Eat the Rich and Tip Your Server

“There’s no reality without absurdity.” —Tomi Ungerer

Seeing men in tuxedos and women in evening gowns drop to the floor in a lavish ballroom before a dais showcasing the most reprehensible despot of the modern age was neither shocking nor unexpected—nor, to be honest, entirely unpleasant to watch. This, of course, was the scene at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, which I was side-watching live, having just sat down to draw a cartoon about what happens when the king’s botanists decide to cordon off a section a forest and encourage, through the heaping of more and more manure, the growth of a particularly privileged sequoia that has been outfitted with armor and encouraged to breach the canopy of trees surrounding it so it could finger its glistening metallic tip into the soft underbelly of Heaven without tempting the corporeal rage of lightening, as if.

I had just finished squinting back the sort of brain bile one typically experiences when expected to normalize an event or circumstance otherwise deserving of ridicule and outrage—this one being the sight of Oz Pearlman, the conscripted fool for the evening’s nauseating frivolity, having abandoned his freshly delivered dinner salad to eagerly sashay over to where Donald and Melania Trump were seated and to bowed down in between them and, with all the wide-eyed and open-mouthed enthusiasm of a preschool teacher holding a re-igniting birthday candle in front of a pair of imbeciles who had just tried to blow it out, perform a magic trick just for them—when there suddenly came the muffled hacking of distant gunfire two floors above the hobnobbery, followed by the toppling of penguins and high heeled stalks of glittering meringue this way and that, followed by the despot, himself, being hustled out along with all the capitulating weenies and every species of scum-sucking remora he always surrounded himself with.

The extravaganza was being streamed by C-SPAN, meaning there were no hosts emceeing the event with all the performative vexation of B-movie extras, just a static shot from the back of the room and the inarticulate burblings of chums chumming and glasses and silverware ceaselessly kissing off each other, the sound like the continuous formation of a trillion metallic butterflies flurrying everywhere all at once—that is, until the pop pop pop of bullets and the surprisingly dull pandemonium following the arrival of secret service agents, some leaping across tables and others appearing onstage and aiming their high-powered rifles directly into the audience. Again, nonplussed by what I was seeing, I had to admit that I found myself a little shocked, but only a little, by how similarly unstartled the crowd in the ballroom seemed given the circumstance. Then again, I had to suppose we’ve all been deconditioned against panic when it comes to the unrelenting sound of the apocalypse clearing its throat several times a day, whether the sound emanated from, yes, the muffled hacking of distant gunfire, or it was the sound of kneecaps and elbows hitting the floor as another ICE agent tackles another terrified immigrant in another courthouse hallway, or it was the sound of Taylor Swift singing ME! in another Zumba class or TikTok how-to-self-harm-without-being-detected cutting video (yes, that is a metaphor, but just barely), or it was the sound of silence offered in response to every incontrovertible proof that our democracy is most definitely being dismantled unmortared brick by unmortared brick.

Of course, this being the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the audience members were mostly press people—well, mainstream press people, meaning they were reporters of corporately sponsored McNuggets of Truth™ rather than actual truthful truths—so they were less likely than normal people to reach for their valet tickets and head home following what was sure to be called a third assassination attempt on the President, the temptation to claim bravery from the heroism giveaway bin offered by the scenario being just too great to pass up. Thusly, I spent the next 90 minutes drawing and occasionally glancing up to watch the peacockery of vainglorious journalists, newscasters, and columnist as they milled about like seniors at a canceled prom, the grandeur of the night having been downgraded to, well, exactly what it was: a ridiculous piece of statecraft theater presented for the demeaning purpose of perpetuating the terrible lie that we are not a failed floptocracy maintained at the highest levels of government and big business by well compensated apologists and ingratiating enablers of power-brokered opulence, some masquerading as a legitimate press corps and others masquerading as the targets of their probing investigative curiosities, neither brave enough to actually admit that rich people are just poor people with money, knowing that if such information ever got out it would collapse the hierarchy and open a Pandora’s Box of social equality we’d never survive with our Dior Talk Phone Pouch clutches and Bvlgari Serpenti Tubogas watches intact.

Verily, at some point during those final 90 minutes before the costume ball was finally disbanded, this landlocked Titanic regrettably refusing to offer us all the grim satisfaction that might’ve come with it sinking, its light flickering out and its splendor disappearing into a vast and frigid sea for a very long time, I realized exactly what the narrative arc of the whole evening in downtown DC reminded me of, which was a book by Tomi Ungerer called The Party. Know it?

***

I’ve always felt that using words to expound upon the genius of Tomi Ungerer is like relying on a math equation to elucidate upon the poetry of a sunset. It’s demeaning. Indeed, while one might be able to list the most outstanding features of any one of his drawings, the sumptuousness and humor and shear musicality of Ungerer’s wit, satire and remarkable draftsmanship is best experienced in blatant demonstration, not description, the same way that a pie is only delicious when consumed, making the recitation of its ingredients label superfluous and, ultimately, pointless. That said, naming the deleterious social constructs and craven attitudes that would have the most imperious among us characterize artistic free expression, particularly the sort most critical of imperiousness, as being antithetical to good manners and civic propriety might help explain why the very phenomenon of Ungerer’s success in a world largely inhospitable to truth and beauty is worthy of not just celebration but emulation, as well.

