“Hangover’s ain’t good man… hangover’s ain’t good”

The re-captioning of existing New Yorker cartoons, using verbatim ramblings from the Twitter feed of Kanye West, have been raising laughs on various websites.

The trend was started by a pair of US comedians and has been taken up by others. From a cartoonist’s point of view there are clearly issues with copyright, but the New Yorker appears fairly relaxed about it.

This may be because the results, despite West’s dodgy grammar and spelling, are surprisingly effective. The Mick Stevens cartoon above has a certain bizarre charm to it, and this writer’s particular favourite is the Alex Gregory cartoon of two Viking invaders on a beach where one is now saying, “This is gonna be a dope ass day.”

But you wonder what the reaction will be if the trend continues and quality dips. And, of course, it’s unlikely the cartoonists will be seeing further remuneration as their cartoons fly around the world.

The Huffington Post has more on the copyright implications and you can see the cartoons here.