Charles Rodrigues

Charles Rodrigues (September 29, 1926 - June 14, 2004) was an American cartoonist perhaps best known as a contributor to National Lampoon.

Rodrigues was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts; his father came from Madeira, Portugal and his mother was a local woman of Portuguese descent. After a stint in the U.S. Navy, he read in Writer's Digest that a magazine entitled Country Gentleman was paying forty dollars for cartoons - then a large sum of money - and determined to become a cartoonist. With support from the G.I. Bill, he went to New York City to attend the Cartoonist and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts). He began peddling his cartoons around 1950, selling at first to low-grade girlie magazines, then to Playboy, to which he would contribute continually for many years. From the 1950s onward he worked for many magazines of many different kinds, including Esquire, TV Guide, a Catholic publication called The Critic, and Paul Krassner's The Realist.

He began contributing to the National Lampoon as of its first issue in April 1970, and continued to do so until 1993. Although his politics differed sharply from those of the Lampoon's staff, the magazine provided a wide outlet for his sense of humor. Art director Michael Gross had this to say about him:

Y'know when I mentioned before that Liberals have no sense of humor? Actually, the only people who have less are the religious Right. Now, look at Charles Rodrigues. Almost nobody is as tasteless as Rodrigues can be. The man would deliver stuff that we would just cringe at. His first piece was the atrocious - and hilarious - "Hire the Handicapped".... In later years, I found out that he's a conservative, fairly religious, Portuguese artist who really thought we were awful people. [laughter] He hated our politics, but he was able to transcend that... so I could never figure out what his attitude was.

In a collection of interviews with various cartoonists, Mark Jacobs wrote:

He works at night, which is fitting, since some of his best cartoons deal with the dark side of the psyche. A classic black humorist, he rummages around in violence, insanity, perversion, bigotry and scatology, looking for what he needs to create the typical Rodrigues effect: wild laughter with a cringe of repulsion.

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