For years now, Jim Carrey, known for his cartoon-like facial expressions and raucous and pointed comedy, has been sharing his own satirical art on Twitter. Carrey has drawn United States president Donald Trump as ‘Trumpty Dumpty’ wanting a wall, the Wicked Witch of the West, a vampiric baby-eater, a Star Wars villain, and a swastika branded fireball crashing into Earth. Carrey’s drawings are often coloured with felt-tipped pens or digitally, always rendered with messy, rough, thick, black lines.
Recently, the comedian posted a crude drawing of fascist leader Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci – disfigured and hung upside down as they were in their deaths. Notoriously, Mussolini and Clara’s bodies were left virtually unrecognizable after an Italian mob got hold of the bodies after their executions. Carrey captioned the image: ‘If you’re wondering what fascism leads to, just ask Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta’. Carrey’s warning is two-fold: 1) fascists are on the losing side of history and 2) fascism’s end is particularly horrific.
While Carrey’s drawing is not particularly funny per se, it sends a clear message that is meant to criticize and agitate against would-be fascists.
Satirical drawings of those in power are not new by any stretch of the imagination, going back centuries. Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco were lampooned endlessly during their lives and in death – particularly by their critics in other countries. While Carrey’s drawing is not particularly funny per se, it sends a clear message that is meant to criticize and agitate against would-be fascists. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the radical right Forza Italia politician and granddaughter of il Duce himself, Alessandra Mussolini, responded pointedly to Carrey by tweeting, ‘You are a bastard’. She then went on to post dozens of tweets related to Carrey’s drawing. She asked Carrey why not draw something else, then followed this by posting images of Native American chiefs Joseph, Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and Red Cloud, as well as the whipping of an African American man. She challenged Carrey to depict the horrors of Hiroshima, and she retweeted an image of a child screaming during a now infamous Napalm attack in Vietnam. She referenced multiple times the fact that Carrey is a naturalized American from Canada – as though indicting Carrey for some unknown crime.
