Transcripts For CSPAN3 Role Of Satire 20240622

National archives. And see a gun stacking ceremony at ap mat ox historical park. At 9 00 p. M. A look at the American Revolution scheduled to open near Independence National park in philadelphia in early 2017. Starting at 9 30 p. M. Civil war medical history and some of the civil war artifacts at the National Museum of health and medicine. And at 10 00 p. M. Philadelphias Independence Hall and the story of the declaration of independence and Constitutional Convention from inside the halls assembly room. Coming up at 4 00 eastern on cspan2, a hearing on Diabetes Research and funding efforts, medical professionals, diabetes patients and advocates testify before the senate aging committee. Four months after the terrorist shootings at Charlie Hebdo magazine in paris, an editorial cartoonist discusses the role of satire. The george hosted this event in new york city. Let me quickly introduce our panelists. Tomorrow gary trudeau will receive the george polk career award, attained a status of a Great American institution. For 45 years he has spared no public figure or illconceived policy and a unique satiric approach to political commentary. He stands alongside such legendary cartoonists as wolf kelly, paul conrad and our next panelist, jules fifer. Author of 35 books hes written novels, plays, movie scripts and an acclaimed autobiography. He received a george polk award way back in 1961. He said to me just the other minute that this was the first major award he received it took our colleagues at Columbia University another 25 years to see the light and recognize him with a pulitzer prize. [ applause ] molly crabapples work writing cut across multiple platforms for what can be found in the new york times, paris review and the Permanent Collection of the museum of modern art. She has drawn in Guantanamo Bay, abu dhabi migrant camps and rebels in syria. The guardian characterized her equal part vosh william s. Burr ro and cirque du soleil. I would add francis and lenny bruce to the mix. Jangle gold will not be with us. He got stuck in chicago with bad weather and problems with planes flying out. Our moderator is distinguished journalist and author. All i will say about him is that it is said he wrote an article in 1971 that interested a man named steve jobs in computers. I want to ask everybody to please if you havent already turn off your cell phones. There will be a q and a. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you all for being here. Im honored myself to be among these artists since im a person has trouble drawing stick figures. But at least we have some of the best and brightest was really a crucial moment in the history of free speech. I mean, once there were sensors, once there were state laws who were jailed dissident cartoonists and graphic artists, now we have murdereremurderers. Were meeting 12 months after 12 people were murdered in paris. And i read yesterday that there are police still in paris newsrooms. And so it makes it even more an honor to be with these people because theyre brave, theyre talented. And theyre facing a different kind of world, i think. First i think i want to say is respect to all of them. George packer in the new yorker recently said the problem with free speech is that its hard, selfcensorship, hitting the mute button is easy. And you not only have to be brave, but you have to be smart and you have to be funny. And that aint easy. So id like to start with the polk honoree gary trudeau who had the honor of being young when he started writing his cartoons. And hes done something in response to Charlie Hebdo. That is i think a brilliant slate of hand, pull the rug out from under these people job. Gary, could you walk us through what youve done . Sure. Are we going to be seen back here . Yes. I suspect you can all read that clearly enough. The problem that i thought this presented for all of us as american cartoonists at least in talking with my colleagues was that we were so ambivalent professionally. And dont really relate to the satiric culture of the french and we dont really have a Charlie Hebdo in this country. Jules is more of the world of edgy cartooning just being in satirical newspapers all his life. My career was in family newspapers. So i have a different set of constraints. And a different set of imperatives. In talking with my colleagues we agreed on a number of these things. We were all horrified by these murders. In small part of our political family of cartoonists. But secondly, we could identify with what they had done. And ill get to that in a moment. But let me read the cartoon first because this expressed some finally it took me weeks to figure out how to do this. Up in the top saying what a mot li crew. Their imperishable creations live on. Say bonjour and adorable panda, not to mention then in the last panel you hear an off stage voice, mohamed here, may i join the no, and put some clothes on. Not hilarious, but it was important for me to figure out how to honor the cartoonist without necessarily honoring the specifics of what they did. I would not have drawn mohamed. Now, thats not to say i stay away from the issue. For years ive written about islamic terrorists and all the way back to the satanic verses, which earned me a bodyguard for a while. Its not i hate to speak for a group, so i shouldnt, but its not that american cartoonists dont love the edginess, the fight, the doing battle in the name of things that we think are important. Its just that the american tradition as was the french tradition at one time is always the punch up, not to punch down. And the big mistake we felt our colleagues in france made was that they created a very insidious situation where they actually caused mainstream muslim public in france to align itself with and to sympathize with their outliers, the terrorists. Theres enormous sympathy in france for them. This is not a great accomplishment. This is something to be applauded and this happened because their approach was one of provocation, not challenging, not to start a dialogue but simply to provoke and simply to hurt. We dont have quite the same tradition. Maybe jules feels somewhat differently speaking from the alternative world. Well, i never saw myself as part of the alternative world because there wasnt one when i began. I was just looking for an outlet in which i could express what liberals back in the 50s postmccarthy days they didnt have was postamendment rights. When people went around saying what they had to say on a specifically possibly dangerous level, only in small rooms or small bars and over big drinks when they felt brave because it felt like a very dangerous time in this country because they might lose their jobs. Because i was employable and had nothing to lose, i could say whatever i damn well pleased and felt giddy and excited about doing that. There was a the thing i felt about the cartoon then and i feel about the cartoon