Stan Kelly is a political cartoonist for The Onion, America's Finest News Source, who have published his works since 1970. In it, he tackles hard-hitting topics such as current events, geopolitics, gun control, climate change, abortion, pop culture, generational differences, the relentless evolution of technology, and bitch ex-wives who take everything from their innocent, hard-working husbands.
In reality, he's the brainchild of author and cartoonist Ward Sutton, created in 2006 as a parody of ultraconservative cartoonists like Ben Garrison
. His cartoons are blatant Author Tracts featuring strawman caricatures of people he opposes, gratuitous Expo Labels on everything (lest anyone manage to somehow miss his Anvilicious message), over-the-top Eagleland imagery, and an Author Avatar in the corner making wisecracks about everything.
All of Stan Kelly's cartoons can be found on The Onion's editorial cartoons archive.
[TODAY'S NO-GOOD TROPES*]
- The Alcoholic: Stan's author-inserts depict him having been arrested for a DUI, berated for Drinking on Duty, and using whiskey sours to deal with everything he doesn't like.
- The Alleged Car: Stan insists that the Chrysler PT Cruiser is a "virile chick magnet."
- All Periods Are PMS: Stan worries that if Hillary Clinton becomes President, the first time she gets her period in office, she'll start a nuclear war.
- …And That Little Girl Was Me: Although it's never stated, it's heavily implied that all the comics involving the average honest, hard-working American dad are based on Stan's own personal experiences (or at least, how he remembers them).
- Angry White Man: Stan believes that it's unfair for the government to keep giving minorities new rights and protections, but middle-class white men haven't gotten any new rights in decades.
- He cites Homer Simpson as an example of rampant societal bigotry and mockery toward white men.
- Stan celebrates in 2020 when the Presidential candidates and top Oscar nominees are all white males, considering it long-awaited justice.
- He feels that the real modern-day victims of American slavery are kids indoctrinated with White Guilt by liberal education agendas.
- Author Avatar: Stan has several who appear throughout the comics:
- Nearly every strip features a small doodle of himself in the lower right hand corner, usually making some clever pun about the comic's moral.
- He often uses people resembling his younger self as a representation of straight-laced teens from the good old days, unlike Today's No-Good Teens.
- Any time a bald, mustachioed man is shown in a positive context (especially if he's drawn as implausibly buff), it's almost certainly meant to be another stand-in.
- Author Tract: Every single comic is designed to be a blatant expression of Stan's personal thoughts on the matter.
- Awful Wedded Life:
- Any comics featuring a married couple typically depict the wife as a nagging shrew, constantly berating her completely innocent Henpecked Husband for minor, overblown peccadillos like being a Lazy Bum, his alcoholism, gambling addiction, neglecting the kids, etc.
- One comic makes it as unsubtle as can be, showing The Grim Reaper with "LOVE" on its cloak lurking right next to the bride and groom.
- Bankruptcy Barrel: One comic shows a man having to wear one and walk everywhere along the road because of exorbitantly high gas prices.
- Blaming the Victim:
- How dare those greedy African children, homeless people, and victims of natural disasters get free stuff from the government and NGOs instead of honest, hardworking middle-class Americans!
- He also believes that the women who accused Bill Cosby of sexually assaulting them are all selfish, and the real victims are The Cosby Show fans who can't watch it anymore.
- The Chain of Harm: It's implied that Stan's father walked out on him and he resents his mother, and that he himself walked out on his wife and his kids resent him.
- Child Hater: Stan doesn't hate children per se, but he definitely hates spending time with his grandchildren or going on family vacations when he wants to stay home, drink whiskey sours, and watch Star Trek instead.
- The Conspiracy: Stan frequently believes that things that annoy or inconvenience him personally are the result of a malevolent conspiracy, often to further a sinister politically correct agenda.
- Dirty Old Man: Stan has no problem drawing women in an overly sexualized way, praises the people behind the 2014 celebrity nude pic leaks, has a massive collection of Penthouse magazines, and his author-insert characters are occasionally seen hiring prostitutes or visiting strip clubs.
- Disco Dan: Stan continues to exist that clothes like the sweater vest and the Members Only jacket never fell out of style.
- Distracted by the Sexy: The rise of leggings as acceptable clothing in public for women is an unbearable temptation for Stan, and worries that it may increase disasters like plane crashes.
- Divine Punishment:
- According to Stan, the wildfires in California are sent by God as a punishment for homosexuality, liberalism, and Barbra Streisand. Similarly, the eruption of Kilauea is divine punishment against Hawaii for putting pineapple on pizza.
