Stephen Colbert plays a stridently obtuse conservative pundit on the Comedy Central nightly newscast The Colbert Report. Its opening is a fanfare of sound—a trumpet call, drums, and a guitar slide, as the camera circles around the toothy star on his red, white, and blue set—climaxing in a cawing screech just outside the decibels of acceptable listening. The animal making this noise is an eagle baring his claws and zooming toward the camera propelled by the power of his total fakeness, like a rabid creature in a B movie. I love him. Colbert's mascot is a small consolation for the total misery of national politics, but a hysterical one nonetheless.
For precisely this reason, I was thrilled about Davidson Galleries' current show, The Age of Satire: British Caricature Prints, 1790–1830. William Hogarth, the early 18th-century innovator of widely published satirical cartooning, is one of my heroes. I can spend hours reading—because it really is reading, and by no coincidence the novel was invented around this same time—his packed-to-the-gills, syphilitic, sequential portraits of greed, hypocrisy, and general dim-wittery. Both the fates of the characters and the staunchness of Hogarth's moralizing are entertaining. (Seattle Art Museum will have a special area for its Hogarths when the new building opens in May with more room for European art.)
But after Hogarth and before Punch began printing in 1841 was another golden age of English satirical caricaturing. This was before the clampdown of Victorianism, and so aside from the occasional serious-minded pro-revolution caricature, most everything at Davidson is ribald, squalid, and silly—but still plenty vicious. Most vicious of all has to be James Gillray's A Decent Story, in which a military man, an intellectual, and a clergy member sit around a table drinking port and having "decent" conversation with two puffed-out, gussied-up ladies. Their faces are nauseatingly garish, with painted cheeks, high arched brows, and empty white eyes. Another domestic skewering involving a raconteur is Isaac Robert Cruikshank's My Cousin Relating His Exploits, published in 1822. A whole knickknack-infested household is in a tizzy: A skinny, bug-eyed windbag of a soldier wearing his pants up near his nipples reenacts his bravery by raising his sword in the air over three unpleasant women, one piggish and with her wide eyes glazed over and the other two gawking like biddies, echoed by the hissing cat and toy dog at their feet. A monkey even snoops from behind a chair.
The etchings are hand-colored and haven't been exhibited much since they were published, so part of their bite is their brightness: the whorish papal red, the emerald and royal-blue coats of the dashing young troublemakers Tom and Jerry, who run around egging on cockfights and ring battles between dogs and monkeys (take the title Tom & Jerry Sporting Their Blunt on the Phenomenon Monkey Jacco Macacco at the Westminster Pit), and tipping over the watchman in his guard station. The political one-off cartoons can be difficult to decipher, but it hardly matters. E. Purcell's The Holy Alliance Unmasked includes four men around a table with mini-me's on their laps and tiny kings running amok under the table, plus monkeys, bears, dogs, and face masks floating all around, and political theories and accusations flying, although it is not clear from whose mouth each comment comes. Among Russia, France, Spain, and England, someone is a serious scoundrel. Apparently, political cartoon plus time equals farce.
Serial books followed the exploits of characters whose names alone merit remembrance. Dr. Syntax, for example, illustrated by Thomas Rowlandson, is the clumsy clergyman in search of a wife who rides on the back of a lady to keep from getting wet and learns such hard-won lessons as The Result of Purchasing a Blind Horse. I daresay our lives can only be improved by meeting Master Fang the Parish Beadle and Dusty Bob the Parish Dustman.
