That’s why they’re ‘political’ cartoons

My friend Ted Rall — savagely funny practitioner of alt-weekly cartooning — dismisses much of the traditional art form as just so many shopworn renderings of “donkeys and elephants.” The implication that political cartoons are as irrelevant and outdated to his demographic as the two-party system is something of a gen-X-eralization, but, like a good cartoon, there’s just enough truth in it to sting a bit. Our best work may be outraged windmill tilting, sacrilegious sacred-cow kebbabing and puffed-up-political-persona puncturing, but you can’t really take the politics out of politics. That would be like ignoring the elephant ... and the donkey ... in the living room. Or in the freezer. Party on. — Joel Pett

Joel Pett is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist of the Lexington Herald-Leader. His work also appears in USA Today.