Master of the Gag

So many John Callahan cartoons make me laugh out loud. This morning I’ve been leafing through our five paperbacks of his work. I’ll randomly cite a few, to give the uninitiated among you a taste of his brilliant tastelessness. There are so, so many more where these came from.

A male patient is bending over an examination table, his butt exposed. The male doctor says, “My technique for rectal examination is somewhat different in that I’m gay and have no arms.”

Nursing home residents shuffle their walkers past a sign on the wall that says,“Thank You for Not Dying.”

An Old West posse on horseback pauses in the desert to gaze down at an overturned wheelchair. The caption reads: “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot.”

A quadriplegic aerobics instructor tells his class—all of them, like him, lying prone in wheelchairs—“Okay, let’s get those eyeballs moving!”

You get the idea. Callahan, who died on July 24 at age 59 of complications from his various physical ailments, had been a quadriplegic himself since a drunk driving accident when he was 21. (He wasn’t driving, but he, also, was drunk.) He kept drinking even after the accident, but finally stopped when he mangled his teeth trying to open a bottle of hooch with his mouth and collapsed in tears at the pathetic spectacle. With therapy, he got to the point where he could draw rudimentary cartoons by guiding his right hand across the page with his left. His mind—brimming with anger, grim pathos and pitch-black humor—supplied the concepts and captions.

According to his obituary in the New York Times, Callahan’s syndicated work appeared in more than 200 newspapers around the world at the peak of his success about a decade ago. The obit added, probably unnecessarily, “Many of those newspapers got used to receiving letters of objection.”

One cartoon that was particularly controversial focused not on people with disabilities but on one of the most sacred icons of American history. Titled “Martin Luther King at 13,” it showed an embarrassed youth standing next to his bed, which was stained by a huge puddle. He’s explaining to his upset mother, “I had a dream.”

In an interview for The New York Times Magazine in 1992, Callahan said, “My only compass for whether I’ve gone too far is the reaction I get from people in wheelchairs, or with hooks for hands. Like me, they are fed up with people who presume to speak for the disabled. All the pity and the patronizing. That’s what is truly detestable.”

I grew up wearing a hook for a hand, so maybe I was predisposed to like Callahan’s work. But I was more struck by this line from the Times’ obit: “Mr Callahan often defended his work with a shrug, saying simply that he thought it was funny.”

Same here. It’s true that I’ve felt patronized and even pitied at times in my life, even though by Callahan’s standards being short one hand scarcely constitutes a disability. And of course I’m happy that Callahan was able to Find a Reason to Go On, and to make something of his life, and all that crap. But the bottom line is that I’ll always appreciate him simply because he made me laugh out loud.

He wasn’t always belligerently in your face, either. One of my all-time favorite Callahans, in fact—it brings a big smile to my face whenever I think of it—is downright sweet. It’s atypically two-paneled, and the first panel shows a guy with his dog. The dog is standing on its hind legs, with its front legs against the man’s trousers. “Get down!” the annoyed dog owner shouts.

In the next panel, the dog is deliriously jamming on an electric guitar.