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Ivan Brunetti's HAW!

By Leroy Douresseaux
September 12, 2005 - 17:08

HAW!

FANTAGRAPHICS BOOKS
CARTOONIST: Ivan Brunetti
ISBN: 1-56097-435-4; paperback original
Humor/Queer Studies
96 pp., B&W, $8.95 (USA)/$13.45 (CAN)

If those dirty jokes that people tell their co-workers at the office, especially around the water cooler or someplace during their work break were turned into New Yorker cartoons, the gag cartoons in Ivan Brunetti’s 2001 book, HAW! would be what they’d look like. Back in print, this collection reveals that these purple black, blackly humorous gag cartoons still manage to surpass most of the dirty jokes that get forwarded by email – even the (N-word) jokes. Any blue collar or dockworker joke teller who could top the gags in this book should be moonlighting as a stand-up comic.

For the prude, this volume is one less morally excusable cartoon after another. For the people who think that “South Park” is perfectly snarky, HAW! tears the roof off the mutha. My favorite gag cartoon contained herein would have to be the one in which Jesus starts to read “The Sermon on the Mount,” suddenly stops, and demands, “Who wrote this s***?”

By the way, Einstein told me the other day that Brunetti is truly genius at work. [NOTE: the reviewer is a sometime medium.]

Last Updated: January 17, 2025 - 08:20