Stan Kelly (The Onion) - Throwback and Forth

Ok ok, I get that it can be a lot to dive into.

Stan Kelly is a fictitious cartoonist that has what can only be described as conservative boomer ass tendencies, and is published as if he writes for an audience of conservative American boomers with strong cultural and political opinions without even the slightest bit of media literacy.

So every symbol or allegory has to be spelled out in a painstakingly obvious way. He has several recurring characters: a crying statue of liberty, horrified at whatever is being depicted, and the opposite, someone who enjoys the depravity and needs to be labeled with the word "sickos" on his sweater, usually saying something like "yes, haha, YES!"

The joke is that it satirizes the type of political cartoons that sometimes become popular among the right wing (see Ben Garrison). More recently, the satire has often been focused on trivial, petty grievances being made out to be much more than they really should be. This particular comic is an example: that boomers hate being reminded that they don't even have a monopoly on nostalgia, and that it's been a long enough time since they were being cut out of the cultural zeitgeist that people are now nostalgic for things that they were too old to understand the first time around.

Stan Kelly is the creation of cartoonist Ben Ward, whose comics in his own name generally poke fun at conservatives more directly.

In a typical newspaper, cartoons present satire on events.

In The Onion, a satirical newspaper, the cartoons are satire upon the follies of other satire.

But we have to go deeper…