Is 'Doonesbury' doomed?

As the comic strip marks its 30th year, its creator, Garry Trudeau, is fighting to be fresh in a growing pack of satirists.

By JANET K. KEELER

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 26, 2000

[Photo: AP 1996] Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury has been skewering everything from politics to computers, journalism to feminism for 30 years.

Abbie Hoffman, '60s radical rabble-rouser, once said, "Never trust anyone over 30."

Does that apply to cartoon strips too?

Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau's masterful poke at the political and social fabric of America, turns the big three-oh today. Thirty years old? Doonesbury? That may be inconceivable to many baby boomers who got their jollies at Nixon's expense during the strip's glory days in the 1970s.

And like its loyal baby boomer readers, Doonesbury is softening a tad as it steps aside to let the younger dogs eat.

Three decades ago today, Mike Doonesbury met his college roommate, B.D., the original helmet head, in the comic's first strip. That seemingly inauspicious beginning started Trudeau and his gang of merry pranksters on a long, strange trip skewering everything from politics to computers, journalism to feminism.

Controversy and Trudeau have been pals since the beginning. In 1976, the bicentennial year, he introduced gay character Andy Lippincott and dozens of papers dropped the strip. When Andy died of AIDS in 1990, the San Francisco Chronicle ran the news on its obituary page. In 1987, as the AIDS crisis rocked the country and the Reagan administration did everything it could to ignore it, Trudeau published the phone number of the White House as the place to get "rock-solid information on safe sex." In response, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater ordered operators to give callers the number of Trudeau's employer.

In the '90s, Doonesbury has lost some of its ability to rankle. Even the official Web site doesn't list any controversial strips beyond 1991. A core readership keeps Doonesbury in about 1,400 newspapers, but it's difficult to believe Trudeau is picking up many new fans from the MTV-bred generations. (Remember, the music channel was launched in 1981.) Scandal and shame ain't nothing new to them. Funny? There's Something About Mary and Austin Powers are funny. Doonesbury seems more like civics class.

The majority of last month's strips, for example, focused on Duke's run for the presidency and Zonker's full-throttle glee at the thought of God returning to the White House in the form of vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman, who is Jewish. Duke, the Hunter S. Thompson-inspired character, hasn't evolved since he was first introduced in the '70s. His comments about the many women he has slept with and his former life as a porn star are boring. He has become predictable and that gives readers more reason to find their political satire elsewhere. Even Trudeau's jabs at Firestone fall flat because we've come to expect our multinational corporations to let us down. Union Carbide chemical leaks, Exxon oil spills, Tylenol tampering all came before.

But even now, the St. Petersburg Times receives letters from readers asking, demanding, pleading with editors to kick Doonesbury out of the funnies and onto the editorial pages. It is, after all, a political cartoon, they say, and the comics page is no place for the words "oral" or "sex", especially when they are together. The most recent plea came from Harold Davis of Sun City Center, who wrote, ". . . It is so biased against George W. Bush that it isn't funny at all. With TV and movies constantly presenting the left-wing Hollywood opinion, I would hope our newspaper could give us a more moderate, balanced presentation."

Balanced presentation is not in Trudeau's repertoire. Just point of view.

On the flip side of the comic's detractors are the Doonesbury loyalists who also write letters to the editors regularly. They don't believe Trudeau is really on vacation when classic strips are published in the Times. Instead, they claim that "conservative" editors run old strips when they don't agree with Trudeau's lampoon du jour.

Trudeau, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975, finds targets everywhere. Among the few people safe from his bite are his wife, TV broadcaster Jane Pauley, and her female competitors. He has said taking on the likes of Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters would make it difficult for Pauley to maintain collegial relationships with them.

Initially, Trudeau's voice was original. But anymore, he's just one of a zillion guys making a living off the silliness of society. Letterman, Leno, Maher, Stewart, Rock, O'Brien, Saturday Night Live and Mad TV satirize the social zeitgeist to big, young, hip audiences. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine reported that many 20-somethings are getting their news (!) from the late-night talk shows. If that's where they are finding out about what's happening now, Doonesbury is probably too erudite for them. Trudeau has always counted on the intelligence of strangers to make his point.

Doonesbury the comic loses some cachet in a cartoon world. Reality check: A professional wrestler is elected governor of Minnesota; the president of the United States is disgraced in a sex scandal involving an intern and a cigar; an actor who played Moses becomes the president of the National Rifle Association and waves a rifle in the air during a press conference. The evening news is its own cartoon panel.

Like rich and famous rocker Bruce Springsteen singing about the hard times, there is something bothersome about rich and famous Garry Trudeau writing social commentary for the masses. He isn't one of us anymore.

One of his many anthologies, 1998's The Bundled Doonesbury, proves that. For $22.95, you get hundreds of cartoons in hard copy and thousands more on a CD-ROM. The CD-ROM works only on Windows, the brainchild of Bill Gates, one of Trudeau's most popular recent targets. Mac users are snubbed, and the irony wasn't lost on some buyers who left remarks on Amazon.com.

"I agree with the complaint that it doesn't run on Mac. It does seem quite out of character for G.B.'s anti-Microsoft (and somewhat pro-Mac) writings," complains a Doonesbury fan from Ithaca, N.Y.

It reeks of sell-out and it makes us yearn for the early days of Doonesbury, when Mike was worried about zits and an anti-war protest was just around the corner. Sometimes, we hate to say, Dilbert seems more relevant.

CLICKS

For a Doonesbury fix, including a cartoon archive and cast bios, go to http://www.doonesbury.com. For some of creator Garry Trudeau's most controversial strips and some nasty letters to his editors, check out http://www.doonesbury.com/controversial/.

If you want to check in on Duke's run for the White house, log on to http://www.duke2000.com. It's not pretty, but some of it is pretty funny.

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