-pants.html


see also Chinese satire of the 1920s: http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/modern_sketch/ms_essay02.html


But we cannot have an exposé such as this one without mentioning Martin Van Maele, a French "artist" who published satyrical pornographic drawings (often in Belgium) in the early 1900s. He did not hesitate in showing the clergy having it off with young girls as well as massive cocks used as guitars and this little ditty in which a dog is involved:
van meale

So let's move quickly to a more serious topic and the recent history of local effing dogs, otherwise this essay will end up like a thesis — a thesis on satire being a bit like a dog licking his balls till they get raw... 
Anyway, the cartooning spat between Indonesia and Australia started (did it start then?) with some nasty cartoons about our illustrious John Howard and regal Alexander Downer. They were shown as humping dogs on the front page of a newspaper in Jakarta. 
rakyat

Two dingoes... In all seriousness, one could analyse the likenesses or the penmanship till the cows come home. but the satire is on your face. Soon after this publication, the Daily Telegraph, without any qualms about it... Er, excuse me... We're more decent here at the merde-och press... Yes, the cartoonist (Bill Leak), possibly under editorial correctness guidelines or the editorial board directive decided to state: "NO OFFENCE INTENDED".. Wow, whoah, woooh!!!... And the panel of censorship on the cartoon showed that the media in Australia is/was CENSORED. 

leak


I apologise about the quality of this toon here, that is the only reference I could find in the whole wide world of the web... I think that this embarrassment has been deleted from search engines... Anyway this clearly shows there is more freedom of the press in Indonesia than in Australia. Is not this funny?.
Even the media in Indonesia eventually showed a Tony Abbott wanking... Hey no need to tell us, we all know that he does, politically speaking. He lies, he gets high on big words and slogans that mean little dicks to the rest of us — the intelligent part of this country of dummies... 

wanking

Great relationship...
Anyway to terminate this long diatribe here, let me quote from John Pilger about cartoonists, especially Steve Bell, in the New Statesman which should of course be called the New Statesperson...
--------------------

"As if to prove its respectability, the Guardian has sought the endorsement of notables, including Nick Clegg, Harold Evans and other specialists in faint praise.

The most effective defender of the paper is not one of these. He has shaggy, dark hair and a beard – or he did when I last saw him. For more than 20 years I have reached for his work as you do for a first cup of coffee. He is outrageous, anarchic, brilliant, sometimes inexplicable and a bit mad (not really). For those who doubt the truth is subversive and often absurd, I point them towards two pages in the Guardian where he resides.

Only Steve Bell exposes consistently, fear lessly, the bullshit of “public life”. Indeed, his characters are often drowning in or waterskiing on the stuff. “Right! That’s it!” says the last governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, to Gordon Brown, then prime minister, and Chancellor Alistair Darling. “Heads down, tea break over!!” They are up to their chins in a tank of turds."

 

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Impressive. And ALL of the cartoons or images showing someone humping a dog or a pig are NOT to be taken literally... And this is why someone whose name we wont mention got it wrong. We never thought of him as a dog humper... Sure, he tried and still tries to fuck the ABC with opinions and his perception of global warming, but in NO way did we ever think of this person as a dog humper... After his court case, we might now do... Tragic. Now do we think that George W Bush was a camel-fucker because of this cartoon below?... No.

camel

I herby thank all the cartoonists I have borrowed their work in the defence of satire. Thank youse all.
Ah and here is the last word:

turtles

vale murray...

New Zealand cartoonist Murray Ball has died at the age of 78 after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer's disease.


Ball was best known for his long-running strip Footrot Flats, a skewed exploration of farm life seen through the eyes of a sheep dog.

The strip ran in newspapers across the world from 1976 until 1994, and even spawned a musical, an animated film and a theme park.

Friend and long-time collaborator Tom Scott told the New Zealand Herald he received a call on Sunday afternoon to say Ball had passed away.

"He was being nursed at home for a terrible illness," he said.

"He was an unbelievably strong, fit, handsome man all his life, with a full head of hair."

NZ comedian Cal Wilson paid tribute to ball on Twitter.

"What a huge part of my childhood," she said.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-12/murray-ball-new-zealand-cartoon-fo...

 

Some of Murray's cartoons were quite out there for the time. Do not read from the top if you are under sixteen.