No Walkley for you, Mr Leak

wilcox toon 8The Australian‘s Bill Leak on the predictable, lame, politically correct, unfunny preciousness of his cartoonist colleagues:

We used to be instinctively anti-authoritarian and cynical, which made it almost impossible to offend us, and was the reason Australia became a breeding ground for great cartoonists. But it’s not any more because, instead of manning the barricades against this plague, our cartoonists, with a few honourable exceptions, rushed to embrace it. They abandoned a proud, national tradition of iconoclasm, wit and invective, and ­defected, en masse, to the purse-lipped prohibitionists and wow­sers of the green-left intelligentsia.

It’s no wonder that so few of them have drawn a cartoon that was ­surprising, provocative or funny since. And how could they? As ­George Orwell said: “You cannot be really funny if your main aim is to flatter the comfortable classes.” When he wrote that in 1941 the people who made up the “com­fortable classes” weren’t the sort of climate change miserabilists with dietary requirements and ironic beards that comprise the ­establishment today. And you’d think the last people on earth who’d want to become part of a crowd like that would be Australian cartoonists.

But they do. They want to be cool, they want to be popular; liked on Facebook, followed on Twitter. So at a time when their duty to ­offend has never been more pressing, they go out of their way to ­appease the offenderati by making their cartoons as inoffensive, as ­insipid, as possible.

Leak’s lament is protected by The Australian‘s paywall, but for those with money to splash and the capacity to tolerate Mrs Woolcock’s ongoing presence on the paper’s editorial page, his column would justify the cost of a subscription in and of itself.

As to which humour-challenged pedants with crayons might have prompted Leak’s thoughts, follow the link below to read about a definite contender. Hint: an example of the Walkley-winning suspect’s work is reproduced atop this post.

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