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Popular Culture Review
Future media innovations or cultural shifts may reemphasize the carnival
style of humor; but for now, the more elegant, bipartisan tradition of print satire
is fading. Newspapers are folding and cartoonists are retiring without heirs;
pundits such as MacNelly and Buchwald have passed on. Berke Breathed’s
Opus comic ended in November 2008 as its creator explained that with “the
cable and Web technology allowing All Snark All the Time,”58 he wants to
protect the innocence of the strip from the coarsening climate around him. Even
Dave Barry, with his self-deprecating ramblings about his dogs and high-school
pictures, ends a recent column wistfully by asking, “Now that this election is
over, whatever the hell happened, can we please grow up and stop being so
nasty to each other? Please? OK, I didn’t think so.”59 Even Dave Barry senses
the present ascendancy of mean.
Keimyung University
Ken Eckert
Notes
1 Gerald Gardner, Campaign Comedy: Political Humor from Clinton to Kennedy (Detroit:
Wayne State UP, 1994) 128, 7 Nov. 2008 http://books.google.com/books
2 Dave Barry, “The Funny Side of ‘Beowulf,” Miami Herald 2 Nov. 1997, 7 Nov. 2008
http ://www .j ibj ab.com/view/67677
3 Troy Patterson, “The Satire Recession: How Political Satire Got So Flabby,” Slate 8
Apr. 2008, 7 Nov. 2008 http://www.slate.eom/id/2188472/pagenum/all/#p2
4 Gardner, Campaign Comedy 123.
5 Peter Canelos, “In Era of Stagecraft, Substance Still Matters,” Boston Globe 25 Aug.
2008, 3 Jun. 2009 http://www.boston.eom/news/politics/2008/articles/2008/08/25/in_era_
of_stagecraft_substance_still_matters
6 Jeff MacNelly, qtd. in Gardner, Campaign Comedy 132.
7 Pat Oliphant, cartoon (1980), rpt. in Oliphant’s Presidents: Twenty-five Years o f
Caricature (Kansas City, MO: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 1990) 48, 7 Nov. 2008
http://books.google.com/books
8 Mike Peters, qtd. in Gardner, Campaign Comedy 131
9 Qtd. in Gardner, Campaign Comedy 130.
10 Douglas Brinkley, qtd. in John W. Matviko, ed., The American President in Popular
Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005) x, 7 Nov. 2008
http ://books.google.com/books
11 Saturday Night Live, video, NBC 1 Nov. 2008 http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_
Live/politics/video/play.shtml?mea=229100
12 YouTube, “Johnny Carson as Ronald Reagan,” video, 7 Nov. 2008 http://www.youtube
.com/watch?v=AdmULsIEyEI
13 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (1941, 1965), trans. Helene Iswolsky
(Bloomington: Indiana