Nothing makes them madder than being the butt of a joke.

It also drives the comfortable around the bend. In the preface, Trudeau cites Finley Dunne’s prescription for journalism to “ Comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” There is comfort in humor, a shared feeling of getting it, of seeing other people get it. If you doubt the power of humor, consider the tyrant Slobodan Milosevic whose downfall was precipitated by OTPOR and their brilliant tactics using humor to put the regime on the defensive. Of course, we have to organize, we have to vote, we have to keep informed, but if we forget humor, we lose. We have not yet lost our democracy and one of the strongest weapons we have to safeguard our rights and our freedoms is humor.

Authoritarianism is a real threat and humor is a real and powerful challenge to authoritarianism. But then, did we ever imagine the day when evangelicals would defend having sex with minor girls as biblical?ĭoonesbury and Garry Trudeau give us that moment of levity and shared consciousness of what is good and decent we need in these trying times. Of course, if this were fiction, we would not believe it. There are several comics taking the real text of Donald Trump’s tweets and speeches with his inane syntax and ignorance made hilariously manifest–or it would be hilarious if he were president in some comic dimension, not in this dimension all of us inhabit and are all endangered by his ignorance and belligerence. The first section has comics from the campaign, the other sections are during the presidency. It is organized into four parts: The Gathering Shitstorm, American Carnage, Team of Deplorables, and Stormy Weather. #Sadis a short retrospective of Doonesbury comics during the Trump era.

#SAD! by G.B. Trudeau