In memory of the political cartoonist who stood against capitalism, exploitation, groupthink and bullshit In Gulliver's Travels , a gentleman from the 'grand academy of Lagado' is employed unavailingly to extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Bruce Petty (1929 – 2023) had more success, as Swift himself did, by extracting from the cruelties and madness of human society, the sunbeams of irony, metaphor and laughter. Amid all the Petty cartoons in the era depicting the Vietnam War, conscription, hippies, hashish, feminism, Johnson and Nixon, the Chinese Cultural Revolution and all manner of other upheavals, including those in the Liberal and Labor parties, the one I remember most clearly had CSIRO scientists in laboratory coats sternly working on the prototype of a motorbike made from merino wool.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2023/may/don-watson/bruce-petty-s-joke-machine

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