And another thing
Thinking of becoming a cartoonist in today’s Britain? Think again
The cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz, 1913–66) fled to London not long after the Reichstag fire, with the Gestapo at his heels. Had he not possessed a Hungarian passport he would never have got away, for as the boy wonder of Berlin political cartooning in the 12 Uhr Blatt, he had gone for Hitler as far back as 1928, and was a marked man.
When Gerald Barry put Vicky on his crash-course in English humour, the subject, though enormous, was at least legal. I mean by this that you could learn about it, analyse and investigate it without breaking the law. When Vicky was doing his homework you could tell a joke about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman without having to look over your shoulder to see if a policeman was listening and might book you for a ‘hate crime’. The word ‘racist’ did not then inspire nervous fear in stand-up comics, happy-go-lucky schoolteachers or Christmas cracker-makers. You could still buy golliwogs in toy shops and find Little Black Sambo on the shelves of public libraries. The term Politically Correct had not yet been invented, let alone the mass of punitive legislation designed to enforce it.
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