Style and Satire
The success of De Familie Doorzon is largely due to the perfect satire on Dutch society and family life, with every majority and minority represented and no one spared. From the transvestite barkeeper (Rinus) to the dopepeddling Ronnie D. and his voluptuous sister and her black husband every nook and cranny of the Dutch welfare state (as personified by Emiel) and its workforce (the Biereco's) is mercilessly ridiculed.
Gerrit de Jager has a quite distinct style, characterized by a love for ridiculous situations, which frequently result in disaster. A good example of this is the inevitable falling over of buildings if the Biereco's (see illustration) had anything to do with it.
Although he's milder in his other comics, the common denominator is a good sense for the inevitable madness of social conventions.
Read more about this topic: Gerrit De Jager
Famous quotes containing the words style and/or satire:
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (18881959)
“If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they willthe very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.”
—William Hazlitt (17781830)