I realise that Steve Bell is pretty low at the best of times. Cartoonists are supposed to direct a pin-prick of humour into the inflated egos of the politicians, to make us think in a humorous way about the stories of the day. So we expect wit, satire and an underlying truth – even if we do not necessarily agree with the politics of the doodler.
Bell, however, just seems to be sinking to ever lower levels with his dreadful scrawls. They are sledgehammers rather than pin-pricks and lack wit or humour. Indeed, he appears to be trying to see just how tasteless his drawings must be before the Guardian calls it a day. Today is no exception.
The cartoon is bad enough but the comments make for some seriously depressing reading.
I only read a few because I was in danger of tearing out the last of my hair.
I’m sure I saw a similar (maybe even worse) cartoon in the Independent, but it seems to have vanished from their webshite now.
@Bucko
Exactly what I thought. And I still don’t understand the cartoon.
It’s an attempt to draw an equivalence between the tax avoidance of large organisations such as Vodafone and the abduction and murder of Jamie Bulger. All it tells us though, is that Steve Bell has a very sick mind.
WTF!!!
I am utterly unspeeched. And it isn’t even remotely funny. I don’t mean in a po-faced ‘now that isn’t funny’ kind of way; there just isn’t a joke in there.
Bell suffers from being a darling of the right on, he has built up his reputation on the basis of finding some clever visual references, such as John Major’s external underpants and has now become lazy and self referential, he only has to draw a picture of a Fat Cat and everyone at the Graun collapses in ecstasy. This is what happens to most left wing humorists, they appeal to a sect so they reflect the sect’s obsessions back at themselves, the eighties alternative comedians were a prime example, it got so they only had to say ‘Maggie’ to be deafened by the applause.
Does anyone have a clue why he draws Cameron encased in a condom ? I expect there’s some very witty explanation. Oh and Bell lives in Brighton, which tells you everything you need to know.
“Indeed, he appears to be trying to see just how tasteless his drawings must be before the Guardian calls it a day.”
Probably never. He’s one of the Righteous. They look after their own.
Depressingly, you are likely to be right.
They wouldn’t see it as tasteless and the whole question of taste is fraught with subjectivity anyway, look at the graunistas reaction to Jeremy Clarkson for instance. I wouldn’t invoke taste but I feel perfectly happy in saying that the Guardian mindset is utterly wrongheaded and on occasions, such as the Wooton Basset cartoon, utterly nasty, my real objection to Bell is that he’s become useless at his job. LR probably wouldn’t agree but there was a time when he was genuinely funny, when he didn’t take himself seriously and followed in the old English tradition of scurrilous and anarchic humour. I didn’t agree with the left’s stance on the Falklands war ( it was what really finally turned me from a leftist view of the world ) but Bell’s cartoons at the time often made me laugh, the disreputable penguin was a favourite, he’s simply lost that touch and subsided into lazy crowd pleasing, he’s gone from cutting edge to leftist saloon bar. Charlie Brooker has got there even quicker, his world weary disgust at media excesses has been replaced by pure bile, maybe that’s what he’s actually like as a person. Compare that with Ally Ross at the Sun, he takes the whole celeb and low rent TV world apart with considerable wit and charm and no trace of bitterness, a genuinely funny man, Brooker and Bell are just propagandists.