- Tiger Woods' failures in 2010 were punishment from the Founding Fathers in Heaven for his extramarital affair.
- Melania Trump deserved to get COVID because she insulted Christmas.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Stan draws Gordon Gekko saying "Greed is good... but even I have my limits!" in reaction to a public school teacher's union strike.
- Evil Vegetarian: Vegetarians don't avoid meat because they think it's cruel, they just do it to spite honest, hard-working cattle ranchers. Stan also imagines healthy eating initiatives are all foisted upon an unwilling America by the "powerful vegan lobby" and "tofu tycoons."
- Expo Label: Literally every person in a comic has a label to clarify who they are or what they're meant to represent. He also labels his thoughts on celebrities (frequently labeling them "No-talent hack"), and labels every new technological innovation with "Latest fad."
- Fan Disservice: After Congressman Madison Cawthorn alluded to attending a Republican Congressional orgy, Stan drew just that. He censored a lot of it, but not enough.
- Fast-Food Nation: Stan loves his corporate food brands, only wanting to shop at big-box retail stores that carry food brands he knows (Trader Joe's seems too socialist for his tastes). He also despises health food trends, and celebrates the end of the Obama administration because it means no more healthy eating initiatives.
- Fire and Brimstone Hell: Where celebrities and politicians whom Stan doesn't like end up, including James Brown, Roy Scheider, Luciano Pavarotti, George Carlin, Tim Russert, Tony Curtis, Elvis Presley, Steve Jobs, McLean Stevenson, Dick Clark, Bonnie Franklin, Aretha Franklin, Stan Lee, Peter Mayhew, Jimmy Stewart, Sean Connery, Gavin MacLeod, Alex Trebek, and Bob Barker.
- Even though there's not dead yet, Stan says there are spots in Hell reserved for Jimmy Carter (even though he depicts other Democrats like John F. Kennedy in Heaven) and Drew Carey.
- Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Where celebrities and politicians whom Stan likes end up, including Jerry Falwell, James Doohan, Dom De Luise, Johnny Carson, Harry Morgan, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, General Norman Schwarzkopf, Margaret Thatcher, Tom Clancy, James Gandolfini, Larry Hagman, Charlton Heston, Leonard Nimoy, David Bowie (undeservedly, though), the cast of The Golden Girls, Chuck Berry, Burt Reynolds, Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Kenny Rogers, Hugh Hefner, Roger Moore, Rush Limbaugh, Walter Mondale, Meat Loaf, Ray Liotta, James Caan, Tony Sirico, and O. J. Simpson.
- The Founding Fathers are sometimes shown looking down from Heaven and weeping at the state of the nation.
- The Food Poisoning Incident: One of many reasons Stan hates Mexican food is the one time he tried some in Santa Fe, it gave him diarrhea.
- Glory Days: Stan still rides high on receiving the Thorsberg Bronze Quill Award of 1981.
- Global Warming: Stan generally doesn't believe in global warming... and if he did, he would think it's good because the heat waves would kill the hippies and floods would hit the coastal elites.
- Godwin's Law:
- People who get on Stan's nerves, whether it's anti-littering enforcers, inattentive waitresses, or TV station managers who move the time for Frasier reruns, run the risk of being depicted as Nazis.
- Liberal political policies (typically involving tax hikes) are usually analogized to Middle Eastern Terrorists or Dirty Communists.
- The Grim Reaper: A frequent appearance in Stan's comics, usually with the name of a liberal policy or trend he doesn't like written on its cloak, signifying how he thinks that it'll be the (metaphorical or literal) death of the country.
- Gun Nut: Repealing all gun control would prevent a lot of tragedies, according to Stan. School shootings? Arm the students. Boston Marathon bombing? Arm the runners. The crucifixion? Arm Jesus.
- Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow: "Kelly Klassic" comics ostensibly written in the 70s show that he used to have a full afro back then.
- Have a Gay Old Time: Lampshaded in one comic from 1981, where Stan hasn't yet learned that "gay" means "homosexual," and thinks a parade with "some fine looking ladies" is just a celebration of being happy.
- Heteronormative Crusader: Stan staunchly opposes letting gay soldiers join the military because they might fall in love with gay terrorists and defect. He also believes that letting kids dress up on Halloween will make them grow up to be drag queens.
- Househusband: Stan's opinions on them are mixed. On one hand, wives working mean that they can't stay home and be lazy freeloaders. On the other, he thinks that stay-at-home husbands are weak and emasculated.
- Hypocritical Humor: Stan's positions definitely reveal plenty of hypocrisy:
- He hates illegal immigrants, but has no problem with people hiring them for menial labor.
