Losing the Freedom to Laugh in the Age of Woke: Cartoonist Leunig Reflects on 55-Year Career

“Humour is something that has largely disappeared.”
It’s a short statement, and relevant as ever to veteran cartoonist Michael Leunig, who after 55 years, penned his very last cartoon for a major newspaper.
Over the years, his charmingly naive cartooning style won the hearts—and occasional disdain—of millions of Australians. His commentary is sometimes outlandish, often gentle.
Leunig never went to art school, flexing his creative style into one that would be the most recognisable in Australia.
Five-and-a-half decades is a very long time.
When Leunig started, John Gorton (1968—71) was the Australian prime minister, and an average home in Sydney cost just 20 percent of what it does today.
At home in country Victoria, Leunig listens to tinkling wind chimes as he reflects on why his departure—albeit forced—from the News Corporation-owned publication, The Australian, was not a bad thing.
“I think deadlines for 55 years get into your bones in a way that’s not healthy and it probably takes a while to detox,” he told The Epoch Times.
When Leunig’s editor delivered the news and a profound apology that it was time for him to leave, the famous illustrator said he was exhilarated.
“And I was. I felt this surge of this, ‘Its a turning point, this could be good,’” he said.
“I’m sleeping better already. I mean the world itself isn’t looking pretty at the moment, but that’s another story.”
“I was always interested because the ‘60s were such a creative time, there was a great interest in the idea of freedom, of new ideas, it was a great time, the music was really fabulous,” Leunig said.
“I started drawing for little student newspapers or what we called the underground press, which were little stapled newsletter sort of things.”
Leunig had been called up to join the Vietnam War, but was spared after it was discovered he was completely deaf in one ear.
He recalls how his friends and countless other young men were whisked away, which stirred emotions across communities. At the same time, music and art seemed to flourish, along with the start of small newspapers.
“Off-set printing came along at that time, it was a printing method that made it possible for amateur people to make little publications,” he said.
“We didn’t have mobile phones back then, we had to talk to each other at the pub or something. Humour was an important part of the atmosphere, intelligent humour, fighting heavy censorship, we had a lot of victories.”
But the counter-culture movement of the 1960s youth would probably be mortified by today’s world of social justice, Leunig says.
“I think it is widespread, we live in more anxious times certainly, and dreadful times in some respects,” he said.
“People are frightened and nervous. I mean it would appear to be so, particularly in the media, people are cautious. Then there’s the whole business we might loosely call the ‘woke consciousness’ which is almost kind of like a new pyrrhonism … It’s very, very quick to judge or denounce and to hurt people or to cancel them.
“[It] sounds like something from a different era in history—not quite the Spanish Inquisition—but it’s a little bit along those lines.”
Leunig has a thing or two to say about modern cancel culture.
“Tonnes of hate mail, mostly in earlier times, pre-internet. I had so much that it was driving me nuts, I’d put them in a pile.”
Of all the hate mail amassed in Leunig’s career, it was an innocent looking manila folder that held the most frightening message.
The envelope had been addressed to fellow cartoonist, Les Tanner, but it was Leunig who had unsealed the envelope.
Peeking inside, he saw some odd contents—a battery, wires, an icy pole stick, a rubber band. He couldn’t work out what it was.
Of course, it was not common knowledge at the time that such a style of letter bomb was possible, and that the technique had been crafted far away in South Africa amid a backdrop of massive social upheaval.
But the letter itself was not from South Africa, if the sender’s details were to be believed. It had been signed off from a “Pommy bastard.”
Leunig and Tanner made the wise decision not to open the folder, instead enlisting security, who enlisted police, who enlisted the army.
“The army guy had a look at it and he said, ‘It might not have killed you, but it might have blown your hands and your face off,’” he said.
“Of course, it wasn’t publicised because they didn’t report those things for obvious reasons.
“That was quite a staggering experience.”
Leunig believed the sender had likely been offended not by a political cartoon, but by a particular playful comment on his colleague’s cartoon about the English and cricket.
“It was a serious thing, that was more a freak thing of some unfortunate nutter sort of person,” he said.
“The army guy said the ability to build these letter bombs had come in from South Africa where there had been a lot of upheaval at the time.
“So that was real hate mail.”
Rowan Atkinson, the man perhaps best known for his roles in Mr. Bean, Black Adder, and Johnny English, has been straightforward in his criticism of the sanitising of modern comedy.
Atkinson maintains that comedians should be able to make fun of anything, and questions the broader dangers to society of sanctioning what people can say.
“The clear problem with the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such,” Atkinson said in a speech that would go on to become viral online.
“Criticism is easily construed as insult by certain parties, ridicule easily construed as insult, sarcasm—unfavourable comparison merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy—can be interpreted as insult.
“And because so many things can be interpreted as insult it is hardly surprising that so many things have been…”
It’s a wave of caution bordering on paranoia that Atkinson deems “the new intolerance”.
Fellow veteran funny man Jerry Seinfeld is another who has condemned the safe approach to comedy.
In numerous interviews, Seinfeld says it is the extreme left, and “PC crap”, that had led to people being overly anxious about offending anyone.
“It used to be you would go home at the end of the day, most people would go, ‘Oh Cheers is on, MASH is on, oh Mary Tyler Moore is on. All in the Family is on,’” said Seinfeld.
“You just expected there’d be some funny stuff we can watch on TV tonight. Well guess what? Where is it?” he added.
“There seems to be some hurtfulness going on and people withdrawing into their own comforts and their own lives,” Leunig says.
“You can understand it but it’s not entirely healthy in some ways.”
All the while, he says, news stories are stoking the coals of anxiety, current news trends weighing more like heavy tomes on the shoulders of readers.
A maze of football, celebrities, fear, panic, and house prices pervades the atmosphere.
He says what the media needs more than anything right now is a psychoanalytical perspective.
“I think the mainstream, some of it has gone right down market, it’s dumbing down,” Leunig said.
“There’s a kind of incompetence there, if this was the military this would be disastrous.”
Society itself, is battling, says Leunig, possibly falling downhill to “some sort of cataclysm” that will get worse before it gets better.
“There used to be this saying in Australia—‘Wake up Australia,’” Leunig said.
“You’re not marching with the regiment, you’re meant to be an outsider, not an embittered outsider, not a cranky outsider, just not one of the mob and that suited me, I had big problems with the way the establishment was,” he said.
“I love it, I am naturally humoured, I enjoy the humour and joking. Being a working class kind of boy, humour is very strong in the meat works.”
Ultimately, Leunig’s passion for cartooning, he says, comes from wanting to see the world healed.
“Most children love to draw. In some ways mine was very simple style and almost childlike, almost innocent in some regards and also very naughty at times which was the way things were back then,” he said.
“We live in a wordy culture. I love poetry and literature, but you can get too wordy in your own head and lose touch with other aspects of life.”
Cartoons are a way to get around the defences of the mind. It’s also common now for cartoonists to use digital means, but Leunig prefers the method where you get ink on your hands in order to produce something organic, raw, and primal.
And not only does he plan to return to those origins in his next venture—a self-published book of cartoons and verses—he plans to go right back to simpler times.
Times when the family matriarchs took little clippings out of magazines and stuck them to the wall, whether they be rhyming couplets or folk poetry.
“So, it could be a nice book,” said Leunig.