An American to Laugh At

The Tyee.ca

P.S. Mueller isn't one of humour's household names. His cartoons are sometimes a bit obtuse. On his web site www.psmueller.com, he has a special category for drawings deemed "incomprehensible."

But we at The Tyee get a laugh out of even the murkier ones, and so are pleased to be able to share them with you on a regular basis from now on. Besides, the guy is an American who dares to dream of becoming Canadian. Introducing him around is the least we could do.

Like Jules Feiffer before him, Mueller offers a devastating lampoon of North American social self-deception. Feiffer's cartoon monologues in the New York Times brilliantly mocked our handstands of rationalization, particularly in the 1970s and '80s. Mueller's single panels -- which have appeared in publications from the Utne Reader and the New Yorker to Field and Stream and Business in Vancouver, and will now run regularly in The Tyee -- are more wildly ironic, less overtly political. But his takes on the absurdities of North American culture are no less acerbic.

'Slap 'em around'

"If I even start to feel like I'm being preachy, I throw it out," Mueller says, on the phone from his home in Madison, Wisconsin. "I'll leave it to other people to be preachy. But that doesn't mean I'm not trying to demonstrate the disconnect between what people believe and what is true."

He says, "I like to criticize culture by playing with it," by revealing its "surreal tissue of lies and fragile alliances."

And he admits he'll also do almost anything to get a laugh. "It's not my job to bring people down. Occasionally I'll slap em around a bit."

Mueller's certainly not shy about slapping around his fellow Americans.

"We're fat, stupid, semi-literate and spoiled," he says. "Not only do we not know what our government is about in the world at large, we don't want to know. And we don't care…. We're just an amorphous blob of NASCAR and football games and big trucks."

The problem, Mueller believes, is that the country has been raised by television. "A sense of morality, a sense of altruism has not been imparted to the next generation."

Mueller laments that "the great experiments of the 1960s are gradually being snuffed out one by one," citing attacks on civil rights, environmental protection and labour. "Those things that tend to uplift people are rapidly disappearing. The country is being bitterly divided by George Bush and all that he has wrought -- as bitterly divided as we were during the days of Vietnam."

Ridicule underrated

While Mueller, who moonlights as news anchor Doyle Redland on the syndicated satirical Onion Radio News, isn't inclined to preach in his cartoons, he does firmly believe that "ridicule is a wonderful thing."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a favourite target. Mueller says the left doesn't use ridicule effectively. "I don't think the Democrats realize how they've been marginalized by the rather articulate ridicule that's been directed at them from the right. The left's response is to get all intellectual about it. These are people who have to think about the joke a bit before they decide whether or not it's appropriate to laugh."

Like many Americans of late, Mueller frequently looks longingly northward, and often visits. "Canada, for me as a Commie pinko American, has always been an example of at least an honest attempt to make democracy work…. I live vicariously through Canada. It's not outside the realm of possibility that at sometime in my life I will reside in Canada," he says.

Canadians no doubt would be better off if he did. Until then, here at The Tyee, Pete Mueller will talk less, draw more, and, we trust, make you laugh. Because whatever Donald Rumsfeld may believe, laughter is the best defence.

Charles Campbell is a contributing editor to The Tyee.