10)
There's a certain breed of person, usually found in the comments section of news websites, who will attempt to shoe horn a reference to their particular bugbears regardless of the topic under discussion or the appropriateness of the comparison. Above we see a wonderful representation of this sort of tosser; safe and warm, vibrating with contentment, surrounded by the paraphernalia of a comfortable, middle class existence and accompanied by his beautiful wife (who is also vibrating). What cares he about the hundreds of lives lost and the millions in damage as a direct result of Hurricane Sandy? Just as long as he can day-dream out loud about, frankly, unlikely scenarios where natural disasters are harnessed to further the Europhobic cause. Paul Thomas hates this man, whose response to the boxing day tsunami was probably to wish that a similar event would wash Britain further into the Atlantic, and he wants you to hate him too.
9)
Poor Ed Miliband. The man can't eat a bacon sandwich without people pointing and laughing. Of course all this ribaldry masks the fact that Mr Miliband is, essentially, interviewing for the post of most powerful man in the land. You'd think it would therefore be constructive to look at the substance of what the man says, rather than his demeanour as he says it, but the media narrative seems forever stuck on weird and nerdy - to the detriment of us all. Mr Thomas apparently had enough of this and decided to create the most over the top anti-Ed cartoon so a line could be drawn under the whole thing and allow us, as a culture, to move on. He's foregone the usual depiction of a hapless dweeb and instead portrayed Red Ed as a sneering, overweight, drag artist. Topicality has been dispensed with and we're invited to laugh at the Opposition leader not for anything he's done or said he'll do or even seems likely to do, but what he might possibly do in an alternate universe where cats go woof, rain goes up and everything is different. And to top it off the chief piss taker is the normally avuncular Bruce Forsyth, which is kinda like resurrecting Mickey Rooney, specifically so he can tell someone you hate that they're a knob. I feel a trick has been missed by not including stink lines and an actual willy coming out of Mr Miliband's head, but then subtlety's not in my vocabulary. Which is why Thomas spent years being paid the big bucks and I'm sat here eating dry pasta and Oxo cubes.
A skewering of that old standby of the hard of thinking knuckle dragger: 'I can't be a racist. I love curry.' It's obviously not occurred to the vibrating fuckwit, who instinctively reduces the entire output of the Indian subcontinent to vindaloo, that visiting a Tandoori restaurant in Britain that is, presumably, staffed by British citizens does precisely fuck and all to further trade between the UK and India. The cartoonist also perfectly captured the dead eyed smile of customer service staff who are obliged to swallow their contempt and affect an approximation of laughter at your shitty "jokes". And the whole thing's pink, so very, very pink.
7)
This cartoon came as the nation was working itself into a tizzy about the hordes of Romanians that were meant to be invading the shores of Blighty come Jan 1st 2014. In the end the invasion amounted to one confused bloke, who seemed quite nice and already had a job in place. Here Thomas provides the only plausible explanation for the missing hordes that we were assured would be landing. They're all still in Calais, staring impotently over the channel, utterly oblivious to the fact that an EU migrant and an asylum seeker are two entirely different things and that they can legally enter the country any time they feel like it. Alternately Thomas either completely misunderstands or is happy misrepresenting the immigration debate. To which I say, poppycock.
6)
Any American reading this will remember Harry Windsor's visits to the States, an event in their history up there with the moon landings and the Gettysburg address, like it was yesterday. Of course they didn't really replace the Statue of Liberty with one of a member of a royal family that they had a whole war to get rid of - that's what's know as comical overstatement - but it's really not hard to imagine them doing something similar. After all, how could read those words by Emma Lazarus (Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore) and not think of Prince Henry of Wales? Extra points for having the torch hand pointing for no discernible reason and the numerous forty foot American flags, without which I'd have no fucking clue where this cartoon was set.
This rings so true. I have many fond memories of childhood visits to my grandparents. Me and my brothers and sisters would get up early to pore over the broadsheet financial pages, hunting for any positive news on the pensions market while we slurped down our coco pops. Then, pre-armed with evidence in black and white, we would rush over to the granny and granddad we now knew to be minted, in order to extort from them as much as possible. Because, as any fool knows, all relationships, even those with your nearest and dearest kin, boil down to series of financial interactions and anyone who says otherwise is a damn hippy who probably wants to marry a tree.
4)
I genuinely find this hilarious. Not for the joke, which is straight from The Barmy Boy's Bumper Book of Rib Ticklers, nor the fact that anyone who bothered to read Ms Mantel's comments would probably found them entirely reasonable, thus making the reaction entirely inappropriate. The cartoon's brilliance is that it conjures up the image of the head of state and her two immediate heirs queuing for three quarters of an hour in a Barnsley Waterstones for the sole purpose of delivering an absolute turd of a zinger and then awkwardly shuffling off after a couple of seconds of embarrassed silence. I love it.
3)
I had some difficulty locating an actual joke in this one. It's about Wimbledon and has something to do with the existence of foreigners,this much I know. But foreign nationals living in a city as cosmopolitan as London or their involvement in what is, after all, an international sporting event is so utterly mundane it really doesn't seem worth commenting on. Surely it's Andy Murray who's the oddity here, given British athlete's past inability to break through to the finals? The Polish do lend themselves to puns, but, as near as I can tell, Thomas has decided that he wont go there with a barge-them*. Is it that Romanians are intrinsically funny? Is it that there's a newspaper billboard propped up where there are no newspapers for sale? Regardless I've spent more time thinking about this one cartoon than I have last years Booker Prize Winner, which must surely indicate some sort of depth.
2)
Part of the reason that people have become so disillusioned with the political process is our leader's constant equivocating and simple refusal to call a spade a spade. Everything is so couched in spin and between the lines dog whistling that it's hard to tell what any of them think on a specific issue. Cue Thomas, who cuts through all the bullshit and tells it to us straight. If someone disagrees with your point of view, well, you straight up murder their bitch ass and parade their decapitated head in front of a crowd of gawking onlookers. That's what those ISIS chaps do, and say what you like about them, they get shit done.
1)
Who says satire's dead? Paul Thomas, that's who. Because sometimes things are so obviously good, that to question them or to draw attention to their flaws in any way is not just churlish, but actively harmful to the good of the nation, stepping over the mark from simple quibbling to actual Quisling. Why the hell should a political cartoonist attempt to speak truth to power, when those in power are so evidently the very bestest thing for the country? "Tory" rhymes with "Glory" and that's all you need to know. What does Labour rhyme with? "Gay, duh!" that's what. Kudos for looking past David Cameron's occasional resemblance to a pair of freshly paddled buttocks and instead depicting him as the square jawed, rakish go-getter that we all think of when we picture the PM. And for anyone who feels this portrait of Mr Cameron is unduly flattering and uncritical, you are invited to get a damn grip. It's not like he drew him walking on water.
Well. Except for that time that he did.
Honourable Mentions:
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| It's funny because he's disabled |
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| It's funny because Australia |
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| It's funny because domestic violence during the World Cup is totally a thing. |
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| It's funny because... the... the sea dried up? |
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Please note, if you feel I have been somehow disrespectful to Mr Thomas, a man who has known vastly more personal and financial success than I will ever know, but has also, at the end of the day, just lost his job, please be aware that he has his own website where you buy cards and prints, enquire about commissions or whatever. Alternately, if you feel I haven't been disrespectful enough, there's an absolutely epic thread on the Mailwatch forum about him that was responsible for my introduction to the man and his work and can be more than a little unkind at points.
Love and Fishes
Dave Denton
*I'm fully aware how awful that was. I apologise.
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