Yesterday, the top news in the morning was Angelina Jolie’s breast surgery. I wrote about it on my Forbes column. My thoughts were inspired in part by a book I read several years ago, Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde. In the book, she explores the choice women have of breast prothesis. Written in the 1980s,  Lorde was one of the first feminists to write about how breast prothesis “seems like a cover-up in a society where women are solely judged on their looks.” (Wikipedia)

Above is one of my personal favorite cartoons about mothers. I posted a slide show of mother cartoons and a short essay about my mother on my Forbes column. I hope you go take a look. Here is another one of my favorites, drawn over a decade ago, but still relevant, sadly:

Today I did a piece on the horrid events in Cleveland, and the happy outcome. I couldn’t not write about it, but it was a strange subject to take on. Let me know what you think, it is here on my ForbesWoman column.  It seems to me this is a wake-up call for all of us. Above is the cartoon that goes with the article. I cheer Amanda Berry and her courage, all of the women and the young child, as well as Charles Ramsey who went against the normal  behavior of “not getting involved.”

Along with fifteen other cartoonists, I was fortunate to be invited to participate in the third annual International Cartoon Festival in Caen, France.  The Caen Memorial Museum, which hosts this event, is a very moving place and it was a wonderful gathering, with cartoonists from around the world.  In keeping with the emotional events that took place in the Normandy invasions, Stephane Grimaldi, the director of the museum, seeks to bring people, events and exhibits to Caen that promote peace and freedom of expression.  Below is a list of the participating cartoonists and a selection of some of the cartoons and photos from the event.

My thoughts are with Boston, the injured and the families who lost loved ones. I really have nothing else to say. Hopefully we can move on, and help our children adjust to new realities as we encounter them.

I was just in Paris on my way to a cartoon festival in Caen. I couldn’t help but notice that Paris has a fair number of homeless on the street. I know New York does as well–perhaps we have different ways of coping with the state of our homeless population. Every city deals with it differently. But however it is handled, one thing is clear: the span between the haves and the have-nots is still much too large. Globally.

The US Supreme court is currently debating some very important cases having to do with same sex marriage. It’s all over the news, as it should be. I support the right for gays and lesbians to legally marry, to have hospital rights, inheritance rights, joint tax rights, all of that.

If we increase the number of people being allowed to enter into matrimony, there are so many benefits. It makes a lot of people and children happy. I have been married for twenty-five years, and it has been a wonderful ride. And a funny one. Marriage is funny, admit it.

If gays and lesbians are allowed to get married across the country, then we would have twice the love, twice the levity.

And even more material for humorists.

For a slide show of my marriage cartoons, visit my Forbes column!

Also, my husband, Michael Maslin and I wrote a book on the subject: Cartoon Marriage: Adventures in Love and Matrimony With The New Yorker’s Cartooning Couple

Sheryl Sandberg is the CEO of Facebook, and she has been in the news a lot lately. Primarily because she wrote a book about business and women and why there are not more women at the top of companies (or countries).  “Lean In” is part memoir, part advice book, and I enjoyed it. She doesn’t discuss humor, but she does mention Nora Ephron, thankfully!  Read my full piece on my Forbes column

Today is International Women’s Day around the world. It is a day to celebrate and join together with others to help women across the globe. I wrote a piece for Forbes which I would love you to read. Let me know what you think.  It sort of went viral yesterday when I posted it!

I was happily surprised at all the blow-back about Seth McFarlane’s performance at the Oscars.  The New Yorker was critical, as were The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Salon.   Smaller sites that focus on women’s rights, like Jezebel and Feministing weighed in as well, as did  Ms. Magazine

But the days following all the coverage, I found myself a bit dejected: haven’t we been here before? When will misogyny not rank as high quality humor?  Granted, humor equality is not high on the list of things we need to fix for women in the world.  But we need to fix it, because I think it is symptomatic of the larger issues.

Humor in a society is reflective of what a culture values and doesn’t value, that’s how humor works. It takes what we know, the given in our society, and twists it–and that is what elicits the laugh. The unexpected makes us laugh. So when Mr. McFarlane sang a song about boobs, many of us did not laugh. It isn’t funny anymore. Not only is it humor we have heard from comedians since the dawn of time, we heard the same jokes in grade school.  If the song about breasts in film were not enough,  McFarlane went on to do jokes about battered women, bulimia, racial and religious profiling.

This type of humor is not only not top quality humor, it’s offensive. If McFarlane and others want to practice it,  they have the right. But as a society, we cannot condone sexist, racist and homophobic humor as anything but wrong.

We need to loudly maintain a new standard for what is funny.  We are beginning to do so, with the rise of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Even in this regard, we have been here before.  Whoopi Goldberg rose to fame decades ago as representative of a new standard of humor in the age of Andrew Dice Clay.  Cultural sexism rises and falls with each generation, but I think each time it is getting less and less.  For this reason, we–men and women– have to keep pushing out new forms of humor, and not let the old fashioned male standard of humor continue to be seen as what is “good.”

Or maybe we should just go back to the fourth grade.

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