Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Cartooning
Males have 9 out of 10 editorial cartoonist jobs today;
is the reason because women don’t stoop to juvenile humor as much or is
it just that they need those light brown pants
Why are 9.85 out of every 10 editorial cartoonists in America today
male? where is a simple one-word explanation: khaki.
At the office, the cartoonists wear khaki slacks. At summer cartoonists’
conventions, it’s khaki shorts. And for evening dinners, where they pick
up their awards for the year’s most insightful cartoon on the problems
of the misunderstood insurance industry, the cartoonist adds a tie and
navy blue blazer to his khaki outfit.
You can see why it’s a tough arena for women to enter. We girls just
don’t do as much with khaki. And, just as there’s group-dress, there’s
also group-draw.
When cartoonists go off to develop their artistic style, the style they
usually end up developing is Jeff MacNelly’s. He’s the Michael Jordan of
cartooning, and editors seem comforted when everything on their pages looks
MacNellyesque.
Editors also seem touchingly comforted by a breadth of humor that ranges
from Jay Leno all the way to David Letterman monologue material. It’s humor
that whacks Newt today, then Bill tomorrow, with just a touch of naughtiness.
For example, if the news is filled with wild leaks about White House interns,
a cartoon showing the first dog Buddy next to the first shrubbery and a
lot of excited reporters racing over yelling “Another White House leak!”
would be appropriate.
Sound stupid? Well, yes, but when I did that cartoon last winter, it
got many favorable reviews from readers sick of my usual cartoons straining
laboriously to make some idiotic policy point on an issue that might actually
affect peoples’ lives.
Unfortunately, as Howard Stern’s mostly male audience shows, certain
kinds of humor apparently aren’t as funny to women as men. Maybe it’s that
women (even young women who’ve done plenty of baby-sitting) have heard
their fill of poo-poo and pee-pee jokes from the 3-year-olds of their acquaintance.
In addition, it’s the moms and baby sitters who are usually telling future
cartoonists that “if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything
at all.” I think the fact that they are less into khaki and perhaps take
less pleasure in puerile and pointless jokes helps explain why women don’t
throng to this trade. It wasn’t always so.
While there are virtually no women in daily political cartooning in
America today (the sandhill crane population is growing faster), this country
has had plenty of powerful women cartoonists. Thanks to Alice Sheppard’s
fine book “Cartooning for Suffrage,” we know that from about 1910 to 1919,
nearly two dozen women were actively cartooning for the women’s right to
vote. As soon as the 19th Amendment was passed, most of these cartoonists
dropped their pens and went on to real work. Idiotically, they thought
of cartooning as a tool of social change, not as a career or a means of
getting a 401(k) retirement plan.
They were rewarded for that un-American thinking with the ballot and
with personal obscurity. Except in Sheppard’s book, most of their names
are lost to history. They forgot to get their work certified by their era’s
equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize committee or rounded up in the Newsweek
magazines of their day. Just as well, since their work was filled with
passionate opinions and few excrement-based punch lines.
And yet their cartoons represent how cartooning can be much more than
jokes about headlines. Cartoons can fight for ideas, defend the downtrodden
and, most important, use humor to subvert the status quo. Like an ice pick
applied swiftly to the tires of a fat and glistening sports utility vehicle,
a good cartoon can quickly deflate the pretentious bullies who clog the
highways of power.
You don’t find many women, or many thoughtful men, going into the political
cartoon end of the print “communications” industry these days because this
industry isn’t about communications. It’s about selling sports utility
vehicles, not criticizing them. Partly because there are so few editorial
page cartooning jobs available (in a good year there might be one or two)
and partly because in a one-newspaper town editors are often reluctant
to hire too strong a voice in any ideological direction, young satirists
of both sexes are either going directly to the Fox network or, like Nicole
Hollander (creator of the divine strip “Sylvia”), piecing together a platform
of magazines, alternative newspapers and book collections. Other women,
like Gen Guracar, who signs her work “Bulbul,” publish almost exclusively
in the feminist press.
Still, I have hope that with the increase of women in politics, there
will be an increase of women in my little cartooning fraternity. (By the
way, the fraternity brothers are generally above-average specimens of the
species, and I count many of them among my best girlfriends.)
Unfortunately, most of the kids who come in to show me their work are
boys (drawing big-muscled or bosomy action figures).
Fortunately, in a recent nationwide cartooning contest for kids, girls
won the first and third place, which proves, I hope, that the cartooning
talent isn’t based entirely in some Y chromosome-linked gene. To be really
encouraging, however, the prize for any girl who wins a cartooning contest
ought to be a pair of khaki pants.
Wilkinson is the editorial cartoonist of the Philadelphia Daily News.
This article originally appeared in The Hartford (Conn.) Courant.