now is its not so much commenting on the particular political point at the moment, or with something thats happening in the news, its bringing along an audience that has been groomed to think in a certain way and teaching them by the method of humor, and in my case panel by panel by panel how to think in a different way, how to look in a different perspective. How to consider another point of view. So it wasnt necessarily about slamming somebody over their head whether it was somebody i hated like nixon or someone else. It was making people think. It was all about because we much of our lives then and even more of our lives now were being brainwashed. And to try to cut into that crap and point at alternative view and to do it through humor which took away the defensiveness of people who didnt who werent about to love their point of view being attacked without, you know, saying getting defensive about it. Well, if youre funny, they tend not to be defensive. So doing all of these things and trying to turn it into on specific issues one week after another week and learning as i went along. So thats basically how i saw it. I didnt think it was about democrats or republicans or this guy or that guy. I thought it was about what this country was, what it had become, what it should be and what i hoped it would be and what it certainly wasnt. And what it certainly isnt now. Moll y, what was your reactin to the charlie cartoon . My god, i was on a personal level devastated. As gary said cartoonists are small family, even though i didnt know any of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists personally, i did know people who knew them. After that i was angry at so many different people. It was a very complicated anger. I was angry obviously at the murderers. I was angry at the prancing preying politicians from every single repressive country in the world, every single country that spies on dissidents, you know, from the u. S. To saudi arabia were using the murders of cartoonists that would have torn them a new one as a way to posture their still warm bodies. I was angry at the free speech in france that happened after the cartoonists were murdered. There was actually a parody cartoon of one of Charlie Hebdos covers that a young muslim in france was arrested for posting on facebook. And i was angry at the americans who cant speak french because americans very often dont learn other languages who are commenting on these cartoons and making a scene like, you know, some regrettable choices by men with very, very long careers were the totality of who they were as opposed to, you know, one regrettable choice out of a lifetime of thousands of cartoons. Yeah, i mean, a lot of the rage, i would say, was my reaction. You know, theres a question i meant to ask of all three of you. It comes sort of before the whole charlie thing, which is is there something this is a question for each of you that made you an oppositional kind of person growing up . Where you could see through the pieties and it made you angry and it made you funny . Well, jules knows i like to blame him. His work was very influential in my finding a career path. I cant blame him entirely because it was kind of accidental. I was doing a strip in college for as a kind of sports strip, and i was scouted in the first five or six weeks i was doing it and offered my current job. Its a story my kids hate. On every level. I put in maybe 30 hours. And was given this opportunity. So i had to put in the 10,000, i ended up putting in the 10,000, but it was yeah, yeah. Kind of after the fact. And i was making all my mistakes in full public view. But jules was very influential for a number of us. His was the first strip, at least that i was aware of, where the main point of the strip was about the idea, was about a subject, a serious subject. And i always imagined and jules may have a different explanation for it, but there wasnt much change in the artwork from image to image in early cartoons in the 50s. And i would thought, oh, thats just to get my attention. Pay attention to the words and Pay Attention to whats being said. And that i thought, you know, maybe came from your love of the theater as well and that you love dialogue. But i really took all that to heart. And of course i was of the counterculture, i was in college at a time when people were pushing against every institution. And so when i graduated from college i thought it was perfectly normal that i would take those interests and those concerns, politics, rock and roll, sex, drugs, all the things that had bubbled up to the surface in my life during those four years and take them into the comics page. Most editors were unfamiliar with those subjects on being on their comics page. So there was a lot of crossing of red lines early. Thats why i find it so difficult to be talking about a red line now with Charlie Hebdo because, you know, i had that debate over and over again with editors. At one point this is just how clueless and young i was, i got so tired of getting thrown out of newspapers that i sent out a questionnaire to editors, i dont know if i ever told you this, jules. And i said which of the following subjects should i not address in the comic strip . And i put a list of things. A is for abortion and a whole long list. And sent it off to like a dozen leading editors. And amazingly almost all them took the bait and checked the boxes and this is forbidden and this is not. And finally i heard from a wiser head. And he said this is just bull. It has nothing to do with the subject, its how you treat it. Its how seriously are you serious as a satirist . If you can convey that, if you can convey that seriousness of purpose that youre trying to move people to thought and judgment, theres nothing you cant write about. And i think, you know, one of the proudest moments of my career was two or three years ago where i wrote about the texas sonogram law and transv transvaginal probes, language not usually in the comics, and i was kicked out of about 70 papers. But all temporarily. All those papers id built up enough sort of credibility as a serious commentator that they said, okay, this one isnt quite right for our community for any number of reasons, but and, you know, that doesnt mean you have to go away. Just means we cant hear your voice this week. Well, im not entitled to have my voice heard in hundreds of communities every day. Thats a privilege. Lots of times i get that. But sometimes i dont. And its called editing, its not called censorship. Ive always defended the editors that for the most despicable reason throwing me out of their newspapers, because thats their job. Make dozens of decisions every day as to what belongs and what doesnt. How about you, molly . I think form for the quality control, youre still being effected around everything you do. You must be doing something wrong. It shows youre still dangerous a little bit. Yes. Or that you have touched a sore point for that