Christopher Lydon Interviews…

     David Rees’s public career began as just the opposite of trying to be funny.  It was a late-at-night flight from his idle amateur cartooning.  “I kinda made a decision,” he said.  “Well, I’ll try to make a comic about how I actually feel for once.”  The ruins of the World Trade Center were barely cool.  The war on Afghanistan had been announced.  David Rees was struck by the want of public skepticism about a war on terror, the silence about the human cost on the ground.  And so “Get Your War On” was born, with an office jock observing into the phone: “Yes!  Operation: Enduring Our Freedom To Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of You is in the house!!!”

     The language of the early strip still shocks with undeniable images and vernacular simplicity–what oft was thought but ne’er expressed out loud.  Except by the clip-art man at his desk: “You know what I love?  I love how we’re dropping food aid packages into a country that’s one big fucking minefield!  That’s good!” And his pal on the phone: “Well, it turns the relief effort into a fun game for the Afghan people.  A game called “See if you have any fucking arms left to eat the food we dropped after you step on a landmine trying to retrieve it.”

     Commentary too raw for the Letterman Show, for The New Yorker or in fact for any publication you’d enjoy reading, made and still makes slashing dark sense on the Internet–a remarkably efficient medium for sharing strong sensibilities without compromise.

     Questions here: when did profane humor come to seem the only approach to truth?  How did John Stewart’s Daily Show become the definitive news on TV?  Should Al Franken be running for president?  Granting, as David Rees does, that The Onion is the funniest site on the Web, what else makes you laugh?

     David Rees’s reading, on his own favorites toolbar, is as deadpan and dour as he is, starting with the New York Times, the BBC, Reuters, Doctors Without Borders and Human Rights Watch.  As usual, it takes one deadly serious student of language to be as funny as Rees is.  He is 31 years old, a faculty kid from North Carolina who majored in philosophy at Oberlin in Ohio.  He says it disappoints people that he’s not a freak or an ideologue–just another NPR-head, an ordinary dude trying to talk back to the news.  He is ready to move on from “Get Your War On” as soon as George W. Bush fires Donald Rumsfeld.  The satisfaction of the strip, he said, is a sort of “self-medication via comics,” starting with a physical wave of relief on the night two years ago when he wrote “those first stupid little cartoons.”  The further reward was giving more than $40,000 from “Get Your War On” book royalties to the Adopt-a-Minefield program in Western Afghanistan.

     “Who knows what’s funny?” as W. C. Fields used to say.  Listen up to David Rees, and add a comment, please, on Internet humor.