Does this offend you?


If it’s your job to get offended, if you get more donations by fomenting angst about anything that could possibly be offensive to your constituency, if you find a conspiracy staring back at your from your bowl of corn flakes, then it does.
And for those people who say it’s more than just a toilet joke, look what I have for you:


So let’s get this all straight for you folks out there:
There’s a good chance you’ll see a cresent moon in the following places:
The night sky and the door of an outhouse. And outhouses stink. And the joke is, who would go into an outhouse not knowing that it stinks.
It’s like me saying: Is it me, or does CAIR sometimes go out on a limb to make it seem like perfectly normal things are totally offensive to Islam?
You’d think the guy had written a sequel to the Satanic Verses or something…

9 comments

  1. Seems like a reasonable place for a crescent.
    I have never known why it was there, but they’ve always been there, as far as I can remember.

  2. There’s a Master’s thesis in here somewhere: “History of Crescent Moons as a Decorative Motif for Outhouse Ventilation”.
    If the motif is old enough — say, if it goes back to medieval Europe — it might plausibly have started as a crack at the Muslims.

  3. Wow! A wee bit sensitive. Is it not a bit much for others to try to read into an author’s/artist’s work more than is there w/o having some evidence of more explicit views of the author from writings, interviews or other works. The article was also accusing him of being politically incorrect by referring to a person out of work a bum in another strip. Good gosh! Thanks for the actual evidence that outhouses have crescents on them. I have no knowledge of that sort of thing and may have been tempted to consider CAIR’s complaint as having some possibility of being true!

  4. Hey, that sure is a nice outhouse. You think you’ll get indoor plumbing one of these days?
    Maybe you could paint it green.

  5. I admire Johnny Hart for not hiding his faithunder a bushel basket, but given some of the dust-ups he’s caused in the past with religiously themed strips, I’m not surprised at the controversy. Quite frankly, when I read the comics, I’m generally only half-awake, and it’s not the part of the paper where I put my analytical skills to their greatest use. I remember reading the strip in question, and thinking that it was either a dumb joke (it really doesn’t fit Hart’s sense of humor if it really is a simple outhouse joke), or that I didn’t get it. Ho-hum. No big deal.
    The fact is, as soon as I turned the page, the strip was gone from my mind, and would have remained so if the reactionists hadn’t put it in the spotlight. Some people just never learn that by complaining about something, you are only drawing more attention to it, so you should really pick your battles carefully.
    By the way, would anyone have been offended if this was an editorial cartoon? And how could offense be taken at this, while “Doonesbury” is at least as controversial as this almost daily.

  6. It was either a really dumb and pedestrian outhouse joke, or it was a subtle attack against Islam. Was Hart being a moron or was he cleverly mocking Islam?

  8. I love B.C., but to be fair I have to say that sometimes it is a wee bit, well, lame. Actually, I can’t think of one comic strip that isn’t at least occasionally lame, or one that doesn’t occasionally make even the most devoted fan scratch his head in confusion. Unless you are on the look-out for hidden messages buried in the back of the Metro section, I am pretty sure you would take a look at the strip in question and chalk the ambiguity therein up to Hart having a bad day, not to his creating a cleverly constructed slur against Islam.
    That said, did anyone read the whole W.P. article throughly? Doesn’t it strike anyone as mildly insane that we have a college professor and others debating the proper method of closing an outhouse door? Did anyone ask someone who is in the habit of using an outhouse? Did anyone call Martha Stuart? Surely, if anyone would be conversant with quaint, rustic plumbing, it would be she.

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