Trudeau, Garry

Garry Trudeau, in full Garretson Beekman Trudeau, (born July 21, 1948, New York, New York, U.S.), American satirist whose literate, sophisticated comic strip Doonesbury reflected social and political life in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Born into a wealthy family, Trudeau attended Yale University, receiving a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1970. At Yale his comic strip Bull Tales—the precursor to Doonesbury—appeared in the Yale Daily News and quickly developed a cult following. Influenced by Jules Feiffer, the liberal Village Voice cartoonist, and Walt Kelly, the creator of the comic strip Pogo, Trudeau utilized situational humour and complex characterization for comic effect; the deliberate, subtle pacing of the strip represented a departure from traditional daily cartoon style, which emphasized punch lines and simple jokes. Bull Tales was picked up by the Universal Press Syndicate in 1970 and began appearing in newspapers nationwide under the name Doonesbury. Trudeau was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1975, and the strip enjoyed wide readership and critical acclaim.

Doonesbury included a large cast of appealing and extensively developed central characters—such as the good-natured everyman Michael Doonesbury, the aging hippie Zonker Harris, the liberal talk-show host Mark Slackmeyer, the perpetually helmeted football star B.D., and the feminist attorney Joanie Caucus—who were rough composites of Trudeau and people he encountered during the 1960s and ’70s. A number of characters were loosely based on actual public figures; the Reverend Sloan, a liberal campus chaplain, was inspired by Yale theologian William Sloan Coffin, Jr., and the drug-addled outlaw journalist Duke was a caricature of the radical writer Hunter S. Thompson. Public officials, entertainers, and media figures were frequently lampooned in the strip, often to devastating effect. Trudeau satirized politicians from across the political spectrum, but he approached highly charged issues such as the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, gay rights, and abortion from a consistently liberal perspective.

Trudeau wrote and codirected A Doonesbury Special (1977), an animated short that won a jury prize at the Cannes film festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film. He took a sabbatical for almost two years in the early 1980s to work on a Broadway musical (1983) based on the strip. When Doonesbury returned, its characters had departed college and begun to age in real time. Trudeau teamed with director Robert Altman on the faux political documentary series Tanner ’88 (1988) and its sequel, Tanner on Tanner (2004). Trudeau temporarily suspended Doonesbury again in June 2013 to devote more time to Alpha House, a live-action political comedy series that he had developed for Internet retailer Amazon.com. Although the strip resumed later in the year, Trudeau announced in February 2014 that he would place the daily Doonesbury strip on indefinite hiatus to focus on Alpha House. After season two, however, the TV series was effectively canceled.

Trudeau published a number of Doonesbury collections, including Yuge!: 30 Years of Doonesbury on Trump (2016) and #SAD!: Doonesbury in the Time of Trump (2018), both of which focused on Donald Trump, whom Trudeau had long criticized.