A Brush with Life
Addison
By Mark Kershaw
ATLANTA Georgia—(Hubris)—February 2024—I am a fortunate editor. Sooo fortunate. I get to publish (however widely I can, and however often) the work (cough)—work, I say!—of Mark Addison Kershaw! And, at my advanced age, I am no longer confined to one of those tiny little desks I once occupied at the University of Georgia’s Park Hall, where my English professors often asked me, in one class or another, to weigh in on Humor. On why things are funny to us. On why it is we laugh, and what makes us laugh. Well, “It is death,” I would say. “It is death that makes us laugh. Death, dismemberment, and things that go bump in the night.” As though I knew anything at all about it at my age back then. Thing is, though, right as I was about some of the things that make us all laugh, I never quite pictured Death in a knock-down-drag-out with a Valley Girl wielding a brush and dryer. Did not see that one coming, Dr. Martin.
Mark Addison Kershaw
Mark Addison Kershaw says his influences include James Thurber, Jean-Jacques Sempé, Charles Schultz, Berke Breathed, and several cartoonists from “The New Yorker.” Kershaw was born and brought up in Nebraska, spent college dabbling in philosophy and a few decades during/after in Minnesota, and now makes his home in Atlanta, Georgia, where he may be spotted walking his dog around the lake behind his home, taking photographs, and thinking cartoonish thoughts. (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)