particular community. Yeah. Not all my smoking mr. Butts strips made it into North Carolina papers. When i wrote about frank sinatra, i went dark in las vegas. Jerry brown, same thing in california. So theyre going to be regional. Most recently i did something about jeb bush. And the dallas paper threw it out because it was too political. Too political . The mans running for president. Though i think one of the interesting things were seeing right now though is the death of that sort of context. The death of seeing anything targeted for any particular community. Because once things move to print towards the line everything gets con textualized. Thats what happened with Charlie Hebdo. These tiny knockoff 1 of the paper, i think pretty awful, very often cartoons, were decon tech churlized and made to stand in front of an american audience. No one anymore is seen as the whole body of their work or seen as reaching a particular community. Everyone is speaking to everyone and its very strange and its doing something very disconcerting to art, i think. Yeah, except the charlie artist did highlight specific things they did. They said were doing this for a very particular reason. Yes. And i think just because you can Say Something doesnt nieceniece necessarily mean you must. I agree with you. Rights do come with responsibilities. Absolute agreement. I think theres a huge difference between what you should legally be permitted to say, which is everything in my opinion, and what makes you a horrible human if you say it. I think that tabloids dont exist to shame women for how they look in bikinis, things that should be legal and work of disgusting humans. And i dont think these two things are contradictory at all. Jules, you had some fairly strong words to say about the state of american cartooning, particularly newspaper cartooning in recent years. Well, gary, you may know the figures better than i, but i think were down to Something Like under 200 editorial cartoonists, does that sound right to you . More like 45. More like 45 . Yeah. When i started it was 200 editorial cartoonists who made their living from a home paper. Yeah. Where they got salaries and benefits. Yes. Benefits . Health insurance, whatever. If youre trying to cut a budget of a newspaper, a full salary versus paying 5 for indicated work. I would venture out of those 45 across this vast nation maybe five of them are worth looking at. Its always been a small minority. Not everybody was as brilliant as paul conrad or hue hanie in louisville or some of the others, bill maulden who was extraordinary and in the early 60s was doing such strong cartoons unlike most of the cartoonists in our midst on race and civil rights that his edits are on the paper. I dont know whether it was the post dispatch or the sun times at the time told him to go to work for the daily worker because he was he was actually talking real stuff about civil rights going on. And this was unheard of at the time. You know, you included in one of the things what i thought was a brilliant take on liberal hypocrisy over civil rights. Could we see that one now, jules . Oh, yeah. Its a i guess this is early 60s. Black man with shades. You know, says i love jazz and what he picked up on it. I dug hip and what he picked up on it. I dug rock and picked up on it. I dug freedom, finally lost white. What i love among our american ra races is that every part of black culture is available they will pick up, but not blacks. Theyll pick up the music, theyll pick up the style, theyll wear their hats backwards. They will act cool. You know, certain sway to their hips. But actually acknowledge that there are other races, not just black, but other races that are worth tolerating, thats a nono. So you can plunder and thats what whites have always done. You can plunder other cultures. In this case black culture. But you cant let them into the club. Thats a nono. And did you get backlash from liberals who didnt like to see their hypocrisy exposed . The answer to that question is i dont know. I didnt get that much feedback. You get a lot of feedback. I didnt get the readers didnt basically didnt communicate with me except on very weird issues which had nothing to do with anything. I didnt get much feedback. Which was both disappointing to me but also allowed me to just Pay Attention to what i wanted to do. I got wonderful attention from figures in the black community and that made me feel good. And when i finally did a collection of cartoons on civil rights, it was byron rustin who wrote the introduction to it which i found a great honor. This is the man who not only organized the march on washington, for me on a personal level taught me everything i knew about race. When i was editor and looking to meet girls at left wing places because thats the only place when you got to go and i went to a pacifist group called the fellowship of reconciliation where an unknown speaker namewa speaking on civil rights and i thought what the heck can he tell me . I dont know everything about civil rights. And then he started talking in the way i changed my entire life and the way i looked at things and the way i worked. He said that the most important issue in america is not the cold war and the fight with the soviet union, its that we never resolve the issues of the civil war. We are still fighting the civil war. And this is not about how white liberals should give blacks a break. This effects everybody, the faith of the negro as they called them then, its about all of us. And what he had to say then is familiar now because its become accepted rhetoric, but it was radical and revolutionary and blew my mind apart. And i got to know him and learn from him. And really effected not just the cartoons on race that i did, but everything. We tried to figure out what are they telling us and what is really going on and how do i broach this in a way that it communicates to a reader. Something i was thinking about this morning when i was watching the video of that black man scott who was shot eight times while running away. Are there some things that are just too awful to caricature to capture in visual terms or just, i dont know, break out of the frame . Well, as awful as that was, lets wait for the trial and see whether hes found not guilty. Which is the american way. The shocking thing is just that theyre even putting him on trial in the first place. Thats only because of the bravery of that guy who filmed it. And the story of that guy, this young man, from the Dominican Republic was first he thought of erasing this, his first thought, in a free country of america. Erasing because he might get in trouble. Then he took it to police headquarters. And the way they treated him he said do your stuff. He got out of there knowing that if he turned the tape over to them first of all, hed never get his phone back. And that tape would never be seen again. How about you, gary . Are there some subjects not necessarily this