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Rhode Island's Funny Man
| Article
# : |
13139 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1987 |
1,853 Words |
| Author
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Louise MacDonald
Louise MacDonald is a writer living in Virginia, whose
ancestors on both sides shared early seventeenth-century
Thanksgivings in New England. Special thanks to the Plimouth
Plantation researchers for their contribution to this artic |
It seems to be a barren world, devoid of activity and of little apparent use to mankind....Let's call it 'New Fall River.'" So saying, the astronaut caricature plants an American flag on desolate, crater-scarred terrain.
Hours after this cartoon appeared in the Providence Journal, the newspaper switchboard lit up like the Fourth of July. The mail desk soon sagged under a deluge of scorching letters from outraged citizens of Fall River, Massachusetts. One reader barged into the managing editor's office, determined "to punch out the lights" of the culprit artist.
Throughout the ruckus, its unscathed perpetrator remained serenely in his seaside home twenty miles away, aware that the noisier the reaction, the more readers would anticipate next week's cartoon. Soon enough the anger would be smothered by hilarity.
Don Bousquet makes a living prodding people into laughing at themselves, helping them find humor in their own foibles. Frequently Bousquet zeroes in on denizens of Rhode Island, the state that he loves. He has a penchant for anthropomorphic cats, seagulls, and gargantuan lobsters, but he is most devastating when he takes aim at Rhode Island's "outback." He finds that Rhode Island towns are as different from one another as Liechtenstein is from China.
"Speech, accents, and sentence structure vary radically. Do you think a Newport dowager sounds anything like a hard-core backwoods man? Just let me hear a Rhode Islander speak, and I'll tell you where he's from," says Bousquet.
For example, the backwards-running sentences heard in Woonsocket delight him. A strong French Canadian element is responsible for a reverse tendency in word usage, such as "Throw me down the stairs my keys." In a Bousquet cartoon, a traffic sign glares "DRIVE SLOW YOUR CAR."
His lampooning targets
Woonsocket's population tends to take Bousquet's assaults in stride, but the natives of East Providence proved highly sensitive to the cartoon that depicted a disillusioned husband eyeing a bleak industrial landscape saying, "I've been thinking, Eleanor....Living here in East Providence isn't all it's cracked up to be." On the other hand, the people of another Rhode Island city unanimously approved of the cartoon of a lady in a hospital bed who cheerfully
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