Comfortable in Controversy
melanie jones interviews garry trudeau
Garry Trudeau began drawing Doonesbury at Yale in 1970. Since then, his strip has become both a pop-culture phenomenon and one of the standards of political satire in America. The first comic strip artist to win a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, Trudeau continues to infuriate and inspire, and is considered by many to be “far and away the most influential editorial cartoonist in the last 25 years” (Wiley Miller, Non Sequitur). Melanie Jones spoke with Trudeau about politics, comedy, and what, exactly, Doonesbury means.
Your comic at Yale, Bull Tales, eventually became Doonesbury. Why the change?
Bull Tales began life as a simple sports strip, eventually morphing into a broader chronicle of undergraduate life at Yale. It had a very specific, local orientation, and it didn’t take pressure from the syndicate for me to grasp that it needed to be retooled for a national audience. So this was a process that I willingly undertook. The only editorial demands that were put on me had to do with making the strip more accessible, not more palatable. The generally subversive tone was not only left intact, but actually became much more pronounced after Doonesbury was launched.
Did any characters find their way from one strip to another?
The three principle characters, Mike, Mark, and B.D., survived the transition from Bull Tales to Doonesbury. The idea was that as three distinct political archetypes, they would serve as the main tent poles for this little parallel universe we were erecting. You have to get it right at the beginning, because you’re building a framework that has to be robust enough to stand for years. You don’t get a do-over if you run out of steam after six weeks.
You’ve been canceled, and even banned, from newspapers before. Does any of that carry over to today?
I obviously didn’t write to be banned (although many editors, noting the media attention it drew, suspected otherwise). I was always on probation somewhere, and the first 20 years or so were filled with lots of drama and controversy. Over time, though, editors got used to me, or began to trust me, or take me seriously—who knows? Since the Clinton years, I’ve had very little pushback. Part of it, I think, is that a new wave of media—from gangsta rap to South Park to the Kimmel/Silverman videos—became so extreme that Doonesbury seemed like a pillar of good taste in comparison.
Have you ever considered becoming more “user-friendly”?
No. I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to do. Pandering is a lot harder than it’s cracked up to be. If it weren’t, everyone would be a millionaire.
The name Doonesbury is a combination of Yale slang “Doone” (a good-natured fool) and your ex-roommate’s last name. Was the title something you were toying with for a while?
I don’t even recall making it, so spur of the moment sounds about right—and consistent with all the other decisions I was making about that time.
In the mid-’70s, you earned the Pulitzer Prize, Yale’s Doctor of Humane Letters, and an Oscar nomination. Do you think the political climate of the time opened people up to satire?
Yes. Satire was a late arrival to the counterculture party, although it didn’t take long for irony to replace indignation as our generation’s signature motif. Initially, the stakes were too high and the political mood too earnest for satire to flourish, and there was only a handful of outliers. In 1970, the year I began, we had All in the Family, the short-lived Smothers Brothers, and two late-night hosts who told a few mild political jokes. SNL was still five years away. Cartooning had Feiffer and Pogo, but that still left me a lot of running room. No one had ever written about sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and politics on the comics page before, so the sheer novelty of it invited a lot of attention.
Many of your characters are based on political figures or celebrities. How do you decide who goes in?
Either they preexist as public figures available for parody, or they are created because none of the existing characters are suitable for the story line I’m focused on. This creative promiscuity has a big downside: the strip has about 50 characters, of which maybe 30 are in active rotation, making it a difficult for a novitiate to jump in. Some of the characters have decades of back story. It’s like opening a Russian novel on page 275.
Satirical cartoonists have to balance humor and social commentary. Have you ever found yourself leaning too far in one direction?
Well, I can’t imagine pulling back from an idea because it’s too funny. However, it is true that social commentary without humor violates the basic contract I have with the reader: I can write on any subject I want, regardless of how incendiary or grim, but I have to find a way to make it bearable, if not entertaining. That’s the essence of black humor.
How often do you receive letters or e-mails thanking or criticizing you for tackling controversial issues like say, AIDS or global terrorism?
There’s a page on Doonesbury.com called “Blowback,” where most of the comment now comes in. We edit it—not to screen out negative reaction, but to make it a worthwhile reader experience. Our visitors know this, so we get very little flaming—mostly thoughtful or whimsical feedback. Back in the day, the tone of my mail could get very vitriolic—Hunter S. Thompson once sent me an envelope stuffed with used toilet paper—but I no longer seem to attract that kind of response. The most compelling correspondence in recent years has been from veterans and family members of wounded warriors.
You’ve said that it’s “better to tell the truth, even in hyperbole, and hope that they [the people] will do something about it.” Do you still feel the same way?
That sounds pretty grandiose—must have been uttered by my beta self back in the day. Any young artist will tell you he’s championing the truth, but my own sense of certainty has lost altitude as I’ve aged. My goal now is more modest—to create entertaining stories, sometimes about subjects of consequence. I don’t get too wrapped up in the idea of changing the world.
Doonesbury has become a pop-culture reference of sorts. Is it disconcerting to realize something you created has become so relevant to modern culture?
I don’t fool myself. Yes, I’ve enjoyed more than my fair share of approbation, but let’s not forget that the Golden Age of the comics is widely thought to have been during the ’30s. Comic strips now are as anachronistic as the newspapers that deliver them. I’m happy to still have the gig, of course—an established comic strip is the closest thing to tenure that pop culture offers—but I would not encourage anyone with my skill set to enter the field. Go to Pixar. Or The Daily Show. \\\