To whomever it is that draws and writes the daily cartoons: Please stop.
I do not want you coming out of this letter with the impression that this is constructive criticism. You should not continue to, under any circumstance, draw and write cartoons. My reasons for telling you this are twofold: you cannot draw and you are not funny. That’s the end of my argument.
I do not need to go any further than that, really. However, I want to and will go further. I doubt in the entirety of campus anyone outside The Post editorial staff would ever defend the impossibly bad and incomprehensible cartoons that plague Page 2 of The Post. If someone did, I’d be forced to question their sanity.
The only way to even enjoy daily Post cartoons is to laugh at how each one is a miserable failure of art and comedy. Whether it’s butchering perspective, horrifying doodles that are supposed to be people, leaving in partially erased lines, submitting comics with ink smudges, submitting comics without punch lines, submitting comics without set-ups, submitting comics without any discernible panel continuity, or submitting comics with cliché and tired jokes, there has not been a single Post cartoon this year that hasn’t been an absolute masterpiece of artistic and comedic failure.
The cartoons often seem to hinge on what seem like inside jokes, and when paired with the nightmarishly bad visuals often give the cartoon the feeling of someone recalling a dream: a really bad dream drawn by a five-year-old and written by an extra-terrestrial with only the smallest grasp on narrative, humor and life here in Athens.
I submit this letter for three reasons. One, it is my hope that you will read this and consider working with a cartoonist and/or writer (in all of campus there has to be some talented person who would be interested in this job) to improve the quality of your paper’s cartoons. Two, I hope to spare the world of another cartoon today. I noticed that when you have enough letters, you don’t publish cartoons. Three, after seeing Friday’s cartoon, I’m afraid you may now try more self-aware humor.
It’s not that people don’t get your cartoons. It is, however, that your cartoons are bad, and the only thing that could make them worse is an attempt to engage in self-deprecating meta-humor. I know it can be tough to hear you are bad at something, but the idea that you spend any time at all on these makes me sad.
You are probably a really nice person, with wonderful talents, but I’m sorry to say humor and art are not where they lie.
Ben Nutter is a senior studying communication studies.
