Washington’s Blockheads

The Weekly Standard ^ | February 10, 2014 | ANDREW FERGUSON

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Herblock: The Black & the White, a documentary about the editorial cartoonist Herbert Block, had its cable premiere on HBO last week, and we can expect repeated showings for many weeks to come, creating a low-buzz Herblockfest interspersed dizzily among re-airings of Girls.

Block died in 2001, at the age of 91. Why the programmers at HBO think their youngish, modish, post-literate viewers will be interested in his life and work is anyone’s guess. But there it is: more than an hour and a half of one newspaper cartoon after another, with voiceovers from one Washington swell after another, testifying to what the Washington Post, in its review, called Block’s “uncanny sense of moral clarity.”

The Post was Block’s professional home for 55 years, so its reviewers have to say stuff like that. It’s certainly true that the documentary itself possesses a kind of clarity, and it would be a shame if younger viewers kept away merely because the show is a boring treatment of a subject they don’t care about. The Black & the White is fit for a time capsule. It offers a pristine view of a phase of Washington culture that, we can hope, is slowly drawing to a close.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Andrew Ferguson never disappoints.

[Cicero]

Herblock was a pioneer—of the unfunny leftist cartoon. Now there is little else in the major media.

I remember when I used to leaf through the New Yorker for the cartoons. Now, you have to go through four or five issues to find even one that is funny.

Thank you (NOT) Herblock for leading the way.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

My father was in the Army during World War II with a guy who became a professional cartoonist. My father would submit ideas to him, and if he used them, they split the commission 50/50. He had a couple published in the New Yorker, among others, but he cherished the New Yorker cartoons the most.

My father was a talented sketch artist, but you needed an agent and had to work full time to make a living as a cartoonist. (His friend would redraw the cartoon because agents and publishers expect a consistent hand.) There was a vast market for cartoons in those days, literally hundreds of publications, from Look, to Saturday Evening Post, to children's magazines like Humpty Dumpty to Child Life. You get the picture.

My father was a raving left winger, but on his worst day, he was funnier than Herblock.

[Buckeye McFrog]

I thought the Meatheads were in Washington. And the Blockheads were at the State Capital. Or is it the
Blockheads at the County Seat and the Chowderheads
in Washington?

Eva Gabor in Green Acres, 1966

[Publius]

Good movie. I enjoyed it. I had written a paper in high school on Block’s work back in 1966, and it was edifying to see the context in which he worked. I knew little about him personally until I saw the movie.