ie., the cultural elite approves of Doonesbury, so everyone pretends they find it funny

Also known as "The Margaret Cho Effect."

Ditto Boondocks. Not funny, not insightful, but don't admit that or you're a racist.

Doonesbury was funny back in the 70s.

Or maybe that was the drugs....

Whew....for a moment there I thought you were going to say"Doonesbury" was as funny as "The Family Circus".

And those, my friend, are fighting words!

Actually, Doonesbury was quite risible in the late seventies. Of course, Trudeau was smoking the gentle weed back then, and relying less on "political humor." Leftists seem a lot less funny when they get political. Garofalo used to be fun on the Ben Stiller show. Really.

Whew....for a moment there I thought you were going to say"Doonesbury" was as funny as "The Family Circus".

Not me!

So we are agreed: Doonesbury had some humor to it back in the 70s.

One thing they did NOT have back then was great Lebanese cheesecake photos, however...

You young folks don't know how good you have it.

I think it's not just "the elite approves" as a basis of cartoonist (or pundit) job security. It's also the perception of ground being staked out by certain ideologues that operate in the media - the "our guy effect ", or "our gal effect" in the case of the pathetically unamusing Cathi.

It goes like this. Ted Rall is a piece of shit. Even the Left thinks of him as a piece of shit, but their piece of shit. If Rall would be canned, it would be taken as a lost or blow to the left and newspapers would get more grief than if "Blondie" just went away. Same with fairly uninteresting old pundits like George Will or "Mr NightLine".

And there is the "Institution effect" where some dippy cartoon, decades past when it was funny or even interesting, is kept around as "an American Institution" - a valuable part of our culture. Doonesbury hits here too, but Peanuts was the worst....Also are those ancient ones that should have been interred in a graveyard the last year they were amusing...sometime back in the 1930s - like Blondie & Al Capp.

But it doesn't hurt to write your newspaper and say that Doonesbury is no longer funny and suggest something more trendy that the 18-34 demographic likes, given Doonesbury is read by old Lefty farts that barely buy anything the newspaper's advertisers run.

I can remember as a young lad reading comic strips every day. It was the first thing I did in the morning. For some strange reason, I kept reading the strips that had lost their funny-factor. It was sort of a ritual with me. Don't forget to read Nancy, Cathy, and other such relics. I wanted to see how unfunny the strip was that day. I even measured the time between funny strips.

I then developed a theory for why I continued to read these comics, what I call the "lime slurpy syndrome." It works something like this:

Did you ever go to 7/11 when you were in your early teens or preteen years, and go straight to the slurpee machine? Usually, for me at least, it was cherry first, then Coke if they were out of cherry. Sometimes, there'd be a third flavor that they'd rotate. I guess some sort of market testing. Sometimes, there were only two choices, one of which was Coke or cherry, and then the other was the random flavor.

Sometimes that random flavor was lime.

Well, if you rode your bike to the 7/11, arriving hot and thirsty after a long summer's day of play, that slurpee was a dream. Fuck the water (they didn't have bottled water when I was that age), fuck the soda, I wanted that slurpee. Serve the sucker up.

Looking forward to the slurpee was a big part of the whole affair. Then, sometimes, some horrid times, they were out of the cherry and the coke, and the only flavor available was lime.

You buy the fucker anyway, because you have been looking forward to the whole package: the straw, the filling of the cup, the beads of water dripping down the sides, and getting the spoony straw to maintain sucking power to the very end. The whole slurpee drinking process took a bit of skill. If air pockets formed, you'd have to bang the bastard on a table to pack the ice and get the sucking going again. And let's not forget, it goes down cold and sweet. Adding to the art, you had to learn the skill of avoiding the painful ice headaches if you drank too fast. There was a lot of learning going on with that trip to the 7/11.

So with all this anticipation, you buy the lime slurpee. It had been about 2 months since the last time you had to buy the lime, and the memory of the bitter taste had diminished with time. You kind of remember that it tasted pretty decent, and it still was sweet, icy cold and had all of the other parts of the experience that the cherry or Coke flavor slurpee had.

Then, about 1/2 or 1/3 of the way through the lime slurpee, you threw the fucker away, wondering what in God's name compelled you to buy such a wretched conconction.

Then 2 months goes by, and it happens again. You forget the shitty flavor, because it wasn't so shitty, like a bad oyster, that it made you never want the vile thing ever again. It was just bad enough to throw away after drinking about half of it.

And you keep buying the lime slurpee.

Ah memories. However, I stopped reading Doonesbury long ago, when the strip passed the lime slurpee flavor stage and hit shit flavored slurpee stage, from which it has never recovered.

But I still read some of those other comics, because they are still lime flavored.

Trudeaus good but hes no Ted Rall. Trudeau is unfunny, but Rall is unfunny and racist. And isnt that what we're looking for in the sunday comics? Racism- lame, cliched racism.

The Far Side was the greatest comic strip ever. Does anybody dispute that?

It's amazing, Cedarford. When you aren't talking about Christianity, China, or Israel, your brain starts working again and I actually enjoy what you write.

I think we can all agree- be we Nazis, jews, queers or straights- we all hate Doonsbury.

Placid, must you encourage it?

While the Far Side was one of the best, for milk spewing hillarity Calvin and Hobbes is tough to beat.
And I'll always have a soft spot for Bill the Cat and his band Deathtongue

For stupid, unfunny cartoons, no one can compete with Roz Chast.