one ill give you an extreme example of that. And im sorry jangel is not here because its his organization. When 9 11 happened pretty much there was a moratorium on humor. In fact, essays were written on irony debt. And the latenight shows went dark. And all of us, you know, were so stunned and didnt know how to respond in a way that would be socially useful. A very interesting thing, they said, you know, comedy is not the opposite of serious. Comedy is the opposite of despair. So how do we direct a response that confronts that despair . So their headlines two days later were i wrote them down just because like the Jerry Bruckheimer movie. I dont remember that one. God clarifies dont kill rule. Hijackers surprised to find selves in hell. They got thousands of letters from people, all positive, who werent shocked that a response to horror would be humor, because humor, thats the salvation. The reason humor exists is precisely because life is such a pain. So there are thousands of letters that poured into the onion. Dave letterman, everybody else figured it out a couple days later and got back on air and, oh, yeah, we have a job to do. Were part of the healing skbl you see the same thing throughout syria and lebanon right now where activists are having lights threatened by isis. And instead of in giving in to despair, they have reacted with vicious mockery, vicious, hilarious mockery. Theres a syrianproduced web series of like actors dressing up like al baghdadi and making fun of him, theres a rock band in beirut that sing songs and want to put bras on cows. Theres this incredible tradition of parody in the middle east. And thats really been turning to great effect toward isis right now. The thing is authoritarian throughout the world of every stripe, secular but authoritarian, they hate humor, they hate cartooning, it gets under their skin. Theres something viscerally ir reverent about it. This kills them. When hitler was in power, one of the things he made a specific list of was a cartoonist in england who had drawn mean pictures of him. He specifically wanted to find these people and kill them because they had hurt his feelings just that much. I had an interesting incident in terms of someone i had angered, i went down to Guantanamo Bay in the summer of 2013 can we just show mollys guantanamo oh, there we go. Great. When i was in guantanamo i was forbidden from drawing the faces of anyone who worked there, which is why i drew these. Because i dont believe in hiding the fact that youre being censored. I think if youre going to be censored you draw the censorship. But when i went to guantanamo, i made a lot of fun of the press tour, the way they sort of tried to engrasht themselves as conservatives and the military was so angry at me. One press officer called up my editor and said that i, quote, made him look like a tool. Its interesting. Do you think theres something about the visual that is more, well as you say gets under the skin, or even in the best verbal satirist is it the fact of caricature make you look ugly . Well, its the immediacy of it. You have to read a whole essay, it hits you and see it. But also theres no barriers to it. Theres no linguistic barriers. You dont have to speak french to know that the picture you had at the beginning of the thing was a really mean caricature of someone. They laugh through borders, they laugh through languages and straight into your eyes. Thats why they have that visceral impact. All of our hero and precursor in the 19th century most of his audience was illiterate. People are great cartoonist in new york. And in fact the mayor, his nemesis fled new york. He was captured in spain, wasnt he . Yes, yes. William mossy tweed who said, you know, in his rage he said i dont care what they write about me. Nobody who votes reads. But them damn pictures. And pictures were extraordinary. There were a number of Extraordinary People at the time. Kepler and some others. Do you think theres a at all a fine line between caricature and sort of offensiveness or over simplifying or stereotype . Or is the best kind of visual representation one that somehow evades a stereotype . Well, again, i think it requires a brain and an opinion. Not just Lyndon Johnson had a big nose so ill do a big nose and call it Lyndon Johnson. The best Lyndon Johnson was by david levine, the greatest caricaturist of the last half of the 20th century, most often new york review of books, lbj had a famous gallbladder operation and there was a photograph of him because he was a famous as well as famous everything else. And in the picture hes holding up his shirt and hes showing his scar from his gallbladder. In the new york review its a wonderful caricature of lbj, same picture, but the scars of vietnam that hes probably showing. And that seemed to sum up the vulgarity of the president , his personal position of the vietnam war, which is why we kept escalating. I mean, it seemed to be a profound comment on so many things that were going on at the time and nobody and a cartoon got it all in one, one shot. Do you think there are anything that any of you are beyond the limits or that you wouldnt touch . Well, its always a personal question. And i think that what you can do a good job touching very much depends on who you are. I mean, i think that i would never draw mohamed myself. You would never what . I never would have drawn mohamed myself. Certainly not like Charlie Hebdo for me, it would be punching down, as gary said. But someone muslim or living in a Muslim Country did a picture of mohamed, or if they even published the Charlie Hebdo cartoons like in bangladesh did, one of whom was murdered recently, thats not punching down, thats challenging a power structure. Its always fundamentally different to criticize a community from within and without. I think the producers would have been fundamentally different thing if it was a bunch of germans, you know, doing it. Well, i mean, imagine if the producer was an all german cast and crew writing team it would have had a different feel to it. So, yeah, i think that what your limits are and personal limits should be very often they come from who you are and what sort of place you occupy in a power structure. I agree with that. I dont think im not quite sure where your question is coming from but certainly no subject that i stay away from. The subjects that i have not collided with on my drawing board are really a failure of imagination, not of nerve. Theyre just i cant think of anything thats either entertaining or inciteful to say about the subject. Its not because i fear the repercussions. Its interesting you mention your drawing board. I think people might be interested in just what the physical layout of how you produce these you sit at a drawing board and do you do first drafts and then revise . No, i do the work the same way ive done it since i was in grad school. And i was doing the strip while i was a grad student. I just draw a pencil and