Drawing conclusions

To begin, a story: I wake up at every morning at around 6:30 in order to get ready for my day. I’ve been waking up recently to KYW 1060, because it allows me to listen to the news while still in bed, which means it’s like I’m working — getting the news that I’m going to poke fun at later in the day — at the same time I’m still hugging my pillow.

This morning was weird; I was drifting in and out of sleep at around 6:45 and I heard somebody on the radio say something like, “And police commissioner Sylvester Johnson lashes out at a cartoon in the Daily News.” My ears perked up. “That’s my kinda story,” I thought, but when I listened I didn’t hear anything about it. By the time I was skimming the morning papers and starting my writing, I had forgotten all about the Johnson thing. The time I did think of it, I actually thought I had dreamt it. I thought I was the biggest tool ever, dreaming up fake news story that would be easy to comment on.

And, yet, the story is not a dream.

Yes, Police Commissioner Johnson (at left) is upset at a Signe Wilkinson cartoon that ran the other day in the DN, depicted a KKK travel agent telling people that Philadelphia has “great views of young black men killing each other.”

And Johnson has seemingly gotten angrier in public at this cartoon than he has at any of the 300+ murders committed in the city this year.

But then it gets weirder, when DN editor Michael Days says that “[e]ditorial cartoons, of course, aren’t meant to be funny.” Wha?

I have a solution: let’s everyone quit murdering people and have all the city’s editorial cartoonists — including PW’s own fantastic Jay Bevenour — make their editorial cartoons as funny as possible. How’s that for a compromise?

Police commish: Cartoon, murder rate ‘not a joke’ [DN]
Hoagie Dip [PW]