{"id":10792,"date":"2017-11-07T08:51:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T12:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=10792"},"modified":"2017-11-07T08:51:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T12:51:00","slug":"episode-243-martin-rowson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-243-martin-rowson","title":{"rendered":"Episode 243 – Martin Rowson"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Virtual Memories Show 243: Martin Rowson<\/a><\/p>\n

http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/virtualmemories\/Episode_243_-_Martin_Rowson.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

Subscribe: Spotify<\/a> | TuneIn<\/a> | RSS<\/a> | More<\/a><\/p>\n

“The one unforgivable crime in British public life is admitting you have no sense of humor.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

“It can always get worse,” says Martin Rowson<\/a>, who’s made a career out of highlighting the idiocy of politicians in his editorial cartoons. We talk about the purpose of satire, his preference for subversion over respectability, the benefits of considering himself a journalist rather than an artist, the advantages of being self-taught, the rationale for selling his original art to UKIP, his literary background and the adaptions he’s done (The Waste Land<\/a>, Tristram Shandy<\/a>, Gulliver’s Travels<\/a>), the ones he hasn’t done (Dorian Gray, Frankenstein<\/em>), and the one he’s working on now. Plus, we get into the change in his outlook when he began working in color (and when he turned 50), how to draw Trump, his disdain for modern fiction and why he killed off Martin Amis a half-dozen times in his old literary strip, and what it’s like “committing assassination without the blood”. Give it a listen!<\/a><\/p>\n

“I used to think my job as a satirist was corrective surgery, albeit with a cudgel rather than a scalpel, but it’s not about that at all. It’s not to make our subjects become better people by pointing out their idiocies. It’s to make us feel better about them. It’s to make us laugh, to empower us to have permission to laugh.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n