Yeah, don’t forget - that self-grandulating parade for a draft dodger is this weekend still!
Not a cartoon, but somehow appropriate. I wonder what would happen during Mango Mussolini’s birthday extravaganza if someone did the same thing.
in the current political environment, the tanks would not stop, and the crowd would cheer.
“are you not entertained”?
An oldie but a goodie:
Description from the placard at the Oscar Wilde House, Dublin:
[This] image was published in Harper’s Bazar [sic] during Oscar Wilde’s tour of America. Oscar had a love-hate relationship with the press in the US and Canada. This image is making fun of his clothes and the fact that he was making money from the tour.
Oscar is dressed in his ‘aesthetic uniform’ of long hair, velvet suit and knee breeches. The knee breeches caused outrage on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, Oscar joked that his legs ‘had upset a nation’. His mother, Jane Wilde, wrote to Oscar from London to tell him: ‘The newspapers are very angry with your trousers, especially Vanity Fair.’
The cartoon refers to Oscar’s visit to a mine in Leadville, Colorado, on April 13, 1882, where he lectured the miners on Renaissance art. Oscar had repeatedly mentioned the Italian goldsmith and sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571), during his lecture. The miners wanted to know why Oscar had not brought Cellini with him. When he told his audience that Cellini had been dead for some time, someone asked: ‘Who shot him?’
Afterwards the miners and Wilde went to a saloon, where they drank a lot of whiskey. They were impressed by Oscar’s capacity for whiskey consumption, and he was impressed by a sign in the bar, over the piano, which read … PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST, HE IS DOING HIS BEST.
I’d also note that sunflowers were an often-mocked symbol of the Aesthetic Movement.
Great story for a great comic!
I wonder if that sign over the piano was a common one.
Wilde – or rather, the saloon keeper – could very well have been the original (or at least an early) source of the phrase. Wilde certainly brought it wide recognition. WP says:
In Britain, the joke about the piano player does not derive from this film but from the alleged remark of Oscar Wilde on his 1882 American tour, while in the wild west: “Don’t shoot the pianist, he is doing his best.” This is also the source of the book and film title. The line evidently gained some currency in popular European culture thereafter. For example, the French translation—“Ne tirez pas sur le pianiste, il fait ce qu’il peut”—appears written prominently in the wall décor of a nightclub in the 1933 Julien Duvivier detective film A Man’s Neck.
Love the “tech genius” needing help to send a tweet.
Josh Johnson also covered their bromance and breakup in this routine:
