We in the media like a good laugh at ourselves, don't we?

BUD HANDELSMAN

CLIVE GODDARD

JOEL MISHON

JIM SIZEMORE

LES BARTON

MIKE BALDWIN

RAY LOWRY

NICK BAKER

• From the "Media" section in The Mammoth Book of The Funniest Cartoons of all Time, edited by Geoff Tibballs

How does a cartoonist get an idea that will strike a chord with people everywhere?

Here is the cartoon by New Yorker cartoonist Liam Walsh that quickly went viral:

And here's Walsh discussing, in a New Yorker video, how he came up with the idea:

CLICK ON THE PHOTOGRAPH TO ACCESS THE VIDEO LINK.

Also read:

• When furniture get nightmares

• Telling it like it is... with cartoons

• One of India's most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. (Scroll down to read the item on Morparia.)

• A Commits alumna's long-drawn affair with illustrations

Should a cartoonist apologise when readers complain his work is "insensitive and tasteless"?

Fourteen people died and as many as 200 others were injured in an explosion in a Texas town earlier this month.

Last week a newspaper published from Sacramento, the capital city of California, published this cartoon by Jack Ohman on its editorial pages:

Joshua Gillin, writing on Poynter, tells us that Ohman has said on his blog that he had received many complaints calling it (and him) “insensitive and tasteless” and pointed out he had drawn much more graphic images in the past to make his points.

I knew it was close to the edge, but I went with it, and I don’t go with things I can’t defend. I’m defending this one because I think that when you have a politician travelling across the country selling a state with low regulatory capacity, that politician also has to be accountable for what happens when that lack of regulation proves to be fatal.

Ohman also writes on his blog that when he has to come up with these ideas, he is not deliberately trying to be tasteless. He continues:

What I am trying to do is make readers think about an issue in a striking way. I seem to have succeeded in this cartoon, one way or the other.
 
The question is whether it is tasteless or not.
 
My answer, respectfully, is that it isn't.

Read Ohman's blog post here to understand how to defend brilliantly and pithily the seemingly indefensible: 'Explosion' cartoon published to make a point.

• ALSO READ: "Telling it like it is... with cartoons".

• Sherry M Jacob-Phillips (Class of 2007), who is a journalist in Bangalore, commented via e-mail:
  I found Jack Ohman's cartoon strip a tad insensitive, but the message was clear. Hence, it served the purpose. But where is the need for him to apologise? The cartoonist is not making any assumptions here; instead, he is sketching an independent analysis of the situation. If writers can express every note that lingers in their mind, then why prevent cartoonists from doing so? Ohman justifies his stance by writing that he is trying to make people think about an issue in a striking way. This is the best way by which one can measure the levels of press freedom a country enjoys. If you fear such cartoons, then just stay away from them.

How a great cartoonist does what he does

Did you know each cartoonist who freelances with The New Yorker, that storied magazine founded by Harold Ross in 1925, is required to submit 10 panels a week for consideration (nine of which typically get rejected)?

How do they do it? How do they come up with so many original jokes?

Well, thanks to Jeff Bercovici of Forbes, we know how one great cartoonist does it. In an interview with Matthew Diffee, who draws cartoons for The New Yorker and other media organisations, Bercovici draws out the essence of a cartoonist's light-bulb moment. We learn that Diffee parks himself at a table for the first hour or two of each day — however long it takes him to drink an entire pot of coffee — and forces himself to free-associate on a blank sheet of paper. That means writing, not drawing:

Diffee says his cartoons always start with words, not images. Typically, he’ll take a phrase that’s lodged in his mind and tweak it this way and that until he comes up with something funny or hits a mental dead end. By the time he fills up the paper, he usually has at least a couple workable ideas.

Here is a Diffee cartoon from a recent issue of The New Yorker:

“I’m sorry, Paige, but grades are based on the quality of the writing, not on your Klout score.”

Diffee also demonstrates how he does what he does in a brief (less than five minutes) video interview with Bercovici:

You can read the Forbes interview here: "New Yorker Cartoonist Matthew Diffee Shows How To Be Creative".

And take a look at a collection of New Yorker cartoons here.

• Additional reading: An insight into the ingredients of great writing from The New Yorker.

• Also read: "A man whose genius for cartooning matches his flair for wit" and "Hadi Farahani, the most brilliant illustrator and cartoonist I have met".

