Fishing gag gift

April is a fun month. Come April 1, it's really OK to play a practical joke on your friend. On Easter, alleluia returns to our vocabulary. And in most places, spring is breaking forth, fanning our hope.

In this world of much sadness, hope can't come often enough. Sometimes hope travels on the wings of laughter or, at the very least, a smile. The catalyst might be a TV sitcom, a good joke or even your favorite periodical.

It could even be The Lutheran's "Light Side" page. On page 4 our foibles-whether a typo in the bulletin or a children's sermon gone awry--carve us into community and lend us some levity. And we must also give thanks for those who spend their days searching for humor so they can sketch their observations late into the night-and deliver them to us. Their humor lands on our refrigerators, bulletin boards or office cubicles. They are the cartoonists.

Harbaugh: People need to laugh

Humor is a much-needed commodity today, says David Harbaugh, whose cartoons appear regularly in The Lutheran. "People have a lot of angst, anticipation and dread about current events. It's a sad time," he says, adding that cartoonists have a certain insight and the ability to "help people let down, to have a laugh."

Harbaugh, a member of St. John Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh (Perrysville), calls cartooning his "avocation."

"I've always had a passion for it-- since I sold my first cartoon in 1957," he says.

Harbaugh, now retired, spent his days designing exhibits for trade shows and his evenings drawing. "It was a great way to get rid of the stress of the work world," he adds.

His cartoons have been published in general-market magazines, including Good Housekeeping, and sports, hunting and fishing magazines. But drawing church cartoons holds a special appeal. "I have a desire to reach out," he says. "Ever since I was a child I've enjoyed bringing laughter to others. It's what drives me. It's a passion, but it's also a ministry. ... I just love to do it."

As a cartoonist, Harbaugh can stand back and observe what humans are prey to. "How very sweet church people are, guarded," he says. "Yet they're guilty of the same contradictory behavior. Not that this is bad. We're just all human."

Three children and four years as a Sunday school teacher have provided him with plenty of material. One of his favorite targets is the church committee. "Basically, I'm not a committee person. I'm not good at it. I like to go it alone, and committees give rise to humor," he says.

Harbaugh says his stack of rejection slips keeps him honest, and he wants to keep his humor clean. "I'm terribly afraid of offending someone. I want to be well-behaved," he says.

Sorensen: Barbie and Ken

"Life's plenty funny without going for cheap shots," agrees Jean Sorensen, a Roman Catholic from Herndon, Va. "I enjoy picking on human characteristics that we try so hard to conceal, like hypocrisy, vanity, being really cheap." Like other cartoonists, Sorensen draws on life's ordinary events, frequently using her experiences. "I'm pretty ordinary. If I didn't find humor in standing in line or putting away dishes, I'd go crazy," she says. "Going to church, teaching religious education, volunteering-being around heavenly people grounds you. Hey, I just made that up."

Next time you see a Sorensen cartoon in The Lutheran, The Saturday Evening Post or Funny Times consider this: Barbie and Ken dolls may have been her props. "It's a gymnast Barbie, so I can really move those arms and legs," she says. Sorensen calls the Barbie "a donation to the arts" from her daughter after she outgrew it. "The Ken was my husband's when he was a kid," she adds, "I'm fairly sure he's outgrown it...."

Sorensen says she goes for the " `that's so true' laugh, smile or guffaw" reaction to her cartoons. "The biggest compliment is if it's on someone's refrigerator," she says.

The biggest laughs, she adds, come from self-deprecating cartoons in which people recognize themselves. "It you can laugh at yourself you'll always be entertained and will never be in want of an audience," she says. "It's perfect."

Sorensen's cartoons about congregational life and church routines collide with human frailties, even absurdities. A cartoon in last June's The Lutheran featured a bride and groom meeting with their pastor. The bride says, "One more thing about our wedding, Mother would like you to wear a clergy-cam."

Formerly an accountant, Sorensen works around the schedules of three children, writing down ideas and letting her husband/editor, Bob, who attends Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Falls Church, Va., determine which ones are "funny," "good" and "OK."

"I'm obsessed with keeping captions brief. If a gag takes longer than two sentences, there had better be a big payoff," she says. Once she has a solid list of ideas and captions, she sits down in her basement studio and starts sketching.

She started out as a gag writer for a syndicated cartoonist for a year, before wanting more control over her ideas. She calls her early drawings "incredibly embarrassing."

"But time and practice has made my work, well, less embarrassing. ... I've been very lucky," she says. "I also had some humor articles published, but my limited intelligence suits me better to a limited number of words."

Johnson: Survival skill

Ray G. Johnson, whose cartoons appear regularly in The Metro Lutheran newspaper and Lutheran Partners magazine, quotes comedian Mike Myers' father as saying: "Silliness is a state of grace." Johnson agrees: "It made about as much sense to me as the hundreds of theology books I've read."

"We often take ourselves too seriously and need humor to jolt us out of our rigid tendencies," says Johnson, an ELCA pastor who lives in Birchwood, Minn., and considers himself semiretired.

Johnson says he started cartooning ,.as a survival skill during tedious synodical meetings. ... I don't have the personality type to sit through that tedium. I'd pass my cartoons down the table and they'd make their way through the convention."

In 1968, Johnson, who continued to work on technique and study successful cartoonists, began "submitting cartoons here and there and had surprising success." Before seminary, he had attended art school with hopes of becoming a commercial artist or illustrator.

His years as a parish pastor have given him ample time to observe congregational life.

"Church life is simply people-not a whole lot different than outside the church," he says. "People are petty, passive aggressive and there's a whole lot of pretentiousness going on." The hardest to take, he says, is religious pretentiousness, adding, "We talk and act like we're not, but we are. ... Pointing it out with humor is a very necessary task."

Johnson also takes his humor on the road. During his low-tech cartoon program, "The Grace of Humor," he slaps 100 to 200 cartoons on an overhead projector and gets church groups involved in discussion. His passions of late focus on peace and poverty. "I'm a poverty nut," he says. "I'm horrified at what's happening in this state and federally. It's insulting to the poor. Greed is the basic policy of our day."

Not surprisingly, Johnson is also a political cartoonist. But when he's not talking about the woe of war or the greed of government, he'll give his opinion on the church's state of preaching and editors who choose "bland, obvious" cartoons over his. Watch for more Johnson cartoons in The Lutheran. Perhaps.

Cooney: Edgy drawing

David Cooney, Mifflinburg, Pa., had to track down his middle school art teacher to teach him to draw pictures to accompany the funny thoughts he was having.

He began by writing greeting-card concepts on 3-by-5 cards and having others draw for him, but he decided it was too time-consuming. "I just need to learn to draw," he told himself before taking drawing lessons from his former teacher. "She taught me about perspective, and I sat down and practiced."

Cooney says he didn't know he had a style until his mother-in-law recognized a cartoon as his. "The character had a bulging eye, a big head," he says. "It looked, well, cartoony. I thought, `Oh my goodness, I have a style. I've arrived.' "

His cartoons are some of the edgier that appear in The Lutheran's monthly mailbag of choices. Although not always suitable for this publication, they do find their way to the staff's cubical walls. Cooney usually taps into pop culture to make a humorous point, which some find sacrilegious, others a welcome relief.

"I like to take time-- tested cliches and shove them through today's culture," Cooney explains. "Like spell-check, the computer, cell phones. You can look at anything through current culture." He uses the example of the cartoon that appeared in The Lutheran in March: As Noah watches the dove return to the ark with a twig and money, he says: "All right! He found land and an ATM."