Revolutionary Stripper

In the immediate wake of Sept. 11, humor went out of style.

A writer for “The Onion” declared that “the age of irony is over.” Jon Stewart, host of “The Daily Show,” cried on the air.

David Rees felt the same sorrow, confusion, and anger. “In New York City after 9-11 you could literally smell death,” he recalls. “It was dreadful.” But he had an entirely different reaction from those other funnymen. He decided to make a comic strip.

Five years later, that strip, “Get Your War On,” (GYWO) has turned David Rees into one of America’s most forceful satirical voices. His success has brought him back to Harvard Square—a place where he got his start—where his work is on display as part of the Fogg Art Museum’s exhibit, “Dissent!”

Now, Rees is anticipating the end of the strip and looking to apply lessons he’s learned about satire to his future ventures, even if he has no idea what those ventures might be.



IN YOUR FACE

After graduating from Oberlin College in 1994, Rees moved to the Boston area and began to create and self-publish comics. He first sold his work in Million Year Picnic, a Harvard Square comic book shop.

For years, he was an obscure, local phenomenon. Then, as the saying goes, Sept. 11 changed everything.

Rees began producing “Get Your War On” (GYWO) on Oct. 9, 2001. It used a medium he’d tried before in more apolitical strips—namely, attaching bizarre and irreverent speech bubbles to public-domain clip art images.

The first strip targeted the official title of the American military operation in Afghanistan, with a clip-art businessman shouting a phrase that is now well-known to the strip’s fans: “Yes! Operation: Enduring Our Freedom To Bomb The Living Fuck Out Of You is in the house!!!”

Still produced with a direct simplicity, GYWO features roughly a dozen clip-art illustrations of nameless office workers.

But after five years of merciless lampooning and, recently, nationwide Democratic victories, Rees is anticipating the end of GYWO. He says he will end the strip when Bush leaves office in 2008.

“I figured I would just keep it up as long as he does,” he says.

NO CYNICISM HERE

Rees says the Bush Administration’s attempt to gloss over the national sense of dread in the month after Sept. 11 provided part of the impetus for writing GYWO.

“Really lofty language is supposed to suck the dread out of war,” Rees says. “You start talking about these lofty ideals and it’s just to obscure what’s actually going to happen on the ground.”

“I wanted to dig underneath the language and figure out what really was going on,” Rees says. “I was reacting against the rhetoric coming out of the White House and the whole pop culture reaction to it.”

Sometimes, as in a strip from Oct. 14, 2001, Rees only needs one panel to tear down even the most entrenched catchphrase:

“Hey buddy, how are you enduring your freedom?” one office worker asks of another.

However, Rees says that to call his strip cynical is to miss the point.

“I’m not saying there’s no such thing as ideals or anything worth fighting for,” Rees says. “But those ideals are just being expressed by words, and some people are being sincere with those words, and some people aren’t.”

Rees says that GYWO was not intended to inaugurate a movement or influence policy. “I don’t think I was trying to make a change,” he says. “It was definitely reactive.”

Hoping to attach a proactive element to the strip, Rees decided to donate proceeds from the GYWO book to the “Adopt-A-Minefield” campaign, which funds the removal of landmines around the world.

THE WAR AT HOME

Rees does not limit his accusations of insincerity to the political sphere. He says that pop culture’s criticism of the Bush Administration is often equally hypocritical.

He has harsh words for comedians who court an audience on both sides of a debate by saying, as he puts it, “we just offend everybody, we’re equal opportunity offenders.”

South Park, a show that frequently skewers anti-war Hollywood activists along with neo-conservative policy, is one such example, he says.

According to Rees, the creators of South Park act “as if there’s any equivalent between this massive international intervention in the Middle East that’s killed tens of thousands of people and some jackass in Hollywood who makes you roll your eyes.”

“At the end of the day… what’s your point?” Rees sighs. “Are these stakes not sufficiently high for you to come down on one side of the issue?”

He says that comedians in particular have opportunities to effectively “come down on one side.”

“I love it when somebody just stops joking and has a flash that’s just honest,” Rees says.

Rees cites a Sept. 25, 2006 episode of The Daily Show as one of those moments. After a montage of pundits reacting indignantly to an angry interview President Bill Clinton had given on Fox News, Stewart singled out a woman who said, “I’m really taken aback, that [Clinton] lost it.”

The camera cut to Stewart, who said, “Really? Who the fuck are you?!”

“When you can pull it off, that’s when pop culture is…inspirational and healthy and wonderful,” Rees says of Stewart’s outburst and its ilk.

Despite this strident, demanding stance, Rees does not seem preachy in conversation. He frequently brings up a struggle to avoid self-righteousness, and he is self-deprecating with regard to his own successes.

Rees estimates that “maybe ten percent” of GYWO strips achieve that flash of honesty he looks for.

“That leaves a lot of filler,” he says.

FUTURE UNCERTAIN

In early 2002, Rees published a GYWO strip that, like many others, featured two nameless office workers talking on the telephone—in this instance, about Bush’s infamous reading of “My Pet Goat” to Florida school-children during Sept. 11 and about reports that terrorists were targeting New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.

This strip exemplifies Rees’ philosophy of political comedy: be over-the-top, but never flinch from the fear we all feel. The dialogue goes like this:

Man 1: “These fucking goddamn terrorists! They want to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge? Why, so I can’t walk across it and look at the destroyed Manhattan skyline and contemplate the fucking mass grave their friends left for us?”

Man 2: “How much do you wanna bet that if terrorists blow up the Statue of Liberty, the French won’t even OFFER to replace it?”

Man 1: “Wait, hold up. Just how interesting could that children’s book have been? What would it have taken to get Bush to put the fucking book down immediately that morning? Maybe if someone fucking flew the World Trade Center into the Pentagon? Would that have been serious enough???”

Now that he sees the end of GYWO on the horizon, Rees has as much of a plan for the future as he did in mid-2001, which is to say he doesn’t have one.

“I think I would like to do more prose writing,” he says. “I’ve been writing sort of these short, sketch-comedy screenplays.”

“I’ve also been doing more stand-up comedy,” he says, tossing off another possibility. “I don’t know, man. It could be very interesting to see.”

—Staff writer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.