A Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant

What kind of man flies through the air

with the greatest of ease,

spinning and turning dangerously,

and says he does it all to clear his head,

so he can return to his drawing board

and meet a deadline five times a week?

Patrick Oliphant,

Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist

of the Denver Post.

Is Pat Oliphant really a threat

to the American political system?

Some seem to think so.

His irreverent cartoons poke fun at the establishment

and poke fun about the credibility of US leaders.

Political satirist, Art Buchwald says of Oliphant,

"If I were in the White House, I'd lock him up

and throw away the key."

He is probably the most widely published

political cartoonist in the country,

and maybe in the entire world.

His formula for insult is largely unrivaled.

He's been called "the most influential

editorial cartoonist of the day"

by the New York Times.

Oliphant has this unique ability

to go into soul of the person he's working on,

and literally draw out the essence from them.

Oliphant has been called "the most imitated

political cartoonist in the United States,"

and one critic has said of him,

"If Pat Oliphant couldn't draw, he'd be an assassin."

The truth is you haven't really made it in Washington

until Pat Oliphant has made fun you.

Oliphant likes to say

"A cartoonist should be seen and not heard".

He is a man of few words,

is one picture and lots of politicians.

To me his work,

it's kind of a through line for the insanity of America.

Did you see your work affect public opinion?

That's a good question, isn't it?

Why did you have to give me that one?

With this work you go from day-to-day,

whatever the world's bringing at you,

and you put it down as a linear depiction

of what... what's going on. And you hope

you're noting history at the same time.

Did I influence public opinion? I'd... I'd like to think so.

I really don't collect that sort of thing.

I don't really know.

Down the road when people look at that work.

The drawing is all a personal observation.

That's why I liked this country.

It was... it was marvelous.

People were so accepting of some stranger who came in

and started drawing about their country.

And they were so forbearing.

Of course, I got my share of the letters,

"You son of a bitch,

why don't you go back where came from?"

You get used to that, too.

Ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome political cartoonist

and association executive, Pat Oliphant.

I'm from Australia,

uh, therefore I come by this, um... accent honestly.

It is not a speech affliction.

He lived out in the country.

His father moved him out in the country,

so there were no playmates around.

And so, he lived a lot in his head.

And he started drawing

when he was maybe about three years old.

He grew up with a love of drawing, in part,

because his father was a draftsman

who did work for the Australian government,

and he saw his father drawing

and wanted to try his own hand at it.

And quickly, it became a passion for him.

His father painted the side of the house and so did he.

He had this old house up in the hills,

and I did one of my first, big pieces on his wall.

Strange thing,

he didn't get pissed.

He just left it alone, painted it over.

His family was kind of a famous family in Australia

at that time, because his uncle, uh, was Sir Mark Oliphant,

who was known for his scientific contributions

to the development of the atom bomb.

And part of the background

to the story of Oppenheimer.

So, people knew Sir Mark,

his reputation was known throughout Australia.

And I think part of what motivated my father

to become great in his own right

was he got tired of always being asked

if he was related to Sir Mark.

And he wanted to be his own guy.

His first job, at 18, was as a copy boy,

earning three pounds a week

with the Murdoch-owned Adelaide News.

I got into it as most people do, by osmosis and accident.

I started out in a newspaper with the intention of being

a journalist, I believe, but, uh, drawing won out.

He and a friend, they were making

some pitiful amount of money. Uh, a few dollars a week,

and they decided "To heck with this,"

and "Let's move across town to the other newspaper."

My mom and dad met at the Adelaide Advertiser,

where they were both working in the late 1950s.

They got married.

My older sister, Laura, was born in January of 1959,

and then I came along at the very last day of 1960.

And then I became a press artist which means you draw maps

and things like that, retouch photos,

- and things like that. - Whatever was needed

- at the time. Mm-hmm. - Whatever was needed.

And cartooning along with that,

and then I became a cartoonist when the cartoonist

they had then left to join the opposition.

So, that suited me fine and that was in 1955.

Did you have to audition for the job

- or did they know you were? - Well, they had seen me

- drawing around the place. - Right.

So, that's one of those things

of being in the right place at the right time, I guess.

It paid a pound more, but you had to work nights.

There's always something.

He never liked it,

but only realized quite how much he hated it

when in 1959, he went on a world study tour.

When he got back, small-town Adelaide

seemed to have shrunk even further.

This being a family newspaper,

you painted the testicles off bulls

and things like this and just cleaned everything up.

They would send him off to record some fancy party,

and there would be this important person

and that important person, and in the middle

would be this short, stubby, fat, little lady or something.

They would make him cut her out,

put those other two pieces together.

Australia's a place in the world

where nothing happens. So, you're reduced

to drawing cartoons about the weather.

My newspaper, being a very positive crusader

for all sorts of things,

always came out very strongly for the weather.

He got tired of these potentates

telling him what to do and how to do it,

and they wouldn't let him say things he wanted to say.

This penguin washed up on the shore

and somebody brought him into the office

and they named the penguin "Punk."

Anyway, Patrick decided to put Punk in his drawings.

So that I could get my own ideas

into my own cartoons, I invented this guy

and it became very popular of its own accord,

his own accord.

He took on a life of his own

and has been that way ever since.

Everybody likes penguins as far as I know.

Punk was really a voice of free expression

in the context of what he would later invent

as the ultimate form of self-expression

through the entire cartoon.

Then he said he wanted to leave Australia,

because everybody's gone to the beach.

Nobody really cares

about what's going on in the political world.

America called to him because that's where

the art was happening. It was the center

of political foment in the world,

it was the center of progress in the world,

and it was the center of his profession,

which was cartooning.

My father, he had a very clear idea,

very early on, who he was and what he wanted.

He doesn't get there without my mom in his life.

This woman that he falls in love with

turns out to be an immigrant from Amsterdam

with the same wanderlust for the world that he had.

And a complete willingness, at kind of a moment's notice,

to uproot their new family

to move to a completely new country,

and gamble on a whole new career,

because they believed they could make it happen.

American cartooning had, by and large,

been looked down upon in other parts of the world.

It had been... It had seemed that the art had run down

and it just wasn't doing its job anymore.

So, I... I felt that, perhaps,

I could inject something new into it

by applying all this, sort of, thing I was doing in Australia.

And so, he started looking around,

and he found through a friend that the cartoonist

at the Denver Post, Paul Conrad,

had left and he went to the LA Times.

The owner of the paper said,

"Well, what's an Australian gonna know