- His stance on technology only focuses on whatever is newest and most recent—he hates Today's No Good Teens for causing DVDs to displace VHS, then hates teens for making streaming displace DVDs. Additionally, his hatred for technology-addicted kids doesn't apply to giving the grandkids video games to make them shut up.
- He complains about how sexualized modern culture is, but is an unrepentant Dirty Old Man who hires prostitutes and has been collecting porn for decades.
- He draws his handsome Author Avatar mocking an old and ugly classmate who once dumped him, while he himself is a lonely, divorced alcoholic.
- He turns his nose up at cartoonists using modern digital illustration tools, but is fine with A.I. drawings because they'd let him work without any effort.
- If It Bleeds, It Leads: Stan depicts the average honest, hard-working American family as being massive fans of stories about mass murder, violence, and natural disasters in the media. He even depicts them getting disappointed whenever a major disaster is milder than predicted and there's no carnage to film.
- The Illegal: One of Stan's perennial fears is Latino illegal immigrants overrunning the country, ruining the economy, and replacing pancakes with breakfast burritos at IHOP.
- Insane Troll Logic:
- Whenever Stan does agree with a liberal viewpoint, it's usually for very different reasons than liberals, such as wanting women in the military in hopes that his ex-wife gets drafted, or supporting abortion so men won't be trapped in families with conniving women.
- Stan's solution to childhood obesity? Get them hooked on tobacco instead!
- The best way to fight racism is by consuming more interracial porn.
- Warm weather on Christmas isn't because of global warming, it's because of George Soros bribing the snow into melting.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Scientists are typically depicted as midwits who know absolutely nothing and are easily rebuffed by the Author Avatar's common sense.
- My Country Tis of Thee That I Sting: The only times Stan willfully insults America is when he can point the finger at liberals for ruining it.
- Never My Fault: Every comic featuring an Author Avatar of Stan shows him in the right, and that everything bad that happens to him (getting fired, a DUI ticket, his kids not calling him) is totally undeserved.
- New-Age Retro Hippie: A common straw opponent in Stan's comics, he's depicted as a smelly, America-hating, flag-burning idiot who's constantly humiliating himself and getting trounced (emotionally or physically) by God-fearing patriots.
- New Media Are Evil: Stan is a firm believer in the sanctity of physical media and despises online streaming of movies and music.
- Nostalgia Ain't Like It Used to Be: As far as Stan as convinced, everything about his generation back when they were teenagers was objectively better than modern teens today.
- Obnoxious In-Laws: Stan depicts his son's mother-in-law as an evil hag with a Hitler mustache."COME IN! EAT MY FOOD! ABIDE BY MY HOUSE RULES! ENGAGE ME IN CONVERSATION!"
- Patriotic Fervor: Stan's comic is dripping with patriotic imagery. In his world, America is a perfect country blessed by God, and everyone who disagrees with him is a Dirty Communist who makes the Statue of Liberty and the Founding Fathers weep.Jesus: I may have been born in Bethlehem... but I know America is the Promised Land!
- Playing Both Sides: For the 2008 election, Stan made cartoons celebrating both the Republicans and Democrats winning.
- Police Brutality: Stan thinks that there's no such thing as excess force when it comes to the police, mourns the cancellation of COPS, and thinks that police body cameras are good only if people can watch the footage of shootouts for entertainment. He also thinks that police brutality protestors are just making up excuses to frame innocent cops.
- Political Correctness Is Evil: A perennial view of Stan's, who believes that political correctness is part of the sinister liberal scheme to undermine patriotic American values. One comic of his depicts the Romans crucifying Jesus as "PC language police" who hate him for encouraging people to say "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays."
- Rap Is Crap: Today's No-Good Teen is often wearing a shirt or bearing a tattoo that says "RAP BAND."
- Running Gag: Many common motifs appear in Stan's comics:
- The Statue of Liberty crying—if not tears of anguish at what liberals have done to America, then tears of joy at how conservatives are saving it.
- Similarly, a trio of dead famous people looking down from Fluffy Cloud Heaven and weeping either in pride or shame. Expect at least one of them to be someone who probably shouldn't be in Heaven, a celebrity that hasn't died yet, or a fictional character that Kelly assumes is real.
- Some villain or pervert (with an Expo Label reading "Sicko") looking on and cackling "Yes... ha ha ha... YES!"
- Stan's Author Avatars having a fondness for whiskey sours.
- Any time the innocent husband and the dirty hippie are talking together in a bar, the punchline in the next panel is the innocent husband saying "MY WIFE!" while his wife bursts in and harangues him.
