Hipster Cartoons

Matt Lassen, an illustrator for MAD Magazine, decided to reimagine cartoon characters as hipsters. Bart Simpson with a man-bun and vintage frames. SpongeBob in thrift-store chic. The Smurfs as the kind of guys who’d spend three hours discussing single-origin coffee.

By late 2016, hipster jokes were already stale—everyone had been making them for years, and the whole thing had aged into irrelevance. But Lassen went ahead anyway, probably because the premise was too good to waste. I wanted to make a tribute to the cartoons I grew up with, he explained. I thought it would be funny to mix things I love with something I can’t stand: hipsters. They try so hard to be above everything that they basically become cartoon characters themselves.

He’s right. The hipster movement collapsed under its own self-consciousness. They were so committed to not being clichés that they became the most obvious clichés imaginable. There’s something genuinely funny about watching that energy applied to cartoons—taking characters that were simple and earnest and dressing them in irony until they’re unrecognizable.

The cartoons I grew up with had a kind of stupid purity. SpongeBob didn’t wonder if his job was cool enough; he just loved it. Bart wasn’t performing punk rock; he was just being annoying. No self-consciousness, no careful curation of taste. But Lassen’s versions are wrong in a way that makes them funny. They’re trying to be something the originals never were, and failing in exactly the way a hipster would.

It’s a simple joke, but it lands.