Daily Inspiration Quote by Garry Trudeau

Trudeau’s line is a mission statement with a trapdoor. He starts with the disarming, almost contractual promise of a daily strip: entertain the reader. That’s not modesty so much as camouflage. In the world of newspapers and mass culture, “humor” is the acceptable wrapper; it buys you access to the breakfast table, the office break room, the places where overt sermonizing gets tossed. By foregrounding entertainment as the “first responsibility,” Trudeau positions himself as a professional, not a scold, and he preempts the perennial complaint that political cartooning is just lecturing with punchlines.

The pivot - “But if, in addition” - is where the real intent shows. He’s outlining a two-stage operation: laughter as the delivery system, judgment as the payload. The phrase “move readers to thought and judgment” is carefully chosen. “Thought” sounds open-ended, civic, benign; “judgment” admits he’s not merely raising questions, he’s steering moral and political evaluation. And “issues that concern me” is the quiet assertion of authorship: this isn’t neutral commentary, it’s a worldview with priorities, smuggled through character banter and visual gags.

Context matters. Trudeau comes out of a post-’60s media ecosystem where Doonesbury made the newspaper comics page a legitimate arena for Vietnam, Watergate, feminism, AIDS, and the slow theater of American hypocrisy. The quote defends that project: keep the strip funny enough to survive editors and readers, then use that survival to press on the culture’s sore spots.