- Rushmore Refacement:
- Stan fears what Mexicans will do to it if they ever become the majority ethnicity in America.
- He represents his disdain for Facial Scruff by depicting Mount Rushmore with five o'clock shadows and captioning it "America the GRUBBY!"
- He believes that if Feminazis take over America, they'll resculpt the Statue of Liberty to be fat, hairy, and ugly and rename it the "Statue of Liberated."
- Stan fears what Mexicans will do to it
- The Scrooge: It's implied that Stan is one, seeing how often panhandlers, fundraisers, store workers who reject coupons, and anyone who asks his Author Avatar for money under any circumstance is portrayed as an evil hag.
- Serious Business: Stan feels very strongly about some of his pop culture opinions, such as his love for The Sopranos, as well as his belief that DC Comics and Star Trek are far superior to Marvel Comics and Star Wars. He even says J. J. Abrams will burn in Hell for "betraying" the Star Trek fandom and making The Force Awakens.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Stan believes he's the real hero of the 2008 electoral cycle, deserves to be TIME's Man of the Year, and can totally seduce Chelsea Clinton and Melania Trump.
- Smoking Is Cool: Today's No-Good Teens vape instead of smoke real cigarettes, which risks them looking not as cool as European teenagers.
- Soccer-Hating Americans: Stan believes that trying to promote soccer in America is European imperialism and fundamentally un-American.
- Species-Specific Afterlife: According to Stan, God has a special heavenly zoo for endangered animals, and those damn anti-hunting bills are keeping them from joining Him in eternal happiness.
- Spoiled Brat: Your kids will grow up to be socialist welfare queens if you put them on your health insurance plans, let them relax on summer break, trick-or-treat on Halloween, or give them Christmas gifts, according to Stan.
- Stalker with a Crush: It's implied that ever since he got divorced, Stan has been romantically stalking women far younger than him.
- Straight Edge Evil: He hates how modern teen rebels ride e-scooters, vape, and skip school for political protests, instead of teens in his day, who'd ride motorcycles, drink and smoke underage, and skip school to get laid.
- Straw Feminist: Women's lib and #MeToo advocates are always depicted by Stan as shrill harpies who hate all men.
- Stylistic Suck: Being a parody of political cartoons, the comics feature a simplistic artstyle, Expo Labels everywhere and heavy-handed messages and symbolism that basically amount to Stan being angry at everything he doesn't like.
- Take That!: Stan revels in opportunities to insult other cartoonists whom he sees as competition, such as Charles Schulz,, Dr. Seuss, Bil Keane, Gary Larson, and digital cartoonists in general.
- Take That, Critics!: One comic depicts anyone who writes in to complain about his comics as a mix of brain-dead Feminazis, elitists, hippies, and terrorists.
- Technologically Blind Elders: Stan hates teenagers' love of the "latest gizmos" while championing whatever media format is already on its way to obsolescence (VHS, DVD, and cassette tapes, to name a few), proudly reveals that he falls for refund phishing scams in the belief that he's getting free money, and daydreams that replacing his own work with an image generator would mean never having to work for a paycheck again instead of the end of his career.
- Teen Hater: Stan certainly thinks that Teens Are Monsters. Today's No-Good Teens are inexorably depicted as zit-faced, trouble-making, music-blasting, tech-addicted delinquents who all deserve to end up in juvenile detention. They may or may not also be in league with ISIS.
- Think of the Children!: Many of his comics depict "Innocent Kids" as being brainwashed by liberal media and institutions into being anything from sinful degenerates to future school shooters.
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Values Dissonance: Stan claims that in The '80s, dressing up in blackface was a totally innocent and fun activity for people to do. - Unexpectedly Dark Episode: The comic for September 12th, 2011 is a variant that's more unexpectedly serious than anything. While many of Stan's comics touch on heavy issues, they're invariably handled intentionally poorly and not meant to be taken seriously — being full of over-the-top strawmen, unnecessary labels, and so on. However, this particular comic forgoes most of the usual jokes in favor of a straightforward question about the 9/11 attacks, with even Stan's Author Avatar (the only Running Gag left) seeming uncharacteristically earnest:10 years later, America wonders...
Uncle Sam: I-is it okay to laugh again?
Stan: Or is it too soon to ask? - The War on Straw: Every single comic featuring someone Stan disagrees with depicts them as moronic, a jerk, or downright evil.
- Yellow Peril: Any time Stan blames something on China, he usually draws a slant-eyed conical hat-wearing Chinese man rubbing his hands menacingly.
