Bill Leak, the provocative longtime editorial cartoonist for The Australian, died Thursday evening at the age of 61.
A tireless rebel against political correctness, Leak routinely poked fun at liberal sensibilities with his work in Australia’s largest-circulation newspaper. His critics’ outrage only energized him further.
Shortly after the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris, in which extremists launched a deadly attack on the satirical magazine for publishing a cartoon mocking the Prophet Mohammed, Leak was bold enough to publish a cartoon of his own showing Mohammed arguing with Jesus. Leak wrote at the time that by targeting a humor magazine, the extremists had deliberately chosen “a symbol of the freedom of speech that lies at the very foundation of Western civilization.”
Leak faced death threats because of that cartoon, threats so serious he had to move out of his house. But he never relented.
His work contained biting political and social commentary, often times touching upon sensitive issues in troubled communities. This cartoon, which caused an uproar when it was published last year, made an acid point about Australia’s Aboriginal population:
Another favorite of his was mocking the obliviousness of the global elites. The cartoon below depicting Indians trying to eat solar panels, published in response to the 2015 Paris climate talks, enraged the sensibilities of some European observers who called it “racist”:
It was far from the only Leak cartoon to cause a stir:
Leak’s cartoons generated so much controversy that last year, the Australian Human Rights Commission started an inquiry into whether it should bring racial discrimination charges against him. Luckily for Leak, and for free expression in Australia, nothing came of it.
Just days before his death, Leak gave a speech promoting his new book Trigger Warning. He lamented the state of contemporary humor, saying the role a cartoonist fundamentally transformed during his life:
“The job’s so much harder now…I can’t just breezily assume people are looking at my cartoons hoping to get a laugh. Ever since conceptual art supplanted transcendent art, all art has been reduced to the level of graffiti. And to people reared on postmodernism and cultural relativism who can’t tell the difference between Picasso and Banksy, I’m not a cartoonist drawing cartoons for a newspaper; I’m an artist exhibiting his work in a gallery that gets hundreds of thousands of visitors through the doors every day. And the work of a man like that has to be taken very seriously indeed. It has to be analysed. It has to be deconstructed. It has to be decoded by these people in a search for hidden meanings. And because art, like political activism, is a form of therapy, it’s supposed to reinforce and confirm their prejudices, not challenge them.”
Well, bugger that. Political correctness is a poison that attacks the sense of humour.
Amen, Mr. Leak. RIP.