sent it to an assistant who inks it in, if its sunday it goes to a third assistant who does the color work on it. So really first draft. Thats it. And its always in the nick of time. Theres no time you know, theres no time you know, i think some artists are need to have that kind of structure. And need to have once a week when i can say thats good enough and have do you have like a special room where you do it . Well, do have a studio, yeah. But ive worked everywhere through the years. We have portable skills. We can work anywhere. How soon after you write the script do you think you have to sit down and draw it . I mean, do you leave any time . Is there any time to leave because of deadlines . No. No. I mean, for that reason i have to take the ideas as they come in order. So say theres a story art that goes from a monday to a saturday. I may come up with thursday first. And then i have to reverse engineer it and figure out how i got there. So you create your own problems. But the desperation is such that if you have an idea, any idea, you got to use it. Im sure youre asked all the time what do you do when you dont get an idea . And the answer to that for most of us is thanks for not noticing. How about you, molly . For instance this seems like a work of much time and effort. That took about i want to say 20 hours maybe. So i started with these rough sketches that are illegible to everyone in the world but myself. Theyre almost like the shorthand version of drawing. And Something Like this i take a big piece of paper, soak it with water and drip dye into it to get the texture. Then i start drawing. And i use old skill like proquill little steel anybodies and dip the pen in i dont know but sounds interest sglg you d interest. You dip the pen in ink bottles. So i ink. Little house on the prairie. I think so. Sort of sepia tone. So i ink it. I pencil simultaneously because im too distractable to sort of sit down and ink. But, yeah, im compulsive. Drawing for me is like picking scabs or something. Did you do this while you were at gitmo . No, i did this when i was at home. I kept a really detailed sketch book while i was at guantanamo, including the basis of this. I actually developed those smiley faces because i was in the courtroom and they had an official court censor there who would sticker and look through my sketch book. Hes allowed to cut out anything he didnt like. Really . Yeah. What sort of things didnt they like . Well, one of the things was faces of anyone who worked there. I see. Oops. Thats what i did instead. Its interesting because the second time i came back i think that they realized how grim it looked to only have these blank masks for faces. So they found me the most they t attractive soldiers ive ever seen in my life and i said i could draw their faces. The most attractive nurses involved in force feeding, they presented to me. Oh, that is wonderful. Those arent exactly smiley faces. They are from the eyes up. Through a nightmare of some nightmare. And jewels, did you start with pen and ink tell us i started with pen and ink because that is what i was most kroem comfortable with. And the dialogue, trying to figure out the idea. And for me it was always the idea that had to come first. And after a while, i discovered what was what worked best is not knowing where i was going, knowing what i was upset about and wanted to comment on, what i was pissed off about. But not how i was going to do it. And did what classic improv did. You start with an opening line. And sometimes that remains the opening line and sometimes it doesnt. But with the opening line, that is panel one. And then panel two follows. And it begins to write itself. And it begins to take you on the trip. And by the third panel i figure out where im going and it goes some or it has to be thrown out and start all over again. But so it is a constant trial and error. But there is a point. And i kind of know what the point is. And when in my case, the kind of cartoon i did, it often had to do with the use of language, official and unofficial language. It is you know, the distrust for government and the contempt for government and hatred for government that we now find with the tea party and on the right, really began on the american left. And it was that the belief from the american left that nothing they tell you is the truth. Nothing government says is true. What i believed in part to be so. And there was enough evidence to back it up. At the time i was starting, there were Nuclear Tests, underground Nuclear Tests and the government was bringing up statistics to show there were no harmful effects of radiation from the leaks that came as sheep and cattle were falling over out west and john wain eventually got cancer from hanging out there. So i did a cartoon called boom on which the government is announcing, as people fall over, there are no harmful effects of radiation. And to take the language that we use to fool people, to lie to people, to mislead people. And to satirize way out of hand to make it funny, what was really going on in a way that would make people, i hoped, think about it and consider it. That was the game. That was the ad man coming up with an ad to convince people that fallout is good for you. I fell for fallout. [ laughter ] that was one of them. It was a bad ad kind of thing. That was the thing. Here is a question. I guess youre probably aware of the whole question of trigger warnings that has come up recently in discourse. Are people familiar with this, survivors of trauma feel that they should be protected from from being reminded of it because it would cause ptsd and therefore a lot of traumatic things that happened to people from beatings to rape, to whatever, those who bring up that subject are responsible for warning people who may want to leave the room or Something Like that. Do you think this is something that is going to eventually effect your work . I mean, as i understood it from people who any friends who do work on trigger warnings, they view it more like having an ingredients label on food so you know what is in it and if you have an allergy, if it contained peanuts. I think trigger warnings make sense in specific communities. If you are on a web forum of people recovering from anorexia, they might have a trigger warning if people mention their weight. But ive also heard really amazing critiques of trigger warnings from people like roxanne gai who wory it will be used by College Students to avoid ebb gaging engaging with material that makes them uncomfortab uncomfortable. I think it is a complicated issue. But in a College Class you might warn students if you are discussing rape doesnt seem particularly onerous on anyone. It doesnt seem particularly bad. There is this phrase that called grownup, which assumes that after a period of years where you get kicked around and disappointed and this and that happens, you arrive at a condition within yourself where once you had to open