Skip to main content
Donate to the 95 years appeal
The art of deflating the hypocritical creed

The Happiness Manifesto
Martin Rowson
Rotland Press £8.07

 

THANK GOD — if there is one — that we can laugh. Martin Rowson, whose cartoons are well known to Morning Star readers, believes that we use laughter as a survival tool. If we didn’t laugh, we would go mad facing the grotesqueries of our world.

It is appropriate that the publishers of The Happiness Manifesto, Rotland Press of Detroit, specialise in works of “mordant amusement and exuberant despair.”

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
FAT HAM
Theatre Review / 21 August 2025
21 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS is riveted by a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy into joyous comedy set in a southern black homestead

Old Persian text
Book Review / 15 August 2025
15 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS is enthralled by an erudite and entertaining account of where the language we speak came from

2 gents
Theatre Review / 14 August 2025
14 August 2025

GORDON PARSONS endures heavy rock punctuated by Shakespeare, and a delighted audience

winters tale
Theatre review / 30 July 2025
30 July 2025

GORDON PARSONS advises you to get up to speed on obscure ancient ceremonies to grasp this interpretation of a late Shakespearean tragi-comedy

Similar stories
HAMLET
Theatre review / 16 June 2025
16 June 2025

GORDON PARSONS joins a standing ovation for a brilliant production that fuses Shakespeare’s tragedy with Radiohead's music

nazi nightmares
Books / 2 May 2025
2 May 2025

GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin

(L to R) Nicholas Garland in The Telegraph; Frank Eccles Bro
Features / 28 February 2025
28 February 2025
PETER LAZENBY is fascinated by a book of cartoons that shows how newspaper cartoonists were employed to, on the one hand, denigrade and, on the other, to defend the miners’ strike of 1984-85
George Osborne's
Book Review / 10 December 2024
10 December 2024
WILL STONE relishes a refreshingly irreverent raconteur's record on politics at the turn of the millennium