Wow, "stupid Doonesbury cartoon". [redundancy alert]

Well, Doonesbury WAS funny back when Duke was coach of the Washington Redskins. Which was back in the, oh, 70s?

I sense a connection.

I question the timing!

Doonesbury was funny...for a while...back when Carter was president.

Larson, Breathed, and Waterson all retired at the top of their games rather than embarrass themselves like Trudeau insists on doing.

I just got an email reply from the Gannon man. It makes me long for the days of the true death card graphic.

I'm glad to see the dude is attempting to land on his feet.

Thank you. I did't "get your drift."

DarthVada: Breathed retired at the top of his game?

Then who is drawing that absolutely shitty Opus comic that gives Doonesbury a run for the Kossiest Komic in the sunday funnies?

I know exactly what you mean on the 7-11 Lime Slurpee thing. Was one of the elementary school rituals, 1980-86.

Doonesbury has had a few decent ones. Some of their Desert Storm ones weren't too bad. And I always did like Uncle Duke if no one else.

Me, I'm a lot more of a Dilbert guy myself.

There's someone out there still reading Doonsbury? Trust me, you've got to give it up. Reading Doonsbury is like pounding your thumb with a hammer -- after a while, the novelty wears off, and all you're left with is the throbbing pain...

I always figured Gates got to Breathed and bought him off for say, 10 years and even after that, no more Melinda jokes!

Trudeau lost it years ago. I point this out on my roundup of political comics: http://www.urbin.net/EWW/goodreading/COMICS/poly_comics.html

There is a also a couple of links to articles saying the same thing.

It's also important to not that Most liberals have no sense of humor unless mocking Conservatives.

McGruder (writer of the The Boondocks, he doesn't draw his own strip anymore), is a barking moonbat member of the far left black helicopter crowd, but at least he can still be funny at times. His comic yesterday was also seriously on target, when Huey tells his younger brother that they can go to college in order not to end up as rappers.

My home town paper only carriers 6 comics and 3 of them are unreadable. Doonesury, Cathy, and Garfield (yes we get it, you're fat and lazy and like the lasagna) all suck like, well, something that sucks a lot. I've been lobbying for Get Fuzzy but my puny efforts don't seem to be making any headway against the monolith that is crap cartoons.

I had thought Trudeau lost his talent somewhere along the way but then I realized what really happened was that I had grown up. I have a big colelction of the old Doonesbury books and looking through them recently made me realize how politically naive I was in my youth.

OTOH, note that the strip shown indicates a MSM icon is just as much for sale as the no-name web guy.

Boondocks is worse, not because it isn't funny (at times is certainly is, unlike Doonsberry), but because it leads to my kid asking me:

"Dad, do you hate blacks?"

Me (spitting my cereal): No - why do you ask?

Kid: "Because this (pointing to Boondocks cartoon) says that Republicans hate blacks."

I wrote a letter to the editor to my paper (Lexington, KY, Herald-Leader) complaining about it. They never printed it, of course.

I actually *liked* Lime Slurpees, and hated Cherry. So you've probably got me to blame....

Damning with faint praise, I think Doonesbury *can* still be funny and/or even a little poignant, but there's an inverse relationship between the strip's amount of political content and its quality.

When Trudeau's just dealing with the characters, he can be pretty good. For instance, the whole "B.D. loses his leg" sequence has been surprisingly decent, save for the odd bits where politics intrudes on it, like the "President Chimpy McHitlerBurton Visits B.D. in the Hospital" bit.

Sorry, Ace. While I agree with you that Anka's integrity kick is effing hilarious, I disagree on the Doonesbury diss. Trudeau's clever as hell, and has never been topped in the land of political-esque comics. That's just. The Fuck. Ing Way. It is!

Got me, Sortelli...I forgot about the stuff that Breathed is doing now. I've only caught it a few times since he came back, due to the Chicago Tribune becoming completely unreadable. And really, he should have remained in retirement.

Yeah, he shoulda. Every now and again I will peek at Opus just to see if the magic is back, but sometimes it's soooo bad it's like Ziggy for Leftists.

I was a big fan of Bloom County back when I was like 9 so maybe it's the whole childhood nostalgia thing but I will shamefully cop to having liked an Opus strip or two as recently as a couple of years ago. *blush*

HeyZeus,

Don't let me down.

Take a bad strip, and make it better.

What, no one else is gonna stand up for The Fusco Brothers?

*crickets*

As proof that good cartooning transcends politics, I really enjoy "Dykes to Watch Out For." Lots and lots of angry leftism (although post-9/11 the protagonist experienced some doubts), but it's drawn and written well. And published in my home town (Ithaca, NY - a calmer, colder Berkeley!)

Does that make me a girly-man?
That and about 500 other things ...

I cut my teeth on Doonesbury and Bloom County. Long before I knew who, say, James Watt was, I had read and re-read jokes about him.

Sometime between Reagan's second and Clinton's first term, all the air went out of Doonesbury.
Breathed left on a high note, came back for "Outland" which was decent ... I haven't summoned the courage to look at his new stuff. Is it really that bad?

No one will believe me, but Ted Rall used to be quite funny when he chose. In the pre-Dubya era, his less politicized stuff had its moments.

"Life In Hell" is another obvious (to me) example of muddled politics but undeniable talent ... the first five years or so. After that it all blurs together.

(Sorry for the obnoxiously long post. Obviously, this is something of an interest of mine).