About

“For most of his working life, Mr. Newgarden has been using the visual rhetoric of gag culture to plumb the dark places in the human psyche. His cartoons are absurdist valentines to the losers who knock themselves out trying to make people laugh: the alcoholic clowns, the painfully lame comedians, the no-talent cartoonists and especially the hack humorists who ground out joke books and magazines in the 50’s and 60’s, the golden age of novelty-shop culture… Lowbrow humor and kitsch culture, and the fear, failure and emptiness they barely conceal, are his enduring obsessions. Mr. Newgarden’s stuff is existential slapstick, the point where Andy Kaufman meets Samuel Beckett. His jokes are meta-jokes about comedy culture that ask what hides behind all those frantic attempts to make us laugh.”
– Mark Dery, The New York Times

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