Drawing laughs

Spot the odd one out: S.J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Garry Trudeau. It's always going to take a rush and a push for a cartoonist to be elevated to the status of "humorist", as Garry Trudeau, the US creator of the Doonesbury strip acknowledges.

"It's a struggle - cartooning is widely viewed as low art," he says. What distinguishes Trudeau from his humorist compatriots above, though, is his ability through his simple drawings and not so simple words to effect change - real change.

On a purely domestic level, during the past decade Trudeau was horrified to read about an ordinance in Florida requiring domestic workers (or "servants") to register with the police, as he was when he heard about a Californian "anti-sleeping" edict that was brought into law simply to harass the homeless.

Knowing he had a captive political audience in the US, Trudeau mercilessly lampooned and parodied the idiocy of these moves through the good offices of Doonesbury and within weeks both of these nasty little laws were outlawed by the respective state legislatures.

If that's not good enough, consider how he has consistently managed to annoy, provoke and, in some cases, ridicule out of office certain moronic members of the American political establishment. His detractors, rather unwisely, are quick to go on the record about what they think of his cartoon strip. "This Doonesbury - Good God! He speaks for a bunch of Brie-tasting, Chardonnay-sipping elitists," said ex-President George Bush while his son, and aspiring politico, Jeb, weighed in with "Garry Trudeau is the slime of the earth."

Even Frank Sinatra had a swipe before his death, after a Doonesbury strip had comically criticised awarding the singer the Medal Of Freedom - "he's as funny as a tumour," said Sinatra. Henry Kissinger believed that "the only thing worse than being in it would be not to be in it". All of which prompted the New York Times to write "Doonesbury may be the first strip with lefty sympathies to lead the comic's political charges."

Since the strip started in 1970, the regular cast of Mike, Mark, Zonker, Joanie and B.D. have provided an acutely funny commentary on American life and times. From Watergate to Reagan to Iran-Contra to Bush/Quayle to Monicagate, Trudeau via his gang has been happily chipping way at the hypocrisy, pomposity and sometimes just plain daft aspects of US political life. And he travels well too: Doonesbury now appears in over 700 newspapers around the world and collections of his work in book form have sold close to eight million copies worldwide.

Now 51, Trudeau was born in New York and first thought of cartooning when he was at Yale University studying graphic design. "The plan was to become a designer back then, not a cartoonist because there's little in the way of academic offerings in the field," he says. "Cartoonists are self-taught and the way I got into it was producing a daily strip and meeting a daily deadline in a college newspaper - it was a low-stakes, four-year apprenticeship. There was an early version of the strip, called Bulltales, which had been spotted in my college newspaper by my future editor, Jim Andrews. He and his partner, John McMeel, were starting a new syndicate and I was their very first feature."

Inspired by the great Jules Feiffer, Doonesbury at first was a very static strip - the idea being that the reader should be attracted to the ideas expressed by the characters as opposed to the artwork - now, though, while hardly scaling the heights of technical achievement, it's a bit more refined.

"Cartooning, of course, is a hybrid of writing and drawing," says Trudeau, "so they're both important, but I've always felt that more than any other cartoonist I made the comics page safe for bad drawing. Good writing can support poor draughtsmanship, in Dilbert, Life in Hell and Cathy. There are a few examples of the reverse of that argument - but I can't think of any."

Some 30 years down the line (outside a 20-month sabbatical he took in 1983/84), the strip is still produced in the same way. Trudeau writes the strip alone, and then does tight pencil drawings which are either shipped or faxed to his assistant, Don Carlton, who traces over the drawings in ink - a purely technical addition.

The lead-in time for the strip is about 10 days - he ships a week's worth of daily strips every Friday evening and the first of those appears a week from the following Monday. For Sunday publications, the lead-in time is about five weeks; hence the strips are not as news-driven as the daily work.

For something that is so American-centric, is he surprised by how well the strip is received in so many countries around the world? "I'm glad that people think my humour is `universal' - I'm not so sure, myself," he says. "I often wonder how people in Ireland, say, could possibly relate to some of the more esoteric riffs on American society and politics, but then I'm reminded that not all cultures are as provincial as ours.

"In the meantime, I'm happy to be described as a political cartoonist, although strictly speaking, that title applies only irregularly. Most of the time I'm not writing about politics at all. A lot of it is just stone silliness." Nevertheless, a lot of the newspapers which take the strip publish it on their editorial pages, not their comic/funnies page.

The only subject matter that is out of bounds for him is his wife, the noted broadcast journalist Jane Pauley. "I never, ever make fun of my wife and a corollary of that is that I generally stay away from broadcasters perceived as her direct competitors - Diane Sawyer, Barbara Walters, etc, on the grounds that it would make it harder for her to maintain a professional collegiality she greatly values," he says.

Recoiling in horror at the thought of producing Doonesbury on a computer - "the feel of graphite on 100 per cent rag paper is too sensuous to forswear for the sake of modernity," he says. The strip has won him a small mountain of awards, the most notable being the Pulitzer Prize he won in 1975 (the first cartoonist to do so). He has helped the characters jump off the page at times by producing films of the strip for NBC TV - and he has written off-Broadway satirical revues and in 1988 wrote and co-produced an acclaimed TV movie, Tanner '88, about the 1988 US presidential elections.

"The strip is the baseline for my career but it has created those other interesting opportunities for me in TV and theatre. I've also been given the chance to write satiric prose pieces, first as an occasional columnist for the New York Times, and now as a contributing essayist for Time magazine. And just recently I've been creating Doonesbury merchandise for Starbucks Coffee Shops to raise money for literacy projects. So, yeh, Doonesbury has been good to me." What about the whole "low art" perception of cartooning in contrast to the respect afforded humorous writers such as S.J. Perelman? "Well, it's a perception that doesn't really annoy me. Cartooning comes by its vulgarity quite honestly, and it requires a broad, popular audience to survive. It's a rare handful of artists who've managed to cross the line into fine art - most notably Saul Steinberg, who has just passed away and whose obits were written by, gasp, art historians.

"Years ago, when it seemed that most syndicated cartoonists lived in the New York area, there was a gang feeling but that's no longer the case. There are roughly 160 people in the US who do what I do for a living and we're pretty far-flung so there isn't much socialising. The main opportunity we have to get together and compare notes comes at the National Cartoonists Society annual gathering."

Another 30 years of Doonesbury? "Yeh, I'm a lifer. I'll do it for as long as I have the strength - and the readership."

Garry Trudeau is in Ireland this weekend for the Murphy's Cat Laughs Comedy Festival. Alongside the Guardian's Steve Bell, the Irish Times's Martyn Turner, Ralph Steadman (and others), he will be exhibiting his work in venues around the town until Monday - admission free.