The Press: Politics Is Funny

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The pig in Pogo, Walt Kelly's pseudo-sophisticated comic strip, spoke a kind of Pig-Russian and bore an unmistakable resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev. He even talked like Khrushchev. "You forget prominent Russian proverb!" he confided to his companion, a bearded, cigar-smoking goat with a remarkable resemblance to Fidel Castro: "The shortage will be divided among the peasants." The goat broke out lunch—cigars and sugar ("One thing my country got like the dickens! Is sugar! y tabacos!")—and the two settled down to a dialectical argument in dialect.

Some Kelly clients were not amused.

Three Canadian newspapers—the Toronto, Ont., Globe and Mail, the Kingston, Ont., Whig-Standard and the Regina, Sask., Leader-Post—dropped the pig-goat sequence. (As a substitute the Globe and Mail reprised a Pogo swampland series from the 1940s.) In the U.S., the Toledo Blade temporarily killed Kelly. And in Tokyo, the English language Asahi Evening News, having run the sequence for 11 days, agreed to drop the rest of it after a protest from the Soviet embassy.

The international implications were considered so important that the final decision went all the way to the Asahi board of directors.

This was not Comic-Strip Artist Kelly's first trespass on the editorial writer's preserve—nor was it the first time that such excursions have cost him papers.

In 1954 he introduced a lupine character named Simple J. Malarkey, who looked so much like the late U.S. Senator from Wisconsin (whom Kelly called "one of the great alltime comedians") that the Orlando, Fla., Sentinel threw out Kelly's strip, and several other papers filed complaints. Again in 1958, when the furor over public school integration reached one of its peaks, Kelly set Pogo the possum to talking about "speakeasy" schoolrooms, "consegregated," "de-consegregated" and "non-un-de-consegregated" schools. One Southern paper, by judicious editing, purified the sequence for its readers, and another dropped it entirely.

The current censorship bothers Artist Kelly ho more than such treatment bothered him in the past. "There is a lot of fun to be found in politics," says he, "and I always do what I find to be funny at the time." Besides, any man with 612 newspapers on his string can afford to lose a couple now and then—especially since the defectors almost always return to the fold.