The answer of course is: Yes. You should be laughing. Hugleikur Dagsson’s book of cartoons is excellent. I got a Christmas present of it just the other day and it had the whole room in hysterical laughter. Yes, the cartoon above is VERY tame compared to some of the cartoons in the book, some of the cartoons are so sick that the Irish Sun, the bastion of good taste it is, says ‘Ban This Sick Book’.

Many of the cartoons make subjects as terrible as murder, incest and suicide funny (to sick minds such as my own), so you can understand that this book of cartoons might not be suitable as a Christmas present for your Auntie Mary - unless of course she previously loved the present you gave her of Red Meat cartoons.

I can understand why certain people will be offended and horrified by the cartoons in this book, but should humour really avoid harsh subjects? Humour is a tricky area, it’s very subjective for one thing. The way I try to judge whether a cartoon is acceptable or not is by my perception of the authors intent.

Hugleikur Dagsson claims that the social criticism in his work is accidental, but he goes on to explain the circumstances in which he came up withone particular cartoon:

Because I was reading, I saw it in the newspaper a piece about how many people in ten had participated in a gang rape, something like that. A staggering amount of people had participated in rape, and I was kind of blown away that I could walk out of this coffeehouse right now and pass a rapist at one point. I was thinking that and also OK, what kind of lives do these guys live, do they wake up in the morning and go, “Shit, I can’t believe I raped a girl last night, I was soooo drunk.� Are they like that? I mean, how do they think? So I thought of this situation, of a rapist on a date and he would just tell her the truth, you know, it’s like truth or dare, like “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?� “Well, I once participated in gang rape. I guess that’s the worst thing I’ve done.� I mean, how do people that do all those horrible things, how do they get through the day? That’s a huge mystery to me and a lot of my stories are a way for me to deal with that.

Despite his claims that the social criticism is accidental, that sounds a lot like social criticism to me - perhaps he just calls it by a different name.

Bearing this in mind, I think his intent in creating these often disturbing cartoons is honourable. He is not just out to shock or horrify. His cartoons will often make you stop and think for a moment.

One of the great values of his work is that he will often make you consider the perpetrators of awful crimes as people, rather than monsters. In our tabloid society it is all too easy to label certain criminals as ‘evil monsters’ and dissociate ourselves from them.

Hugleikur Dagsson makes us consider just how far away we are from these hideous crimes. And sometimes how responsible we are for them. Take his cartoon of a young girl professing that she wants to be a whore when she grows up - ‘Thank you MTV’ says her mother.

Or this cartoon of a the familiar ‘damn I’m drunk’ of someone who has had too much to drink and realises they have gone too far - only in this instance too far is just that bit further than most of us will have experienced:

You can check out some more of the tamer cartoons from this book at shouldyoubelaughingatthis.co.uk, or read an article on the author at the Guardian website, or have a look at a Hugleikur Dagsson MySpace (how do you confirm if a MySpace is by the real person or just a fansite??).

It would be rude of me to discuss the price of a Christmas present, but I generally find Play.com the best value for ordering stuff like this online. Of course you won’t get it delivered in time for Christmas now, but you might want to start the New Year with a laugh.