• Plus, meet the R.K. Laxman of England, Matt of The Daily Telegraph: "There’s no cartoonist like Matt. With his sharp humour and kind touch, he expertly captures the absurdities of everyday life. No wonder our readers start the day with a smile" — A tribute by Mick Brown.

The most intelligent comment I have read on the Aseem Trivedi controversy

COURTESY: AJIT NINAN/ToI

There have been many reports and editorial comments on the arrest in Mumbai last week of cartoonist Aseem Trivedi. But it is veteran journalist Salil Tripathi, whose writing I admire, who has put the whole issue in perspective.

And the issue, he writes in his column in Mint is not whether Trivedi's humour is juvenile or witty. That is irrelevant.

To be sure, the cartoons for which Trivedi landed in trouble are neither great works of art, nor are they necessarily funny. Like graffiti, some of his cartoons remind one of teenage toilet humour ...  But... his right to express himself is fundamental, even if it is a rant ... For the Constitution recognizes his right to express himself, without preaching violence. And he aims to taunt and ridicule, even if he may end up irritating and disgusting some. But that’s the point of the law.

And look how Tripathi treats the person who filed the case against Trivedi in the first place:

When the laws are wrong and the defendant acts to exercise his freedom, what is the state to do? Err on the side of freedom. And yet, unfortunately, from the police who registered the complaint of a random busybody (who shall remain nameless here, to deny him the oxygen of publicity he craves), and the prosecutor who decided to argue the case, and the magistrate, who thought it fit to admit the case, the state has capitulated again to the hypersensitive, insecure among us.

This is commentary of the highest order. Read the column in its entirety here: "Aseem Trivedi vs the State".

COURTESY: RAJNEESH KAPOOR

Also read:

• "Cartoons, politics and hypocrisy", by another Mint columnist, P.N. Vasanti, who is the director of the Centre for Media Studies.

• And here are two of Salil Tripathi's columns that I have referred to in the Reading Room earlier: A critique of Arundhati Roy's Outlook essay and A tribute to Soumitra Chatterjee.

When complaints from the public mean you must be doing something good

Those who work in the media have to know how to deal with complaints from the public. If you're a journalist, for instance, it feels good to have a reader (or viewer) writing in and commenting on what you have published (or aired), even if that comment is critical. You feel good because it means someone has read what you have written or watched your news show and taken it seriously enough to give you feedback. You don't have to get into a tizzy just because your work made someone angry. (You need to develop a thick skin early on, says CNN-IBN's Suhasini Haidar.) If the criticism is warranted, and there is an error in what you have reported, a correction may be in order. Otherwise, just read the e-mail and move on.

Would the same principle apply if you were a syndicated cartoonist? If you were Stephan Pastis, the creator of the laugh-out-loud Pearls Before Swine comic strip?

Judge for yourself from these excerpts taken from his introduction to a collection of Pearls strips, "The Sopratos":

Being a syndicated cartoonist means getting a lot of e-mail.

But the best of the best, the crème de la crème, are the complaints.

First, there are the just-plain-hate-filled folk, who load their e-mail with lots of exclamation points and keep hitting the “CAPS LOCK” button

“You think you’re funny, but you’re NOT!! You SUCK!!! Your comic has never made me laugh! Not even close! And you can’t draw worth SH*T!”

When I’m bored, I will sometimes send those people the following:

“Dear Pearls Fan, 

“Thank you for your kind words. Your support of Pearls is appreciated. Unfortunately, due to the overwhelming popularity of the strip, Mr. Pastis cannot respond to each and every one of his fans personally, but he’s glad to hear you enjoy the strip.”

More than not, that will trigger a follow-up e-mail. Those look like this:

“&$%@ you, you #&$@#*. I am NOT a fan of your @*&@ing comic. And DON’T SEND ME YOUR %#*#ing FORM E-MAILS.”

This of course means I have to send him the same response a second time.

Then there are the more specific folk. These people write when a particular strip or series of strips has angered them. Ohhh, there’ve been a few of these.

Off the top of my head, and in no particular order:

• Greek people (upset at being depicted as dirty restaurant owners)

• Parents of kids with ADD (angry at my saying they shouldn’t be drugged)

• Palestinians (angry at the Jerusalem bus strip)

• Bisexuals (furious that I called a lonely man who would date people of either sex a “desperasexual”)

• Family Circus fans (angry over any number of things I’ve done — depicting the kids as grown-up alcoholics, having Dolly say, “I love my dead grandpa,” or having the kids shelter Osama Bin Laden for a week)

• Family members of people suffering with Lou Gehrig’s disease (angry at Pig for saying how coincidental it was that a guy named Lou Gehrig died from something called “Lou Gehrig’s disease”.)