a bottle and throw pour it down because somebody said something or did something. You are able to oops, shrug it off and say it and go on. If we are so sensitive and so watchful as to not hurt people and who are hurtable in so many ways, we get a generation and we get several generations that never grow up and im looking at all of you. And i think one of the things weve given up on is the notion of behaving like grownups. Our leaders dont. And often in families, we dont. And it is something to aspire to and the only way you do that is to take the hurt i used to get bitter and angry and pissed off and not speak to people. Now who will me off and well have a wonderful conversation ten minutes later that im no longer into grudges or getting mad for very long. It doesnt make any sense. And it doesnt win anything. And the only one who loses is your yourself. Gary, i guess you were asking for trigger warnings of the list of the boxes to check or Something Like that . What are the biggest scary subjects for editors these days . Well, i can only talk about my own experience because i dont know what they are setting down in other strips. And i know there is a double standard. And sort of this night quite an editorial cartoonist or conventional cartoon artist and they are held to other standards and i cant tell you what they are being what kind of constraints their under. I havent heard, you know, any amber light warnings from editors in years, you shall not write on any specific subject. Is religion okay . Religion is fine. Reproductive issues are fine. Drugs are fine. But given up on it is how you deal with it. They just threw up their hands. I think the only thing you are really not allowed to do in america for the sake of your career is not allowed to say american soldiers are bad. You are not what . Allowed to say american soldiers are bad . Ive done that a few times but not generically. In specific for specific reasons. And my very among my very first strips were depicting behavior of our armed forces in vietnam. Now admittedly it was told from a kind of hippie fantasia perspective, why cant we get along and the vietcong terrorist who befriends the soldier. And i had a view of what was going on over there. But that is a rich source of material for me, trying to understand the military issues. And obviously if i make blanket statements about troops, that is not going to help me in trying to deal with their issues. So ive written about ptsd and many of the other sorts of wounds that warriors come home with. And it is not that i try not to aning to onnize them antagonize them, it is for me, for the brass, because im a liberal, there is no reason for me to be welcome on military bases and such. But enough we got enough feedback from the field, the guys writing about our issues. My break through was in 1990 when i got a letter from the then chief of staff in the army goerld sullivan before desert storm saying were getting good strong response from the field from the soldiers who feel you are connected to their issues, which i was, because i was getting a lot of letters from them. So i was invited over and brought over by a tank commander and first i couldnt get out of the country because i to get to in theater in those days, had you to go through saudi arabia and you needed a visa. And i had the misfortune of timing of spending a week writing about how the saudis were sitting out of the war and the young men were in country clubs while we had 500,000 troops in the desert so i couldnt get a visa. And this went on for weeks. There were 2,000 journalists down range and i couldnt get a visa. And so i get this call from a guy named bill nash, the commander of a tank brigade outside of kuwait and he said i hear you have trouble getting here so come on any way. So i got in a plane with no visa and arrived in read at 2 30 and i got closer to the immigration desk and i thought this is not going to go well and a side door and a couple of gis came out and got me and stuffed me in a helicopter and and when 9 11 happened, and everybody forgoted, the bin laden reason was the military presence in saudi arabia. There is no question they owned the country at that particular moment. They could do whatever they wanted and they acted like it. But i was flown to this base and i was met at the helipad by the colonel and he said, you know, i was reading you when i was in vietnam and i was a lieutenant and i was trying to manage this mismatch con scripts and keep them alive in a hateful war and i was curious about you and it would be good if you wrote about military issues and you knew something about it. [ laughter ] so im going to fly you around the battlefield and you can play with the toys and hang out and and enjoy all of that stuff, but youve got to go into the barracks and go into the dining facilities and spend time talking to these guys and try to understand what theyve been through. It is a professional force. I think youll find they are very different than the soldiers of your era. And so that was the beginning of my introduction. So when bd character loses his leg in the subsequent war, i heard from the d. O. D. Right away and they said okay, amputation, that is a long story arc, that is not something you can blow off in a week. Come find out what that means. And so they long story short, they got me into walter reed and i came and went for years trying to tell the stories of wounded warriors. What they were suffering, having performed their duty in our names for a war i found hateful, that is an interesting balancing act because im trying to keep both things alive in the strip at the same time. So a lot of the best cartooning in some way is investigative. I mean, you sneaked into a a Migrant Workers camp in abu dhabi. Tell us about that. I was doing a case on the Migrant Workers in the u. A. Building the branch of these amazing cultural institutions. Right now the louvre and the guggenheim and nyu are building branches on this island in abu dhabi. And migrant labor has long been exploited in the gulf. A construction worker in the gulf might make 200 a month to work for 12 hours a day doing just brutal, physical labor. And this is long an issue and long been known that the workers have their passports confiscated so they cant change their jobs or leave the country. And they said were different, were not like at all and it wasnt true. Not at all. And it wasnt even a little bit. They were just every other company dos construction in the uae. And so with the help of a Young Construction worker i was able to sneak on the labor sites and into Migrant Worker camps and just talk to these guys and talk about their ambitions, talk about what it was like to be a worker there, talk to them about whether or not they were happy. There was a lot of this idea that because these men come from poor countries that they are just passively accepting of getting paid 200 a month but actually i found that wasnt true. They were