Creativity Quote by Mort Walker

There is a whole career’s worth of institutional friction packed into that breezy little brag. Mort Walker frames rejection as a recurring gag: “kicked out” not once but twice, then “finally got back in,” as if persistence were less a virtue than a punchline with good timing. It’s the cartoonist’s instinct to turn authority into a prop and humiliation into a beat you can control.

Context matters: The Stars and Stripes is the U.S. military newspaper, a place where rules, hierarchies, and morale all have stakes beyond office politics. For an artist, especially one with Walker’s later reputation for lampooning military life (Beetle Bailey practically lives on base), being expelled suggests that his sensibility didn’t naturally conform to a system built on conformity. The line hints at a recurring tension between official narratives and the small, stubborn reality of the people inside them.

The subtext is less “look how rebellious I was” than “look how elastic the system can be when it needs you.” Walker isn’t painting himself as a martyr; he’s admitting he got bounced, learned the perimeter, and found a way back. That “finally” is doing quiet work: it implies negotiation, workaround, maybe even grudging respect on both sides.

It’s also a statement about legitimacy. Getting “back in” isn’t just returning to a job; it’s reentering the authorized channel, the stamp that lets satire circulate where it can actually irritate and entertain the people who live under the rules. Walker turns discipline into material, and makes the gatekeepers part of the joke.