• George W. Bush supporters (mad that I had Rat writing him a letter saying that if he was going to bomb all 192 countries, he’d better pick up the pace)

• Homosexuals (mad that Rat called Pig a “fairy”)

• Baby Blues fans (deeply offended that I would show their favourite characters being babysat by Rat, above, who sat alone at their kitchen table doing tequila shots)

• Turkish people (apoplectic over my naming a llama “Ataturk”, a former leader of Turkey. This one even triggered a letter from the Turkish ambassador to the United States.)

• Nuns (angry that I referred to a nun getting an enema)

• Abraham Lincoln supporters (offended that I showed Lincoln saying, “I need to see another play like I need a hole in the head.”)

Add to these the more general never-ending complaints about having the characters swear, drink, smoke, and shoot guns, and it’s easy to see:

I’VE GOT THE GREATEST JOB IN THE WORLD.

Also read: "You won't believe how this popular comic strip artist gets his ideas".

You won't believe how this popular comic strip artist gets his ideas

Stephan Pastis, the creator of the wildly successful Pearls Before Swine, says the process of humour writing is most akin to what they say about the sausage: It tastes great, but you probably don’t want to see how it’s made.

Pastis makes this claim in his introduction to “This Little Piggy Stayed Home”, a collection of Pearls strips that appeared in newspapers in 2002-03.

That introduction is proof, to me, that this comic strip artist is truly a funny man. Funny ha-ha, as well as funny peculiar. Read these excerpts and you will know what I mean:

The question I get the most from Pearls readers is, “Where do you get your ideas?” And the truth is I don’t know. What I do know is that most of the better ones seem to quite literally pop into my head, with most of the dialogue already written. A good example of this is one of the more popular daily strips, where Rat asks Pig, “If you could have a conversation with one person, living or dead, who would it be?” and Pig answers, “The living one.” I don’t think I spent more than a minute writing it. It was just there. The good ones always seem to be more “found” than “created”.

I also know that the ideas seem to come in bunches. If there’s one good idea, there’s usually a few more behind it…. It’s like all you have to do is keep the pen moving.

But the converse of this is also true. When there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there. I’ve had days where I’ve written for ten straight hours, not eating and not leaving my room, and I have not come up with a single idea. …

While the thought process remains more or less a mystery, I have learned that there are certain circumstances that seem to be more conducive to creativity than others. For me, the key is total isolation, loud music, and coffee. Every time I explain what I do to achieve this in interviews, I look unbelievably strange. But it’s the truth, and I am strange, so here goes.

First, I lock myself in a spare bedroom in our house. I remove the phone. I close the blinds. I even put a folding chair in front of the door, in case the lock doesn’t work. I also turn off the lights, leaving only the minimal amount of sunlight that comes in through the closed blinds to show me where the notepad is.

Second I turn on loud music. I have about a dozen compilation CDs that I’ve made, filled with what I think are great, soaring, more or less spiritual songs in which you can lose yourself. There tends to be a lot of U2, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, and Counting Crows in the mix….

Third, I drink a lot of coffee…two large cups. For the first hour, I just drink the coffee and walk back and forth with my headphones on, head nodding up and down to the music, occasionally playing the air guitar, and air drums and dancing. As I’m usually wearing only my boxers, you now have a good visual of how strange this really is.

To make matters even stranger, I periodically go to my bookshelf and read the same sections of the same books over and over. They are: 1) the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; 2) the beginning of Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; and 3) Ernest Hemingway’s short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”.

By the second hour of this, the ideas will usually start coming, and I’ll lie on my stomach on the floor and write them all down in a spiral notepad. I don’t draw at all. I only write. After about eight hours of this, I’ll usually have a week’s worth of strips written. Which means I can put on my pants and get dinner…hopefully in that order.

So now you know.

And then Pastis has the last word, or three. “Enjoy your sausage,” he tells us.

If you're a Pearls fan, you will agree that in Pastis’s case we not only relish our sausage but also revel in seeing how it is made.

• For more advice on cartooning from Stephan Pastis, visit the official Pearls Before Swine blog: “Cartooning 101”.

• Photograph and comic strips © Stephan Pastis

When furniture get nightmares

What is my television's worst fear? What might my sofa dread? And what is my centre table's worst nightmare?