going on strike and just getting arrested and kicked out of the country when they did. So, yeah, i tried really hard to get to know people. And also with that story, a lot of times when it was covered in the western press, there was an idea these guys were like cattle, easily fooled peasants who got taken advantage of. And i was like no, these guys are brave by their family and they are beingo pressed and they are fighting against it and i want to portray that complexity and make them the men they are. And i truly believe that good art is a cliche. It robs people of their humanity and turns them into objects and stereotypes and good art is punctuating that. And doing art that is good and thoughtful and rigorous, and you are cutting away at cliche and trying to get to the human truth of the matter. Joouls, you have revolutionized the comic world. Did you invent the graphic novel . No. Speaking of the graphic novel, what gary is doing now and has been doing for the last few years, without being called a graphic novel, just doing a series of graphic novels. In doing real characters with real wounds and in a real world. And day by day we find out a little bit more about them. It is a great tradition the Old Newspaper comic strips going back to gasoline alley, delved into. And once you put them together and read them at once piece, you read it is a novel. Day by day, you are not aware of it. But it is characters developing. However satirical it may be or humorous it may be. It is a story. And it is a story that one follows. I loved from the beginning, the adventure strips as a kid. The strips that ran in a daily papers in the 1930s and sunday supplements and 12 panels in glorious color, particularly the work of milton and the pirates in the and some others. And these guys were my masters. I couldnt draw like them. I didnt know how to draw like them. So i sort of backed in overthrowing the government as a fallback position. [ laughter ] and back a few years ago i just got tired of doing politics and commenting on commenting on what ive commented on before and starting again from scratch and how we replay the same record and the same issues and i said screw it, im going to do something i cant do this any more. Im too old. And i began working on graphic novels and that is what i do now. What was your first one. It just came out last spring called kill my mother. [ laughter ] and it is a graphic novel, starting off in 1933 and ends during the war in 1943. And now im at work on a preak well that started in 1931 and there will be a third book which will finish it all up about the blacklist years in hollywood. Kill my money. Well nothing is off the table for you. You are just finding out. I guess that is something ive always admired about your work. I want to take some questions but i want not knowing you well, is there something you would like to add or subtract to the discussion so far . Look at the pressure here. Well, i was very moved by molly talking about her work and how she goes about it. And gary talking about the level people, even though they are impressed with the different forms of humor and satire, dont really think of the degree of thought and insight and seriousness and the artist trying to figure out how do i present this. What is the best way of communicating this. I dont want to make a speech. I dont want to yell at people. How do i get across the point i want to make, which isnt being made somehow. I mean everybody you talk about the serious journalists, they arent very serious because they write the same crap that everybody else writes. How do i get across my point of view and make it work and make it work as a combination of words and pictures. It is a whole idea of words and pictures as a comic is a whole different form and we think differently about it. And what you do, we think differently about it. And what you do, and what you do, it is just an extraordinary example of what is out there. And there is some wonderful, wonderful talent out there today all over the place working in alternative forms. And it is terrific to me, as 86 years old, an old far, to see in a field that i adored as a kid and i and i adore every bit as much or even more today, this is what i think as the new golden age. I am really grateful for it. Well im always grateful to be on the same stage as jewels and my new friend molly. And my first exposure to his work was not as a cartoonist, even though it was cartoons i was hearing. I was a theater nerd and we did a lot of plays in my high school and the different dorms had different plays. And i went to see three short plays that somebody was putting on. And they were hilarious and funny and moving. What were they . Well one of them was monroe and one of them was they were cartoon stories that jules had written. And i didnt know them as cartoons. I thought you were a play write and that rang my bell because i was a theater guy. And what i didnt understand, as i circled back to my childhood interests, that how much these two artforms had in common. And so im doing ive been doing a tv show the last couple years called alpha house. And the work we do every day is such good preparation, there is characters and dialogue and story art. It is Just Television now, which is such a wonderful space to work in is so close to the story telling except you dont have the absolutely control that you do no, but you have great actors. Yeah, we have great actors who make you seem funnier than you are. These guys are legends. Im honored to get to share a stage with them. Yeah, thats all i have to add. Well on that note, before we take questions, maybe a round of applause for these people. [ applause ] so i guess you want to line up at the mic here for questions. Or just shout them out. You are pretty close. I have a question. It is not going to register unless you go to the mic. [ inaudible ]. Dont be shy, people. Were with you. Well wait. I beat em. My question is for molly. Im curious as a woman when you go overseas and try to sneak in places are there challenges that you face because you are a female trying to get into places that a male cartoonist wouldnt face. Everybody has been courteous and respectful to me. People in the middle east are some of the most hospitable and courteous people on earth to be honest. And ive never been in a situation personally where i felt that i was at a disadvantage because i was a woman in it. Thank you. Though i have to say i have always been with male translators but always treated with utmost respect. I have a question based on ethnicity and politics. From what i heard earlier, you seem to suggest that most of the brilliant satirists in the political vein are leftists and comic strip artists seem to be jewish even though jews are a small portion of the population. And so mr. Pheifer can you comment on your jewish left background. I dont know what you are talking about. I tell you because i have your book here and i would like you to autograph