Sorry, didn't mean to imply you called anyone a "right wing nut job," I was just adopting the term from that hilarious "JibJab" internet film last year, arguably the single bright spot in an otherwise miserable slugfest of an election.
Oh, yeah, I remember that film now... that was amusing. :-)
I guess my issue with political "humor" is that by definition (at least these days) no matter which way you lean, you're taking a side roughly half the country won't agree with. And humor that divides is, for me, a contradiction in terms.
Well, true... but sometimes politically-oriented comics can make or express an argument in ways that other media might not be able to convey... or if (sadly enough) other media don't bother to cover at all. Early 20th century political cartoonists, IIRC, were fairly influential in their time...
Plus, once we know a cartoonist's views there's really no reason to keep reading...we get the point. By now the only reason to read Doonesbury is to see exactly HOW he will skewer the right. Ho-hum. This kind of thing was probably "radical" and "dangerous" back when he started (in Nixon days?), but by now its a tired cliche. Just like Saturday Night Live...you can only be "the rebel" for so long...eventually just by hanging around long enough you become an "institution." And in comedy, that's a death sentence.
Well, I still think Doonesbury has life left to it (and it isn't all about politics---the fact the characters have actual lives besides commenting on the latest political hijinks puts it halfway between just "about politics" and the usual newspaper comic strips. Plus, Trudeau does occasionally criticize the left/his strip's leftist characters...). (The strip was started around 1970, during the Nixon years)
Granted, I'm also looking at all this from the perspective of someone who's been reading comic strips since I was five, longer than comic books even (I'm 29 now)... though my enjoyment of Superman (thanks to, well, watching his various cartoons on TV as a kid, along with the Reeve films) has been around about as long.
To make a formal list (pulled from my bookmarks) of what comic strips I usually read: Baldo, The Boondocks, Crankshaft (thinking of dropping), Dilbert, Doonesbury, Dykes to Watch Out For, For Better or For Worse, FoxTrot, Funky Winkerbean, Get Fuzzy, La Cucaracha, Luann, Monty,Mother Goose and Grimm, Mutts, Sally Forth, Pearls Before Swine, This Modern World.
As for "Saturday Night Live," the word "mercy killing" would sum up my feelings toward giving it the axe about now (haven't liked it since "Wayne's World"). ;-)
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