Web Photos Lampoon Bush

In the picture, residents of New Orleans make their way through waist-deep water as President Bush stands next to his father, grinning and displaying a striped bass that he’s just caught. “Bush’s vacation” is the caption of the photographic gag that has made its way around the Internet this week.

In another doctored photo, the president strums a guitar and appears to be serenading a weeping African American woman holding a baby in front of the Louisiana Superdome.

Perverse though it might seem, the juxtaposition of Hurricane Katrina’s human costs with the perceived sluggishness of the federal government’s response has proved to be a boon for political humorists -- particularly those operating in cyberspace, where dissemination is instantaneous.

“It almost follows a familiar pattern that we saw after Sept. 11 and to some extent with the beginning of the Iraq war where the humor is somewhat hesitant, and then does not tend to center on the tragedy, because there is nothing funny about the tragedy,” said Daniel Kurtzman, editor of About.com’s political humor website (politicalhumor.about.com), which has a section devoted to Katrina. “In this case, what’s providing fodder is the botched response, all the idiotic statements from officials and their almost total disconnect from reality.”

As befits the Internet, hurricane-related humor is not centralized. Zingers come from amateurs whose masterpieces, polished in Photoshop, are passed around by e-mail or posted by political and humor blogs, and from professional cartoonists and humorists, such as Mark Fiore, a former newspaper cartoonist who now concentrates on animated pieces.

One item in heavy circulation is Fiore’s animated cartoon (at www.markfiore.com), “Whoopsi Gras, the Carnival of Ineptitude.” It starts out in an absurdist fashion, with parade floats in the flooded New Orleans streets, mocking evacuation efforts and the lack of National Guard personnel on the scene. It ends, however, on a stark note, with cartoon bodies floating face-down in brown water, with the weeping voice of Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard, in a clip from “Meet the Press” where he cried while recounting how his colleague’s mother called from a nursing home every day after Katrina hit, asking for help, until she drowned Friday. “I wanted to do a bit of a sucker punch,” Fiore said. “I wanted to come in with a real hammer at the end.”