it and it is filled with jewish left commentary. I never saw that book. I never met a jew. Backing into forward. Its well you got me. That is a jewish posture. The comic strip artists of my childhood were Irish Catholic like wool kelly. But the jews were mostly in the comic books. They came from new york and cleveland. Beg your pardon. Cleveland. Cleveland shuster. Yes. But they came to new york. And i birched the notion many years ago that superman didnt come from the planet crypton, he came from the planet minesque. I dont think that is true any more. Cartoonists are not necessarily jewish any more, the comic book artists. They come from all over the place. But it is a generation, four or five generations away perhaps from where i am. So anything i really have to comment about is about stuff that happened so far back that if you wanted to know what, where i came from, why, because there was a Great Depression and out of the Great Depression people formed political alliances in order to survive. There was a great comic named milt kay mon, a nightclub artists who said when i was a kid during the depression, and he was my age, he said i lived in brooklyn, there was a community and a socialist communist and socialist party and American Labor part and i moved to manhattan and 22 years old before i heard of the democratic party. Does that not answer your question. Well i thought you would come up with a mort salt quip. I was new in the community and wanted to meet the girls. Also true. Next question over there. Hi. So it is really cool that you can all do work in the field like going to all of these places and getting really handson experience of all of these different people. Im wondering when you are not in the field, in other countries, what news sources do you like or do you feel like you trust because there are a lot of, like, the media skews things one way or the other and how do you feel like youre making a good, informed view point on certain subjects . Oh, man, it is a lot of failure and trying. Just the act of writing something is almost always skewed. Because reality is infiniti complex but you have 500 words. And what you take from reality and jam into the words, it is biased. There is no unbias. In terms of what i read, i like the guardian, and i look the london review of books. Bbc is good. Buzzfeed has great reporting actually and some great farm reporting. But i tend to follow writers i admire. And it is easier now to do that now. The idea of the single cohesive platform is dead and it is better to find writers i trust. And sometimes you look at twitter and follow people on the ground in those areas. That is not always accurate. There are things that are wildly inaccurate with that. But it is often the most unfiltered way to find out what is going on at a certain place at a certain time. Cool. Thanks. Youre welcome. Next question. Hi. It seems that can you speak up a little bit. I believe it was during the swift boating times, during the bushgore election that the studies came out saying that denying a lie tends to increase the publics ability to believe the lie in the first place and the more you try to fight a lie the less effective you would be. And it seems that to defeat an idea, the only way to defeat something is to discredit it and that is where satire comes into. Do you feel additional responsibilities because of that, the importance of satire, to discredit ideas that are false or harmful in your works . Does that come into play in your mode of thinking, that you are performing a service discrediting ideas that are harmful . Well, in my case, there is a lot that has to be accomplished in a comic strip. You have to front load it with information that the audience trusts on some level and thereafter tell a story premised on what is contained in the first and sometimes the second panel. There is a lot you have to do, in my case, about 100 words or 150 words at the most. And so you have to create a kind of rhythm that the audience can anticipate to understand what is true and what you are making up. And i dont quite know how i guess from doing it over and over and over again. I figured out how to set up this is what and in the case of what you are describing, this is a set of facts that is now widely believed or it is known that certain people are expressing this point of view, even though it is not true. Whatever it is, however complicated it is, you have to do it right away and set it and then discredit it and ridicule it and then have fun with it. So if i reverse engineer any particular given cartoon, it would be exhausting. It would be deconstructing it and it is a good thing im not a public intellectual that i work more intuitively or i would never get anything done. I just have to trust my instincts. And of course that is where editors come in and say, well, you are jowrong about this or i is misleading. I dont get that any more, not because of my standing but simply because i know how to do it now after all of these years. But, yeah, that is an interesting observation about one of the responsibilities of humor. And particularly in a realitychallenged environment like now. I have a character who does his job his job is to supply an alternative set of facts to clients who need a different reality than the one that scientists might have observed or independent might have observed. So you call up this company and he provides you with arguments to beat your wife into submission with. Your own set of facts, because hers are inconvenient. But it is never in a coherent way. It is more intuitive. And the artists that ive related to, and we were talking about robert altman, i got to work on a show. And it was entirely from his gut. And sometimes to his detriment. Sometimes it wasnt clear where the story was going. But i do think that not being as smart as everybody else or as some other people who actually think things, it is probably part of the job description. You have to be able to simplify it to reach a broad audience. Thank you. Next question. For mr. Trudeau. Speak up. You wrote 45 years and counting long novel. And ive wondered do you have in the back of your mind how the story ends and what the last strip would be . I dont. The only thing that occurred to me is when the moments come and i turn out the lights, it seems to me that it is the strip started on a random moment of two kids rooming together and introducing each other as freshman. I think it will end on something just like that. And i dont see any need to tie everything together. I have 74 characters in the strip. And that longtime readers would recognize and can differentiate. So i dont feel that there has to be some closure to all of those story lines. Ive just brought them together for all of those years and i think it will just end on a on no particular an event of no particular moment. Any further questions . Well, thank you all for coming. [ applause ] coming up at 4 00 eastern on cspan, a hearin