The guy still baffles me. Here we have him commenting on the queen and Mrs. Obama. It’s a fun strip, but it’s based on the idea that the queen herself was affronted by Mrs. O’s friendly hand on the shoulder. Whereas, in real life, the queen had no complaint and actually touched Mrs. O first; Buckingham Palace even issued a statement to let everyone know things were okay.
Yet the Oliphant cartoon is quite neat, not a commentary on reality but a fun sitcom spinoff from it.
UPDATE: In Comments, Matthew points me to a couple of other recent weirdies by the man, and I’ll throw in another here. Coincidentally, I just saw a post by the liberal blogger Hilzoy that gets at the Oliphant experience. Her topic was battered wives, so I’m hijacking her words to make a much more lighthearted point:
There are things that are comprehensible parts of the world, even if they’re rare, like having your car stolen; and then there are things that are unexpected in a completely different sense, like having your car turn into an elephant before your eyes: things that make you wonder whether you’re completely crazy.
Reading Oliphant, this experience is actually quite salutary. Frustrating as it is to see his brain twitch, you are left in a slightly different world than you inhabited before looking at the cartoon. Of course, the effect is overwhelmed when he does something borderline racist or anti-semitic, such as showing Israel doing the goosestep. (Yet the way he draws the shark/Star of David is brilliant.)
Have you read the next few after that one? I have no idea what a couple of them are supposed to mean. At least, the one with Kim Jong Il blowing up the evolutionary progression. He wants to destroy humanity, I guess? The one with the Afghan guy complaining about having to rape all his wives is understandable, but kind of in poor taste…
The Afghan cartoon — really fucking weird, and also stupid. The law (which is a disgrace, of course)legalizes marital rape; it does not require marital rape. Therefore, there is no basis for the joke. I hate when people do that: i.e., peg a joke to a nonexistent hook.
There isn’t even a punchline; it’s like the cartoon’s story got cut off at midpoint. And the little penguin or whatever delivers his comment in the first panel, not the last. I suppose that last isn’t a flaw, but it adds to the randomness.
The Korea cartoon — Possibly a bold statement against the use of nuclear weapons. My! Possibly also a chance to refer to North Koreans as “monkeys.”
GOP Headquarters (which you didn’t mention, I just found it) — Yeah, all right, the Republicans are in a mess right now. But instead of saying “Take me to your leader,” the alien says, “Who is your leader?” How could anyone get that expression wrong?
Matthew, I don’t know why I’m going to thank you for steering me to those cartoons, but I am. There’s something about late Oliphant that clears the mental sinuses.