‘Doonesbury’ Takes Off Clothes, Takes on NEA Issue

A character in a “Doonesbury” comic strip clad in nothing but rope shows the art community’s contempt for government funding, the strip’s distributor said.

But some editors are wondering how readers will react to the strip due out next week.

The strip by Garry Trudeau has the character J.J. uttering fragmented sentences laced with such provocative words as “ooze,” “lubricate” and “hot juices.”

J.J., with nothing but rope covering her private parts and a bucket over her head, gives her rendition of “performance art.” But she makes no direct reference to sex acts.

“The way I read it, it’s an attempt to show the lengths that the art community will go to to thumb their noses at government grants,” said Jack Morrissey, an associate editor at Universal Press Syndicate. The company, based near Kansas City, distributes the strip to about 1,000 newspapers.

The strip apparently referred to controversy over National Endowment of the Arts funding, Morrissey said. Some conservative politicians have tried to block government money going to artwork they consider obscene, and some performance artists have lost grants.

Morrissey said several editors had called with questions about taste and the reason behind releasing the strip. But no paper indicated that it would pull the strip, scheduled to run Aug. 6 to Aug. 11, he said.

Bob Duffy, vice president of Universal Press, said newspapers could choose not to run the strip. But he strongly discouraged editors from altering it for reasons of taste, as papers have done to Trudeau’s comics in the past. “We’d rather have them drop the strip than alter it,” he said.

The Los Angeles Times will run the strip without alteration. “We have seen the cartoon and feel it is in the Doonesbury tradition of social satire,” said Laura Morgan, a public information spokeswoman for The Times.