Welcome to Tough Laugh ✏️
A project about editorial cartoonists and the dangers they face to make us laugh - and think.
Register now, and make sure to never miss an update!
Imagine publishing one of your cartoons on Twitter, and a few hours later being stopped and arrested by the police while you are driving home with your family.
Imagine being at home, on a regular evening, and receiving a notification on social media that proceedings against you are starting for three cartoons you published.
These are only two of the stories that we are going to tell in “Tough Laugh”, a project that, with a podcast 🎙 and a newsletter 📩, will bring you the stories of cartoonists and the dangers they face to make us laugh — and think.
✏️ We are Federica Testi and Emanuele Del Rosso, and this is an introduction to our Tough Laugh project, launching in autumn!
We want to tell the stories of cartoonists in danger
We all come across great editorial cartoons, reading a magazine, on social media, watching TV. But we seldom think about the author of the cartoon that made us laugh, or think, or even made us angry.
Many cartoonists face economic hardship, harassment, threats and even physical violence for the job they do. Some are killed. And they often are not considered equals to journalists.
With “Tough Laugh”, we will tell you the stories of these cartoonists, in two ways:
🎙 With a podcast
In autumn, we will launch a first season of our “Tough Laugh” podcast. It will consist of three episodes produced with Cartooning for Peace within their project “Enhancing legal support to press cartoonists in the digital age”, with the financial support of the Global Media Defence Fund administered by UNESCO.
The episodes — each in a different language: English, Spanish, French — will tackle the stories of criminalised editorial cartoonists, digging into the challenges that come with publishing cartoons, and how the law has been, and is, (mis)used to censor them. Hence, the name of this first special Tough Laugh season: “Tough laugh, Tough law”.
📩 With this newsletter
This will be a space to talk about cartooning, its history, its present and its future, telling the stories of cartoonists and all the challenges they face to make us laugh and think.
With the precious help of our team members Zahra Salah Uddin and James Hodgson, this summer we will be working on all this. In autumn, you will be listening to the first podcast episode.
Why register now? To make sure to never miss an update!
Subscribe and learn more about cartooning and and cartoonists, receive updates about our podcast, and see amazing cartoons. We’ll be in touch very soon.
If you like the project and have any idea for collaborations, contact us at toughlaughproject@gmail.com.