These are the questions cartoonist Dan Piraro asked himself before setting out to answer them in his own unparalleled style:

Piraro, the creator of the syndicated newspaper cartoon Bizarro, explains on his blog the origins of this particular cartoon:

We’ve all felt sorry for a small chair as an extremely heavy person sits on it, and that empathy for inanimate objects was what led me to muse about things common household furniture might fear or dread. Of course, I know that inanimate objects are not sentient and have no feelings but by “chair,” I mean “child,” and who hasn’t felt sorry for a child being sat upon by a large adult? Perhaps my sensitivity in this area comes from personal experience; my parents were very poor when my siblings and I were young and could not afford furniture, so they sat on us. They couldn’t afford children, either, but until they figured out where we were coming from, they just kept having them. It was painful at times, yes, but it also brought us closer together as a family. 

How can you not admire a man whose genius for cartooning matches his flair for wit?

Take a look at some of the other Bizarro cartoons:

What does that last cartoon mean? Piraro explains, again tongue firmly in cheek:

One reader wrote to me this week asking me what this cartoon meant. If you are that reader, then you already know the answer because I responded promptly and politely, which is my habit. If you are not that reader and have wondered for yourself what this cartoon means, wonder no more for the next sentence will explain it. The devil likes bad things to happen to people so if someone came through surgery quite well, he would be disappointed by the “good” news.  If you are now wondering if I actually believe in the devil since I draw so many cartoons featuring him, the answer is yes, he is Karl Rove.

You will get this cartoon only if you are a huge comics fan — and have been one for a long time (Hint: That's Elmer Fudd fleeing for his life):

Visit Dan Piraro's website to get your regular dose of wry — make that bizarre — gags: "Bizarro Blog!".

Also read:

• When Dan Piraro made a mistake with a Che Guevara cartoon

• Telling it like it is... with cartoons

• One of our most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. (Scroll down to read the item on Morparia.)

Telling it like it is... with cartoons

With a few deft strokes of his (computer) brush and pen, DNA cartoonist Manjul (he uses only one name) has captured the spirit — and the angst — of the current "people's movement" in a series of cartoons published in the paper this week:

In an interview published in DNA last year, when he had come to Bangalore to receive the Maya Kamath Memorial Award, Manjul had revealed that he began his first experiments with political sketches when he was only 16. His early cartoons were published by a local newspaper in his home state, Uttar Pradesh. Looking back, Manjul says that he found cartoons an appropriate medium for the expression of his own unique political commentary.

Manjul also talks about how he gets the ideas for his cartoons:

“The day begins with poring over newspapers. Through the day, there is much twisting and turning of matters in the head, as one settles on what the subject of one’s cartoon will be. Once I’ve settled on how to present it, though, the drawing is easy,” says Manjul, recalling the words of Abu Abraham: “A cartoonist is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

To read the full interview, go to "Manjul says it all between crooked lines".

"Open" sesame...

Aniruddha Bahal is unlike any journalist I know of. While his claim to fame rests largely on the sting operations he carried out for Tehelka.com, Bahal is also an accomplished author and writer who has worked with both India Today and Outlook. For a brief period in 2008, he also hosted the irreverent Tony B Show on Channel V.

ANIRUDDHA BAHAL

Five years ago Bahal founded the online investigative journal Cobrapost, which was responsible for Operation Duryodhana (also known as the "Cash for Questions" scandal), in which his team secretly caught on camera several MPs accepting cash in return for asking questions in Parliament.

Bahal's life as a novelist began in 2003 with Bunker 13, an espionage thriller. Last month, he published his second novel, The Emissary, a 500-page tale set in ancient Greece. Why ancient Greece? How did the idea originate? And how did he write this story without first visiting Greece? That is what both media students and aspiring writers will want to know. Obligingly, Bahal has written a detailed account in a recent issue of Open, in which he explains how Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul nudged him towards history:

“It is essential for a writer to read history. It widens the scope of his imagination, amongst other things. But what kind of travel writing are you reading?” he [Naipaul] asked with some sternness.

Naipaul’s gaze can rattle one in the best of times, and right now he seemed to be calibrating whether I was someone he should be wasting time with.

“Well, I was going through a lot of Ryszard Kapunscinski and Bruce Chatwin,” I said, shakily hoping the names would pass muster and get me past some duffer classification that his gaze seemed inclined to thrust me into.

Naipaul’s gaze mellowed as he heard me belt out a few Kapunscinski titles: Shah of Shahs, Imperium, Another Day of Life. “That’s good,” he said. I felt like I was sliding out from the gutter. There seemed a warm hum of approval. The conversation veered elsewhere.