When Tomi Ungerer published The Party in 1966, which was the same year that Hunter S. Thompson published Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga and Susan Sontag published Against Interpretation and Other Essays and Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde was creeping like a tarantula over our most precious and expensive china and The Beatles’ Revolver was being held, muzzle first, against our collective chest and commanding us to hand over our low expectations of what popular music was capable of demonstrating when left to the enchanted stewardship of four English wizards, the whole of the Western world was undergoing a seismic cultural shift largely inspired by a massive youth population born during the late 1940s. These were young adults who, when they were children and being raised by a generation that, due to a kind of follow-the-leader negligence and a nearly catastrophic devotion to rich and powerful people, had come close to ending all life on the planet, were encouraged to not only have dreams for a better future but also to expect them to come true. This was a generation that specifically didn’t want what their parents had had, namely a society prone to self-destruction because it was too polite to say FUCK YOU! to those who needed to hear it most and Tomi, as one of the many revered spokespeople for this generation, was always more than willing to say FUCK YOU! to anybody who needed to hear it – which explains his infamous 1966 publication and the complaints by the proprietous chaperones of so-called good taste at the time that his adult-themed books were immature and the work of somebody who needed to grow up.

What did this really mean? And what does this continue to mean?

Dr. Seuss, otherwise known as the Henry Ford of mass-market moralism and easily the most famous tolerance guru ever to emerge wet and yowling from a zizzer-yuzz-flunnel, once said, “Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.” In consideration of such indirect yet pointed praise for the most starry-eyed and inquisitive among us, is it any wonder that Ungerer began his career in 1957 as a writer and illustrator who became instantly famous for talking directly and, given his mindboggling prolificacy, incessantly to children? Of course, these were children who instinctively recognized the extraordinary power and purpose of the artist’s wild imagination, not because it provided a juvenile respite from a real world that required —demanded, even!—a much more serious and grownup form of interaction, but rather because they correctly saw the whole of our collective human experience as an enormously freewheeling exercise in pretending and sought fellowship with the most creative and life-affirming iterations available to them. And why not? Why would any of us want to settle for the bleak and demeaning imaginations of Richard Nixon, Bishop Sheen and The Warren Report when, during Ungerer’s reign as the Pablo Picasso of picture books, we had access to The Mellops Go Flying, The Three Robbers, Otto and Moon Man? Indeed, this has always been the wisdom of children, this preference for joy and wonder over defeatism, and, in the case of acquiescing to defeatism over joy and wonder, it has always been the pointless curse of adults; or, I should say, some adults, thankfully.

So how does this curse of defeatism even work, particularly when an active embrace of joy and wonder exists as a viable alternative to cynicism?

Well, if it’s true that any conclusion about the world comes to us at the moment when we get tired of thinking, and I think it does, the question we need to ask ourselves is this: what makes us tired? Well, pretense makes us tired. Confusion and forced adherence to bullshit framed as an absolute truth makes us tired. Challenging the validity of untested demands on our behavior while remaining obedient to regimented and unrelenting laws and customs rendered in contempt of our natural instinct to be autonomous makes us very tired. Compulsory disenfranchisement from phony class prefabs and any number of contrived social rituals invented to make all but the most privileged among us unmoored by wanting and crippled by doubts about our own self-worth will paralyze us with exhaustion!

Of course, given the fact that these confinements do not occur naturally and have most definitely been curated and maintained by human beings, maybe the better question would be: who makes us tired? Who confounds us with behavior that we cannot or do not wish to emulate? Who insists that the only way to enjoy peace of mind is to celebrate America as a flashing and magnificent orgy of surrender and compromise? Who insists that we cleave to a brutally unfair hierarchical system that relegates the majority of our population to the crowded lower decks of the income pyramid for the sake of perpetuating capricious pomp and flatulent circumstance? The answer, of course, is those who wish to control our fate by asserting their own. The answer, of course, is rich people; rich people and their fucking apologists and enablers.

Thusly, The Party unravels its condemnation of New York elites—although its ridicule is by no means confined to high society and must include anyone who willfully misconstrues the upper echelons of the aristocracy as being uniquely important or in any way respectable and beyond reproach, as was the case with the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, at least as a spectacle—like a meticulous and titillating striptease that doesn’t stop with the skin. It is a book that has the effect of entering the reader’s bloodstream like a slow-release psychotropic drug, one that gradually morphs the egomaniacal characters into ridiculous party-going ghouls and vulgar buffoons, the escalating distortions parodying a high that, rather than warping one’s perception of the world actually brings it into a tighter focus, perhaps even a hyper one. Like all Ungerer’s work, we are shown what is typically rendered invisible by the naked eye alone and shown the naked souls of monsters that the dominant culture typically insists we revere as our esteemed heroes and leaders. In that way, it is the opposite of a guided hallucination into absurdity and more an empowering awakening that shakes off the delirium of the groupthink anesthetic that’s kept us ignorant of the mercilessly classist society in which we live and shows us the bizarre and outlandish insanity that is the actual and wholly unfortunate truth.

And, of course, the truth, when released like a sticky web from Ungerer’s pen, will always have the effect of ensnaring and terrifying us with a crude sensuality that is impossible to look away from. That said, The Party has the unique ability, like all great satire, to disrupt your confidence and to explode your comprehension of life, itself, so that when you gather the shrapnel from your blown mind and endeavor to reassemble your understanding of things—like what makes the so-called beautiful people beautiful and why you may be blessed to be wretched by comparison—you’ll be forced to reconsider the soundness of your brain’s former architecture and to make whatever corrections are necessary to minimize the potential of future detonations.

(Pause to listen for the lighting of the fuse on the piece of art I ended up making, with apologies for just how grotesque and dystopian it may appear at first glance, though I feel it’s my duty to remind you, as if this essay hasn’t done so ad nauseam already, that there are realities that are much more grotesque and dystopian than anything an artist might be capable of depicting—it’s just that those realities are presented to us as being beautiful and enviable and, at least from this side of the velvet ropes, smell a whole lot like success.)