Creativity Quote by Mort Walker

Laughter, for Mort Walker, isn’t a garnish on life; it’s maintenance. “The brush that sweeps away the cobwebs of your heart” takes an abstract emotional claim and gives it a cartoonist’s physical logic: the heart as a room you live in, cobwebs as the gunk that accumulates when you stop moving through it. Walker made his career drawing people stuck in systems - the army in Beetle Bailey, the daily grind, the petty humiliations - and then puncturing them with a gag. The line smuggles in that worldview: you can’t always change the barracks, the boss, or the era, but you can clear your interior air.

The subtext is quietly anti-heroic. It doesn’t promise laughter will cure trauma or solve injustice; it frames it as a small, repeatable act of self-rescue. A brush is humble, domestic, almost boring. That choice matters. Walker is arguing for comedy as hygiene rather than revelation - less “stand-up as truth-telling prophet,” more “a little oxygen so you don’t calcify.”

The metaphor also flatters the reader without preaching. Cobwebs aren’t evil; they’re neglect. That’s why the sentence lands as permission instead of diagnosis. In a culture that often treats seriousness as moral credibility, Walker’s image defends lightness as a form of care: not denial, but circulation. Laughter, here, is emotional housekeeping - the kind that keeps you capable of feeling again.