Funny is dangerous

‘I’m off now,’ says Michael Heath, signing off from his selection of Desert Island Discs on Radio 4, ‘to go and do a gag about God knows what. I haven’t the foggiest idea.’ You’d think at 80 he might want to stop, or have to give up because he’d somehow lost his touch. But not the cartoon editor of this magazine, and chief creator of wicked skits on the idiocies and affectations of contemporary life. What’s it like working as a cartoonist after the attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo? asked Kirsty Young. ‘It adds a certain frisson to your drawing,’ Michael replies. ‘But I never wanted to be a political cartoonist… I wanted to be funny.’

‘People take offence,’ he says. ‘Funny is now dangerous. But I’m not scared. Because they don’t get it.’ He’s much more frightened of ‘boring everyone witless’. Not that there’s ever been much danger of that. He’s been making money from his cartoons since he was at art college and hating every minute of it. Instead of wasting his time, he sent in some drawings to Melody Maker, then a jazz magazine, and earned his first two guineas. Since then he’s worked as an animator for the J. Arthur Rank organisation (24 drawings for each second of film), and virtually every paper and political magazine on Fleet Street. Most of his record choices were jazz (Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell), which made me realise that his drawings are very like his musical enthusiasms. Clean lines, strong rhythms, every detail spot-on, an instant take never to be replicated. He says of the Monk track, ‘I loved it so much I thought I would draw like that.’

His father was an illustrator for children’s magazines, mostly cowboys and Indians, and his mother, too, was an artist.