That’s the point that I decided to brush up on history.

You can learn a lot about generating original ideas and about doing the right kind of research by reading Bahal's highly entertaining article here.

(Contrast Bahal's working style — I am tempted to call it "laid-back" — with that of Jonathan Franzen, hailed by Time magazine in a recent cover story as one of America's best novelists and whose fourth novel, Freedom, has just been published. Here's an excerpt from the profile-cum-interview by Lev Grossman:

(If Franzen finds prepublication media attention difficult, at least he doesn't have to deal with it very often. It took him seven years to write The Corrections. You'd think that having done it three times (his first two novels were The Twenty-Seventh City and Strong Motion), he would find the fourth easier. But no. Freedom took him nine years. "It was considerably more difficult," he says. "It was a bitch. It really was."

(Read the article to get a good insight into the writing process: "Jonathan Franzen: Great American Novelist".)

***

TISHANI DOSHI

In the same issue of Open, dancer and writer Tishani Doshi pays tribute to Chandralekha, one of India’s most controversial and celebrated choreographers, whose "refusal to separate art and life inspired my parallel careers, one drawing upon the other".

Doshi writes: "My twin lives of dance and writing have flowed in and out of each other fairly seamlessly. Dance taught me the rigour and physical discipline that every writer needs, and poetry and literature in turn added dimensions and depth to the dance".

What does this tell us? That writing, even full-time writing, does not really have to be a "full-time" occupation. That is the beauty of being a writer — there are so many other cultural options that you can indulge in simultaneously. (Don't tell that to Naipaul, though.)

***

I have saved the best for last.

HEMANT MORPARIA

One of our most famous cartoonists, Hemant Morparia, bemoans the decline (and possible early death) of the political cartoon in India. In his well-founded critique in the same issue of Open, Morparia lists seven reasons for India's poor track record in producing good cartoonists. What's exceptional about his argument here is the quality of the writing: each item in that list, for instance, runs on, and leads, to the next item — you have to read it to appreciate it.

And he tops it with a brilliantly telling cartoon.

Read "Death of the political cartoon" and revel in some sparkling originality.

• Photos courtesy: Outlook; Sunday Times (Sri Lanka); Cartoonnews.blogspot.com.  

STRIP SEARCH
Speaking of cartoons, I have always wondered why most of our daily newspapers give such short shrift to the good old comic strip. And why the majority of comic strips hail from the good old US of A. Don't readers turn to the funny pages first any more, as they used to do in the good old days? And are there no Indian comic strip artists who are good enough?

Writing in in Outlook's 15th anniversary issue, Manjula Padmanabhan, playwright, journalist, comic strip artist, and children's book author, offers a convincing answer to that second question:

Publishing Western strips is not merely cheaper, it also permits a newspaper to dodge the issue of socially relevant humour. When Blondie throws a jar of mustard at Dagwood’s head, Indian readers are unlikely to think “Oo! Husband abuse!” But if a sari-clad, middle-class, middle-brow Indian Blondie were to follow suit, Indian readers would very likely howl with righteous disapproval. In Bombay’s Sunday Observer edited by Vinod Mehta, where Suki made her debut in a strip called Doubletalk, readers whined about her constantly, calling the strip a “horrible eyesore”, “Double Gawk”, “dragging and brazenly repetitive”. The reason I was able to carry on was that I had my editor’s full support. That was almost three decades ago. Today? I don’t know which newspaper editor would champion a lowly strip cartoonist against sustained reader-rancour.

Read her enlightening article here: "Strip the skin".
 

Quick on the draw

Hadi Farahani is the most brilliant illustrator and cartoonist I have met. I had the pleasure of working with him in Dubai in the '90s when I was the Features Editor of the Khaleej Times. His incomparable art lent both colour and life to the articles I edited and published in the paper.

Hadi has since moved to Canada and his work has appeared in all the big-name publications in the West. And he has been nominated three times for best magazine and newspaper illustrator of the year by the National Cartoonists' Society in the US.

You can take a look — and gaze in wonder — at his work here.
 

Marvel at his illustrations for newspapers and magazines (samples above). And also admire the logos in the 'design' section.

Hadi is a great role model for any young illustrator among you. Don't you think the college newspaper will benefit greatly if you can produce illustrations like these?

• Also read: A Commits alumna's long-drawn affair with illustrations