In Britain, where most foreigners find the humor as tepid as the beer, one of Fleet Street’s most successful wits today is a waspish foreigner known as Vicky. As six-days-a-week political cartoonist for the Laborite Daily Mirror (circ. 4,649,-696), world’s biggest daily, German-born Vicky (real name: Victor Weisz) has built the largest following of any British cartoonist since David Low at his wartime peak. While he has not as yet won Low’s fame, most Fleet Streeters agree that Vicky is Britain’s top cartoonist.
In his editorial comment on Britain’s attack on Suez, Socialist Vicky was, as usual, Fleet Street’s sharpest mocksman —because he saw the British as they do not like to see themselves. To Vicky, 42, Sir Anthony Eden is a toothy, decrepit aristocrat, his Conservative colleagues a band of feckless manikins. Vicky’s Eden in the last four months has ranged from a knobby-kneed Adam, who is persuaded to bite into the forbidden fruit by a seductive French Eve, to a desert-island castaway brooding over a phonograph full of ancient hits, e.g., The Last Time I Saw Paris, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered. Last week Vicky derided Tory Leader R. A. Butler, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan and Foreign Minister Selwyn Lloyd as Eton-collared brats whose destructive antics are interrupted by an Ike-faced Santa Claus loaded with oil and dollar aid.
Charles Addams Khrushchev. Vicky is also a longtime critic of the Eisenhower Administration, whose foreign policy he considers “dangerous and wrong.” But in the Suez crisis, he sided with the U.S.; since the satellite uprisings, Vicky has bitterly lampooned Russian policy. Says Vicky, who also cartoons for the anti-U.S. weekly New Statesman and Nation: “I am in the funny position of having been called anti-American and of now be ing called a new-found friend of America.”
Vicky’s ideas, unlike those of many cartoonists, are all his own. On the theory that “a cartoonist has to be passionately interested in politics,” he pays frequent visits to the House of Commons to stalk his prey, make sure that his characters look like their caricatures. In 1949, after meeting Harry Truman for the first time in Washington, Vicky blurted: “I congratulate you.” When Truman asked, “What for?” Vicky explained: “For looking more like my caricatures than I thought you did.” In Vicky’s gallery, Khrushchev looks like a Charles Addams rendering of a prizefighter; Lord Beaverbrook, empire-building publisher of the Mirror’s opposition Daily Express, is a big-mouthed dwarf in crusader’s armor; Churchill is a cigar-waving Dickensian comic.
Triumph on Turtleback. Vicky, a refugee from Naziism, landed in Britain 21 years ago. He spoke no English, faced an even more formidable obstacle for a car toonist: he was baffled by British humor. By reading and rereading Alice in Wonderland, he rode (as one colleague says) to “his conquest of Fleet Street on the back of the Mock Turtle.” In 1941, Alice-sized (5 ft. 3 in., 120 Ibs.) Vicky landed his first successful newspaper job with London’s News Chronicle. After twelve years he quit because an editor refused to run one of his cartoons. Says Vicky: “I have never pandered.”
While Vicky is at his funniest when he is lancing overstuffed politicians, some of his most memorable cartoons are as bit ter as his memories of Nazi persecution. Under a moving sketch of hollow-eyed Hungarian children and sorrowing old women, Vicky (whose parents were Hungarians) last month used as his punch line a quote from Soviet-controlled Radio Budapest: “Fascist and reactionary elements have been crushed.”
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