Pat Oliphant

Pat Oliphant is the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the United States. After moving from Australia to the US in 1964, he began his sixty year career drawing satirical black and white sketches skewering politicians, covering the tenure of 10 American presidents. In 1967, he won a Pulitzer Prize for "They won't get us to the conference table . . . will they?," a searing depiction of Ho Chi Minh, president of North Vietnam, carrying a dead Viet Cong soldier. Oliphant’s trademark is a penguin character named Puck who sarcastically comments on the scene depicted. Oliphant says, “Humor makes things palatable and induces people to look at things they wouldn’t otherwise want to think about without the humor.” In the mid-1980s, the artist also began making sculptures and lithographs of his political caricatures that communicate their deficiencies through exaggerated physical flaws, such as bloating, sagging, and shrinking.