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Rhode Island's Funny Man
| Article
# : |
13139 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
1,853 Words |
| Author
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Louise MacDonald
Louise MacDonald is a writer living in Virginia, whose
ancestors on both sides shared early seventeenth-century
Thanksgivings in New England. Special thanks to the Plimouth
Plantation researchers for their contribution to this artic |
It seems to be a barren world, devoid of activity and of little apparent use to mankind....Let's call it 'New Fall River.'" So saying, the astronaut caricature plants an American flag on desolate, crater-scarred terrain.
Hours after this cartoon appeared in the Providence Journal, the newspaper switchboard lit up like the Fourth of July. The mail desk soon sagged under a deluge of scorching letters from outraged citizens of Fall River, Massachusetts. One reader barged into the managing editor's office, determined "to punch out the lights" of the culprit artist.
Throughout the ruckus, its unscathed perpetrator remained serenely in his seaside home twenty miles away, aware that the noisier the reaction, the more readers would anticipate next week's cartoon. Soon enough the anger would be smothered by hilarity.
Don Bousquet makes a living prodding people into laughing at themselves, helping them find humor in their own foibles. Frequently Bousquet zeroes in on denizens of Rhode Island, the state that he loves. He has a penchant for anthropomorphic cats, seagulls, and gargantuan lobsters, but he is most devastating when he takes aim at Rhode Island's "outback." He finds that Rhode Island towns are as different from one another as Liechtenstein is from China.
"Speech, accents, and sentence structure vary radically. Do you think a Newport dowager sounds anything like a hard-core backwoods man? Just let me hear a Rhode Islander speak, and I'll tell you where he's from," says
... (1934 of 10561 Characters)
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