Drawn On Edge

The Joke’s Over by Ralph Steadman

originally published January 10, 2007

The kind of roguish and flukey happenstance that pitched Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson together at the dawn of the '70s has largely been wrung out of the mainstream media. These days, you’ll be sent away with only tears and rock-salted lashes for covering Derby Day without really mentioning horses and then peppering the piece with a set of elegantly freakish illustrations. No sir. Not today. But Thompson's and Steadman’s work would eventually become some of the more potent seeds of outsider journalism - the stuff that props up the very paper you’re staring at now.

Never mind that Thompson ended their initial meeting by depositing his new collaborator at the Louisville hospital violently ill and twice maced by his own hand. The resonance they achieved on that first assignment (eventually christened “gonzo journalism”) carried them forward through several decades - sometimes together and sometimes apart. Steadman’s blissfully untamed and distorted imagery was the perfect response to Thompson’s unhinged and inspired prose. Now Steadman has bottled the essence of that vibe into nearly 400 pages of deftly captured memoir titled The Joke’s Over (Harcourt, New York, 2006).

Whether they were infiltrating the America’s Cup (where Thompson gave his comrade a dose of LSD to cure his sea-sickness) or winding through the collapsing empire of Nixon’s end game, their tempest-like portraits of these events were matchless, down in the marrow of the affairs where their surreal assessments played as plausibly as reality. Or not.

Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, published in 1971, shuffled the writer into pop mythology. But apart from his initial, nominal fee, it wasn’t until many years afterwards that the artist saw any real recompense for the iconic lines he contributed to the book. Until Thompson’s death in 2005, he and Steadman sporadically threw fresh kindling onto their collabo despite the writer’s vacillating paranoia and general unpredictability. Laid out in diary entries, letters and thoroughly engaging narrative, Steadman uses words this time to illustrate the deep and sometimes skewed affection they maintained for one another. Steadman maintains that it was “the death of fun” that led Thompson to his Hemingway-like end, and poignantly writes the following to his friend post-mortem:

“Did you think about never seeing familiar things again… never reading a truth, never having an opinion, never railing against the New Dumb, never figuring out that there was still fun to be had…”

In answer to an inquiry by telephone concerning when and why he started writing this book, Steadman said the following: "Well, I heard as we all did on February 20th of last year, and then on the 20th of August we had this blastoff [of Thompson’s ashes] that Johnny Depp arranged.

It was just after I got back to England after that, that I sat down and began to put together what I could remember. Writing the damn thing took about four months. It had to come out like that if it was going to come out at all. I did nothing else. It was my way of having some kind of therapy, and get out from under the shadow of it… to be myself and feel whole again. I always knew he’d do it. He was trapped in this wheelchair and it had started to take its toll. With his hip replacement and the problem with his spinal column… he really wasn’t happy. He could hardly move."

Drugs, pain and a manic brilliance were some of the bigger baseline elements that Thompson brought to his liaisons. People put up with it, Steadman writes, because “they loved being beaten on by the holistic love/ hate relationship Hunter had with life…” At times, Thompson and Steadman creatively egged one another on. And at other times, they simply seemed to understand one another - largely unconditionally. Those of us who are blessed with similar friendships can only begin to speak to their value. “Don’t write, Ralph. You’ll bring shame on your family,” Thompson once told his Welsh friend. Thankfully, Steadman didn’t listen.

JoE Silva