The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 13, 2025

Notably: Last Friday we got a painful email from Clay Jones, our favorite cartoonist, unimaginably more painful though it must’ve been to write it: “Unfortunately, this week I had a stroke and my right side is partially paralyzed. This means the streak is over and I have to relearn how to use my hand and my voice. Please bear with me until I figure this out. I appreciate everyone’s love and concern. I will see you when I see you.” The most iconoclastic cartoonist of the age of Trump–our tongue-wagging, sippy-cupped Aristophanes–has been silenced after all. Our world isn’t the same. Might as well silence Borowitz (“After promising on Truth Social that the gathering would be “wild,” on Friday Donald J. Trump summoned angry supporters to a rally outside the headquarters of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. Urging his irate loyalists to “stop the steal,” Trump declared, “If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, you’ve got to fight like hell”) or Jon Stewart, though Stewart’s conventional sanctimony trips him up more often than not. Since we started subscribing exactly two years ago, and long before that apparently, he’s not missed a single day of producing at least one cartoon (he produces additional ones on demand, for an extra fee), a daily blog that can run on as long or longer than the average FlaglerLive article), and videos showing his page go from blank to bang, sometimes in 30 seconds. It was and I hope will again, maybe more along a Johnny Carson schedule, be an impossibly furious pace, and it’s taken its toll. There’s no imagining what hell he’s in. He’s asked for no emails, no communications, though he’s gotten some 600 comments in reply to his announcement on his Facebook page. He can’t reply, and he’d justly and Clayfully shit on any thoughts, prayers or rooting-for-you bullshit from us healthy (or at least healthier, functioning) fuckers. We can support him by continuing to run Clay from the archives (most of his cartoons never saw light of day in our pages) and maintaining our subscriptions (to Claytoons and Substack) on his timetable: until further notice. Other than that, we love you Clay.

—P.T.

Not long after Mencken arrived at Mrs. Lohrfinck’s house, he suddenly began babbling incoherently. Astonished, she called Dr. Benjamin Baker, who arrived within minutes, put Mencken into his car, and took him straight to Johns Hopkins. Since August was out, he telephoned Gertrude to tell her the news, and she kept calling Hollins Street until August returned at eleven. August drove immediately to the hospital, but none of the interns on duty had any idea where his brother was. Then he ran into Baker, who brought him to Mencken’s room. According to August, the doctor told him, “Your brother has got a massive hemorrhage. He can’t conceivably live until morning. He was practically dead on arrival. That’s the way he would have wanted it to be.” Baker later denied that he had said any such thing to August, but there is no question about what he told Alfred Knopf, who called the next day to ask about Mencken’s condition: “Mr. Mencken has suffered a stroke, and I am sorry to say he is recovering from it.”

–From Terry Teachout’s The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002).

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