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6/12/00 4:45 p.m.
A MacNelly Appreciation
Reprinted from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

By Ross MacKenzie

n the late fall of 1970, Jeff MacNelly appeared in the offices of The News Leader on the prowl for a job. The paper had not had an editorial cartoonist since the 1950s, and was not looking for one. Yet there he was — brush tucked behind his ear, smiling like a Labrador puppy, and even then nonpareil in his humor and his art. Seventeen months later, at 24, he would become one of the youngest to win the Pulitzer Prize for anything.

He reeled in a second Pulitzer at The News Leader, and in the mid-1980s, after landing at the Chicago Tribune, a third. He remained a Tribune employee until leukemia and lymphoma combined to take him early Thursday at 52, but — passionately a converted Virginia country boy — he long peered at the world from his mountain-top perch in Rappahannock County.

Early in his three professional decades MacNelly emerged as a one-man factory and cartooning's dominant force. He created the comic strip "Shoe," the panel "Pluggers" (now produced by the Times-Dispatch's Gary Brookins), and the weekly window for Dave Barry's column. Through it all he churned out the thrice-weekly cartoon that was his first love — as well as a profusion of art, alternately serious and wacky, that exceeded just about everything on the artistic landscape he leaves behind.

His unkempt genius consisted in several parts. As they said of Conrad's Jim, MacNelly was "one of us." But for him the message came second. He was insistently a humorist — an entertainer, a comedian — first. A droll skeptic who saw clearly into the darkest murk, he viewed laughter as the salvational link between reason and un-. He employed his unbounded artistic talent to transform each newly discovered outrage into comedy. Adamantly unclichéd, he was in his way deeply a cliché of the clown with tears.

He spent his life laughing at the atrocious — and no target was too lofty. Sniggering smugness, repositories of received wisdom, the vanities of the merely mediocre. Potentates and grand mullahs and intelligentsia snits. The glitterati, the culturati, the yuppie left. Custodial democracy, dysfunctional welfarism, terror states, and Newspeak ideologies that in the name of future paradises create present hells. The boys Carter and Clinton, who never could get out of Dogpatch but threw it all away trying.

MacNelly's years coincided with the zany madcap era of ozone, oat bran, and battery-acid rhetoric — of utopian hope and radical dissent, of Tammy Faye and Hillary, of Jane Fonda and the POWs, of The Wall collapsing at last. With his pen and laconic one-liners, MacNelly made sure that from central planning to dogmatic slumber, no institution, doctrine, or condition was safe from confronting its own abuses and inanities. His humor was his way of being serious.

Sheepdogs bark to keep the flock together, but MacNelly — ever a latter-day version of the medieval fool, ever hanging back to view wryly from afar life's strange circumstances — was a constant straggler. Throughout he seemed indomitable, invincible — the source of a laughing stream that never would end. And what a guy! Refugees from lonely barren lives were almost mystically pulled to this reluctant celebrity.

MacNelly's humor — along with his insight and artistry — persisted to the end of his bravo zulu performance: Even at the depths of his cancer treatments he would sign his letters to one who had preceded him on the chemotherapy path, "Chemo Sabe."

The late radio wit Fred Allen noted that "all the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter." Maybe forgotten and maybe not. Few here will forget Jeff MacNelly; few who ever met him ever could. And long will the heavenly host be splitting its sides — not to echoes but the real thing.

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